Behind HubSpot Academy's early success
Marketing Powerups #70: Chris LoDolce, Founder of SaaS Academy Advisors, shares his transformative customer education strategy.
Creating a customer education program that drives business results takes more than just training users on a product. To develop meaningful and effective training, you need to take an empowering, transformational approach.
Today, Chris LoDolce (Founder of SaaS Academy Advisors and former Director of HubSpot Academy) shares the 4 key steps to a transformative education strategy he used at HubSpot:
1. Understand Customer Needs
Many SaaS companies struggle with customer education. How do you create programs that drive product adoption, retention, and growth? According to Chris LoDolce, it starts with understanding your customers' needs.
"Our goal never was how many users looked at the videos," Chris explains. "We needed as many users as possible. Our goal was to help change the behaviors of people through the educational programs. It was about creating transformative educational experiences for users"
2. Define training goals
Once you understand your customers, you can define clear training goals tied to business objectives. The goals could be increasing product usage or customer renewals. It could also reduce churn.
"Having clear goals connected to business impact is crucial. HubSpot Academy created specialized learning tools aimed at driving increased product adoption because they knew usage tied directly to customer retention. Let your core metrics guide educational priorities."
3. Create Transformational Content
With your goals set, focus on creating content that educates and transforms learners. Think beyond product training - empower people to achieve their career and business goals.
As Chris puts it: "The goal isn't even just to tell somebody how to do something or why they should do it. The goal is to put these three things in context - why this matters for their business, why this matters for their career, and why this matters for their personal goals."
4. Building a Passionate Community
Finally, build a passionate community around your training programs. Facilitate sharing between participants, make your team accessible, and focus on impacting lives.
"HubSpot actively invested in bringing HubSpot users, learners, fans, and customers together both online and offline through the Inbound Conference. The key is to foster connections between learners, be visible and involved in dialogue, and recognize the human element in all interactions."
That’s all for now, friends!
Have a powered-up day,
Ramli John
P.S. If you found this helpful, would you share the love by tapping the heart below? ❤️
It’ll help me know what’s resonating with you and get more people to know about my newsletter. Thanks!
glad you liked the cheatsheet man :))