In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Dave Derington, Gainsight's former Manager of Educational Services, to share his insights and tips about training customers!

By: Cory Bray

In this guest post, Cory Bray talks about how he sees customer training fitting into the Sales Enablement Ecosystem, a framework that he and Hilmon Sorey outlined in their book, The Sales Enablement Playbook.

Most software companies pride themselves on making products that are easy to use. While most modern technologies incorporate a user experience that’s superior to those of past generations, that doesn't mean anyone can pick up a product with no guidance and be successful.

Customer enablement is a fast-growing function within B2B organizations. In fact, today’s customers expect their vendors to help them achieve business success, not just sell them a product. With the rise of the SaaS business model, customers can switch products much more easily than in the past, and vendors must now continuously earn their subscription renewals and expansions. For this reason, B2B companies must now provide a differentiated and effective customer success experience, or suffer the consequences of poor product adoption and ultimately churn.

If you’re unhappy with your LMS, you’re in good company. The Learning Management System (LMS) is one of the oldest and most hated categories in enterprise software. According to a recent report from the eLearning Guild, fully one-third of organizations are “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” with their LMS. In addition, over half of organizations are planning to change their LMS within the next year, and 89% within the next three years.

*This post was updated on 9/5/17.

Video is rapidly becoming the key format to demonstrate, engage and train online learners. Don’t believe us? In a recent study, we found courses that have video have a 51% completion rate, while those that don’t have video were completed 36% of the time. And of course, as technology continues to develop, this type of content has never been easier to produce and access.

It's true that eLearning programs facilitate customer education in a scalable and sustainable way. However, creating high-quality content is still time consuming, and training teams have a lot to consider when deciding whether to charge for these experiences. This post describes a few things to keep in mind if you're not sure whether you should provide free or paid content.

In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Rita Patterson, PayScale's Manager, Customer Education, to share her insights and tips about training customers!