Many customer education folks know of Dave Derington, educator of corporate education professionals. Dave’s done nearly everything related to training and customer success. He co-hosts the CELab podcast and is a go-to-market strategist for LMS providers and companies with customer education initiatives.
When I asked him to sit for an interview about growing customer education with marketing strategies, he jumped out of his seat and onto my screen.
Fact check: There was no actual jumping involved, but Dave was eager to share his expertise with me and for you. You’ll enjoy this…
I began by asking about the keys to making relationships work with the marketing department.
Dave: Every time I come to a new company or engage as a consultant, I reach out to the marketing team and say, “Hey, let’s get connected.” I want to understand what’s on their plate, how they operate, their structure, and who I can engage with.
More tips came flying forth…
Dave: Have an open mind and attitude. Have a growth mindset. You’re going to have to learn things. Be present, available, and proactive. There are so many things you can learn from marketing, and so many things marketing can learn from you.
I was curious to know if marketing ever told him to “Hit the road, Jack.”
Dave: I’ve never had that happen. And if I did, I’d quit, because if you don’t have support from different stakeholders, you’re bound to fail.
In a CloudShare webinar, Dave and I talked about how discussing common goals—and metrics—is an ideal starting point.
Dave: Yes! I care about KPIs a lot and finding that common ground is part of that first intro or entree to a marketing team. Hey, what are you tracking?
I bring up “adoption.” I want customers to use the platform more. That is a shared KPI, though sometimes it may be secondary to a marketing team that’s focused on building a pipeline.
Still, I care about adoption, retention, and churn—usually post-sales types of metrics. If you can establish KPIs you have in common with your marketing team, that’s a really good thing.
Marketing has tools. Customer education has tools. I asked Dave if the collaboration lends itself to making use of each other’s tools.
Absolutely. I have experience with and credentials for several marketing tools, so that helps. If you’ve built rapport, the marketers might say, “Can I give you access? It would save everyone time.” And I’m like, “Yes, please, and thank you.”
At one company, I was given Salesforce and HubSpot admin rights. I’ve been granted access to the company’s LinkedIn account to enable my team and me to put content out there.
In one instance, I opened my LMS up so Google Analytics could provide data about the content we had out there. I could run reports and get access to other systems that allow me to wed the educational topology together into a fabric that actually lends itself well to customer success outcomes.
And it’s not just tools you stand to gain. It’s creative talent too. For larger organizations that have larger marketing teams, you often have a built-in “center of excellence” that can help develop amazing content. That could mean you have people who can help you create unique messaging for the market, develop graphics, or more.
We’re always looking for talent to expand upon what we’ve built. Marketing is a natural go-to resource for this.
We got to talking about the mutual use of the CRM system. Specifically, I wanted to know if the data customer education has about customer behavior is integrated with it.
Dave: It’s pretty common, yes. I have an education function, and I have a tech stack. The data in the LMS is quite easy to integrate with Salesforce or HubSpot, a data lake like Snowflake, or whatever you want. And all of a sudden, the data spins into those platforms, and you have a marketing channel.
It’s easy to integrate. It’s more challenging to figure out what to do with it. That’s where the partnership comes in.
Dave got on a roll and injected some truly golden nuggets:
Education is a product—our product. If you think about it any differently, you fail. And a lot of companies fail because they don’t look at education as part of the company’s overall deliverable.
“Customer education is the spirit and soul of your product. It is how it all fits together into a fabric to achieve an outcome. Companies miss out if they don’t educate their market on the higher-level function.”
👏 👏 👏
I applauded Dave for that response. He took a bow and said, “I’ve been working on the impact of the words.”
Next, I asked about the channels he’s been successful with for promoting customer education.
Dave: Each company has its own marketing topology and channels they use.
I like to start with LinkedIn because it’s the social media business platform. There’s a lot of social capital that we can get by becoming a brand that’s sharing knowledge on that platform. People want to learn, and they don’t have a lot of time. So small tidbits and things like that lead into a pipeline for longer form content.
YouTube is another channel that I’ve used. I did an engagement with WorkRamp recently. My remit on that engagement wasn’t to talk about their products, but about the jobs to be done… Why do you do this? When do you do this? What do you do next? How do you get started? How do I use AI?
We built that channel and saw more than a 300% quarter-over-quarter engagement spike on YouTube, leading to sales qualified leads requesting demos.
Don’t discount events. Some of the best things that I’ve ever seen and done revolve around educational activities at conventions.
And then, I guess another channel is the good old phone. Just calling people. Get to know your customers. Use as many channels as you can, including email. If you aren’t engaged with your customer, you’re assuming you know what they need.
Mr. Derington, have you found diversifying your customer ed menu is a big deal when it comes to marketing and sales?
Dave: Diversification is incredibly important, and it’s something that you have to scale towards.
I’m excited about the entire “constellation” of different applications that allow me to engage with my market and think about it as a canvas I’m painting.
Let’s start with webinars. Old school, right? Most of the time they’re freaking boring. You’ve got a sage on the stage—somebody who really knows a lot of stuff or just likes to talk… “Look at this, look at this, look at this. Here’s a click path.”
They’re not really engaging and they’re not hands-on, but they are effective when you’re first kind of stacking the pipe with “subject 101.” I use webinars as a channel for quick iteration loops—to refine the messaging and to test the messaging. And then I take that content and I put it into on-demand and other formats that are more refined.
When it comes to learning modalities, I use whatever I can get my hands on. When I was with Outreach, we were able to add templates, snippets, and short videos directly into the media component of our platform. I made little campaigns.
Let’s say you’re a CSM. A customer calls and says, “Uh, I don’t understand this thing.” Well… What’s going to happen? You’re going to sit on the phone with them for an hour. I’ve done this a million times.
Does it scale? Absolutely freaking not. It’s a waste of your time. What we did at Outreach was produce small pieces of content that could be sent in an email, often with a link to a short video. Now, I’m down to 15 minutes. We’d check in later and they would usually say, “I get it. I’m good.”
I’m even using social media. Why not leverage TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter—not just to build awareness, but for learning? Go where your customers live, right? If you’re not engaging with them in that environment, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
I’m also a huge advocate of instructor-led training. It will never go away and shouldn’t. I could go on, but suffice to say, use every channel you can think of. Diversify.
In a recent webinar you did with us, you mentioned customer education could be packaged and sold with special offers.
Special offers are a profound way to connect. They can make or break a customer education function.
Think about building urgency with limited-time promotional windows. Let’s say you just created a high-stakes certification program. These are hard to sell because they’re time-intensive and often expensive.
You might offer them for free for a beta period you’ll use to refine them. You might offer a heavily discounted version—50% off for a limited time. “Use it or lose it.” Maybe offer a discount if you have so many people and you do some activities. Or offer a discount on the product for the first year bundled with the training.
These are motivational tools to make it easier to sell. This is the dance, and the marketing team can help you think about the packaging and create a little FOMO.
We ended our conversation by talking about a modern wave in customer education and success: community building.
Community is extremely important, and it’s also part of the marketing model because community is another channel that people like.
If somebody comes to a community, you have a captive audience. It can be integral to the growth of your program. It’s almost a requirement these days to build user communities.
This interview is the fourth in a four-part series exploring the critical collaboration between customer education and marketing. If you missed the first part, click here to catch up.
Dave joins a cast of industry experts in our insightful eBook, “The Customer Education Elevator: Take Your Programs to New Heights with Strategic Marketing”.
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