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1–2, we'll define customer education and discuss how to operationalize it in your business, whether you're just getting started or hoping to mature your program. In Chapters 314, we'll cover the 12 steps of the Customer Education Playbook, all of which are based on research conducted from speaking to hundreds of customer education professionals and executives across multiple B2B industries. Finally, in Chapters 15 and 16, we'll explore the phases to achieving a mature customer education function and give you our thoughts on the future of the industry.

      Our hope is that the Customer Education Playbook will help professionals on the ground to develop a clear and structured approach that leads to impactful, engaging, and measurable customer education programs. As you read the following chapters, you'll learn the answers to all of those questions you've previously been expected to “figure out on your own,” and you will get practical and actionable advice on how to effectively target and educate your customers – transforming them from prospects to champions.

      Your customers are the center of your universe. The survival of your business hinges on their choices – whether they buy or churn, renew their subscription, tell their friends about you, or become a drain on your support teams.

      As the center of your universe, your customers deserve your research, your dedication, your focus, and a deep level of understanding into their behavior at every stage of their journey.

      1 The increasing complexity of today's products. Today, customers need more hand-holding than ever to get to the point of value with your product. If you don't educate them on how they can reach that value quickly, they may assume that your product isn't a good fit or that it's too complex for their needs.

      2 More competition than ever before. According to US Census data, new business formation has been growing steadily since 2010, and between 2019 and 2020, the number of new businesses registered leapt by 24 percent.1 A well-executed customer education strategy can make all the difference in helping your business stand out from the competition.

      3 Growing customer expectations. Education and training have become an expected part of the customer experience. Whether it's in-product tutorials, skills-based learning, or certifications, your customers want to learn and grow as professionals and are increasingly looking to you to make it happen.

      The focus on educating the customer may have started out as the route to customer success, but what began with an emphasis on improving customer experience has quickly proved itself to be an economic imperative, an approach that pays dividends across the customer lifecycle.

       Pre-sale

      Your interested customers have now become true prospects, and at this stage you might be channeling them into some kind of trial. Customer education offers a route to optimizing trials for success by focusing on the value proposition and controlling the flow of information so that customers don't feel overwhelmed. Examples might include offering the customer a tool to learn new vocabulary at the start, using visual aids to shape thinking, or breaking down the trial into smaller sections where customers can really kick the tires. The trial stage is a really sensitive moment in the customer journey, and customer education allows you to curate experiences that work for individual personas and roles. You can also extend the benefits of education to your channel partners, from distributors to resellers. The quicker and easier you can get these important stakeholders trained and confident with your product, the more likely that they will achieve results on your behalf and the less you will need to micromanage those relationships behind the scenes.

      Education also allows you to scale and streamline your trial and onboarding processes far beyond what you could achieve with customer success managers (CSMs) and sales teams alone. If your prospects can walk themselves through a trial experience or an onboarding journey, complete with tutorials and education built for any points of friction, you are immediately reducing your customer acquisition costs (CAC) while increasing the number of simultaneous customers that you can onboard.

       Post-sale

      Congratulations! Your prospects have become customers. They've signed on the dotted line, onboarded your product, and passed the line into a post-sale relationship. But don't make the mistake of seeing that line as a finish line – in reality, it's more like your starting point. At this stage, marketing and sales often drop out of the relationship, and the baton is regularly passed over to customer support or customer success. Without a strong educational strategy in place for proactive support, CS teams can become a reactive presence, waiting for problems and troubleshooting as they occur.

      Customer education can be used to deflect support tickets and even turn support interactions into training interventions at the moment of need. Instead of onboarding new CSMs to handle an ever-increasing number of tickets, you can strategically place education where known pain points occur in your product, or you can develop a robust knowledge base so that customers can resolve their own problems. As customers become more confident that they will find the answers, your support costs drop, even as the number of customers you onboard increases.

       Advocacy

      Your customers are now achieving increasing levels of comfort and mastery with your product, and they're getting there faster than ever, speeding up overall time to value (TTV). Providing opportunities for customers to gain deeper mastery will lead to an increase in net promoter scores (NPS) and customer satisfaction (CSAT), because you're creating brand ambassadors who have used your product to become more effective in their role. The more legitimacy you gain in the market as an expert in your field, the more opportunities there are to grow direct revenues through paid education, such as courses and paid eLearning.

      Today, skills-based

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