In our previous blog post, we introduced the concept of customer lifecycle training. Customer lifecycle training is a useful strategy that you can employ to raise initial awareness with prospects, onboard converted customers, and increase ongoing customer renewals.

In this article, we discuss the first phase of the customer lifecycle - marketing (or "lead generation"). By offering training as marketing, you can inform potential customers about what your company has to offer, and how they can benefit from your products and services.

At Skilljar, we are seeing innovative companies apply customer training principles across the entire customer lifecycle, not just during the implementation phase. Companies that offer training from pre-sales, through ongoing success, are able to help customers gain the most value from their products and services. This leads to the virtuous cycle of increased product usage, higher customer satisfaction, and lower churn.

We've collected best practices into our new eBook - The Guide to Customer Lifecycle Training. What is the customer lifecycle? It is the process that a customer goes through as they consider, purchase, and deepen their use of your product or service.

Today, we announced our partnership with Microsoft Azure Marketplace. This integration enables Active Directory users to seamlessly access onboarding, training, and learning plans in Skilljar's learning management system.

On-demand training is an effective way to increase long-term return on investment (ROI) for the resources allocated to customer onboarding and training.

Creating faster, accessible and more effective training leads to improved customer onboarding and long-term success. Salesforce.com, for example, states that "customers who invest in training consistently report >80% higher ROI on their investment. That’s why we offer a wide range of training options, from in-person classes featuring hands-on instruction, to virtual training, self-led courses, private workshops, and more."

These benefits can be tested and quantified by providing on-demand training to only certain groups of customers, and measuring short-term and long-term impacts on customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), upsells, renewals, and revenue.

In the short-term, measuring ROI from onboarding could be as simple as assessing revenue and cost. Read on to learn how on-demand training can improve customer onboarding ROI.

When scaling an on-demand customer education program, customer success organizations are also concerned about the quality and effectiveness of onboarding and training. Scheduled phone calls for onboarding, while difficult to scale, are at least a way for customer success managers (CSMs) to interact directly with the customer, get a pulse on their satisfaction, and respond in real-time.

On-demand training, when implemented correctly, can actually increase the effectiveness of customer onboarding when paired with instructor-led training. Read on to learn the 4 ways to increase training effectivness.

Agile is an organizational process successfully used by many software development teams around the world. Many training teams are looking at using agile principles for developing learning content, but the industry has been generally slow to adopt this methodology. Why? Read on to learn more!

Most customer success teams run new customer onboarding by scheduling a series of sequenced phone calls. While this seems easy to implement, having your customer success managers (CSMs) run 1:1 and asynchronous processes is very difficult to scale.

This onboarding experience isn't ideal for your customers either. Key attendees might have scheduling conflicts, it's difficult to capture knowledge, and customers may prefer to consume information differently than how it's presented.

Offering on-demand training is a proven, successful strategy for scaling customer onboarding and education. In this post, we describe the 4 key benefits of on-demand training for your customers.

At our Pioneer Square office, we like being able to see the rotating food trucks in Occidental Park. We're likely moving soon, and won't have direct line-of-sight into our daily lunch options.

Solution? We've set up a new Twitter feed that automatically alerts us to the daily food trucks available. Subscribe here: https://twitter.com/psqfoodtrucks

Customer onboarding is a increasingly important part of long-term customer success, yet is also one of the most difficult components for a customer success organization to scale.

As your customer base grows, it becomes more challenging to deliver a consistently excellent customer onboarding experience. Your customer success managers (CSMs) are spending an increasing amount of time on basic activities, your customers are clamoring for more onboarding resources (particularly SMBs), and you have a finite headcount with which to support them.

We had a great weekend in Whistler. Here's our team photo: