We're excited to announce our offical partnership with Marketo LaunchPoint™, the most complete ecosystem of marketing solutions. The technology partnership enables seamless integration of Skilljar's fast-growing customer training solution with Marketo's engagement marketing platform.

In the final post of our customer onboarding series, we summarize the 10 strategies we introduced in the 3 previous posts. To recap:

• Part 1 - we discussed training techniques, including on-demand training, instructor-led training, and public webinars.
• Part 2 - we covered automated strategies, including in-app messaging, knowledge banks, and email drips.
• Part 3 - we introduced human-based approaches, including onboarding managers, community, live chat, and support tickets.

What a difference a year makes.

2015 was a time of incredible growth for Skilljar. At this time last year, we'd just made the tough decision to pivot away from individuals/SMBs and focus on enterprises. We had early indicators that the market was promising but did not know whether this new direction would succeed. We still had capital from our angel raise, but were not on track to reach VC-expected milestones.

So I'm incredibly proud and gratified with the progress we've made in 2015. We went from virtually zero to dozens of enterprise customers post-pivot, continually learning from our customers along the path to achieving product-market fit and healthy revenue. We welcomed outstanding new team members, including raising a VC round from fantastic investors. Our product is truly enterprise-ready, including integrations with Marketo and Salesforce, SSO, and REST APIs - and we're even closing new deals on New Year's Eve.

Planning which conferences to attend next year? For professionals in customer success, customer training, and customer marketing, here's a handy guide to upcoming events.

We'll keep this list updated as we learn more. If we missed any, let us know in the comments!

In Part 3 of our Customer Onboarding blog series, we look at how your internal team members (people) can be involved with customer onboarding. For many businesses, a human touch is necessary for the customer onboarding process. Contrast this with Part 2, which focused on automated strategies, and Part 1, which focused on a dedicated training team.

Customer success is a very cross-functional discipline, incorporating aspects of sales, marketing, product management, and support. The strategies below might be owned by different functional teams than the formal customer success organization. Yet it's important for the customer success team to be involved with all aspects of the customer journey

In this blog post we dive deeper into onboarding managers, community, live chat, and support tickets. For a 1-page guide to all ten strategies, remember to download our free 10-Step Checklist for Customer Onboarding.

This Part 2 of our Customer Onboarding blog series focuses on automated ways for customers to help themselves. In Part 1, we covered how training can be used for onboarding via on-demand training, instructor-led training, and public webinars.

Automated onboarding is great for organizations that require low-touch, high-volume customer success, such as "freemium" or self-service products. It's not possible for customer success managers (CSMs) to provide 1:1 training at scale.

In this blog post we dive deeper into in-app messaging, email drips, and knowledge banks. For a 1-page guide to all ten strategies, remember to download our free 10-Step Checklist for Customer Onboarding.

The best customer success teams understand that customer communications is a multi-channel process. When you think about it, most customer-facing functions in a company are already multi-channel:

• Sales teams use email, phone and LinkedIn to hunt down prospects;
• Marketing teams use web, mobile, social, and email to educate buyers;
• Customer service teams use chat, phone, email, and social to provide support.

All of these teams have multiple software tools to provide analytics and improve productivity. Yet many customer success teams still rely on a single channel - their customer success managers (CSMs), who schedule meetings and quarterly business reviews (QBRs) manually.

Our free 10-Step Checklist for Customer Onboarding provides a handy reference for ten different customer onboarding strategies. In this blog post we dive deeper into the first three - on-demand training, instructor-led training, and public webinars.

We recently started using Hubspot to track potential customers as they evaluate Skilljar's online training platform. While investigating the Twitter ad platform, I was surprised to find that Hubspot isn't listed as an integrated CRM or marketing automation provider (for the supported list, including Marketo and Salesforce, see https://business.twitter.com/help/lead-campaigns-faq-best-practices).

This is a major inconvenience, as we'd otherwise need to periodically download CSVs from each Twitter lead generation card in order to track signups.

Fortunately, Twitter provides an optional endpoint that I was able to successfully configure to work with Hubspot. Read on to learn how!

If customer success is the key to sustainable business growth, then customer onboarding is the key to sustainable customer success.

Timely and proactive onboarding is the important first step for your customers to gain value from your product or service.

Skilljar is excited to win the Brandon Hall Group's top award (silver) for 2015 Excellence in Technology - Best Advance in Learning Management Technology for External Training. A huge thank you to our customers - your feedback is invaluable in helping us make Skilljar a great product that's easy to use and drives business results.