At Skilljar, we spend a lot of time thinking about customer onboarding and success. Even after our customers have successfully launched on the Skilljar platform, there are many reasons why we'd like to stay in close touch.

Earlier this year, we started doing proactive Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) with select customers who are "post-launch" with Skilljar. These 60-minute sessions are an opportunity for us to learn more about our customers' upcoming business goals, get feedback on our product roadmap, and share best practices.

This post describes the typical agenda and template that Skilljar uses for our QBRs. Major kudos to the Preact team who created the master template that we use.

Salesforce integration is one of the top asks from Skilljar’s customers. Since Skilljar’s training platform (aka learning management system) accelerates product onboarding and customer success, it makes total sense for our customers to combine Skilljar training and certification data with the Salesforce CRM. 

We began working on a native Salesforce integration earlier in 2015. At the time, we were loosely familiar with Salesforce as a sales tool, and for implementing Single Sign On via SAML (reusing Salesforce credentials to log into Skilljar). But otherwise, we had very little background on the Salesforce ecosystem or the AppExchange. 

Because we were new to the Salesforce ecosystem, we’ve found the ISV approval process to be very challenging to navigate. This post summarizes our lessons learned.

The majority of our team most recently worked at Amazon.com before joining Skilljar, including myself and my co-founder Jason. We're frequently asked what skills we learned at Amazon that are transferable to startups. If you're wondering whether it's worth joining a large company when your long-term goal is really to become a startup founder, this post is for you.

Nothing prepares you for a startup except having done it before. This is probably why investors value previous startup experience so highly. Even then, there are many tactical aspects that change with time or don't have "right" answers, like what fundraising deal structures are in vogue, or when to hire a VP sales (there are already plenty of opinions you can read on these tactical topics). This post focuses on the macro themes of how Amazon did, and didn't, prepare us to be startup founders.

We are excited to announce our latest integration partner, Influitive. Influitive provides advocate marketing software for B2B companies, making it easy to reward customers for actions like writing a product review, completing a survey, or attending a user conference. Since Skilljar is enabling our clients to accelerate onboarding and training for their users, it's a natural extension to reward customers for completing training.

Skilljar does have some built-in functionality around rewards, such as awarding credits/points, however a sophisticated advocacy system like Influitive provides a complete solution for customer rewards beyond training. We are proud to integrate seamlessly with best-of-breed systems so our mutual clients can create even more powerful solutions.

At Skilljar, we’re excited to be hiring for a variety of positions in sales, marketing, product, and engineering.

Getting a job at a startup is very different from getting a job at a large company. I’ve now conducted hundreds of interviews at Amazon.com and Skilljar, so I’ve seen both sides, and have a unique perspective on the differences. 

Read on for actionable tips on how to get a job at an early-stage, VC funded tech startup like Skilljar.

We've been adding lots of new functionality to our Live Training feature, and we're excited to announce the newset addition - the ability to list your live training events on your course detail page!

We love announcing new integrations and are especially excited to offer a way to connect your Skilljar training site with remote proctored exams through Innovative Exams!

Sales, marketing, and development teams have had their own software stacks for years. 

• A full-stack developer is fluent across front-end, back-end, and database languages and tools.
• A full-stack salesperson can do lead research, prospecting, demos, proposals and closing.
• A full-stack marketer is expected to run online demand generation, content marketing, SEO/SEM, lead conversion, scoring, nurturing, and even manage offline channels. 

In all of these cases, there are dozens (if not hundreds!) of software tools that are combined to create a complete and robust supporting software stack. 

Customer success management, however, is a fairly new discipline that is still in its infancy when it comes to software. Customer success combines elements of account management, customer relationship management (CRM), onboarding, training, implementation, and support in order to help customers successfully adopt and use a product in the long-term.

What are the must-have software tools in a modern customer success stack? Read on to find out!

We've improved our Analytics pages by making them faster and adding more information, see below!

We're excited to announce our new feature where you can manually add or remove attendees of your live training events straight from the Skilljar dashboard!