In last month’s Training Tips series, we asked Sarah Bedrick, founding team member of HubSpot Academy and their former Certifications Program Manager, to share some of her insights and tips about how they trained customers on the HubSpot Academy team. Continue reading to see her answers to two more questions!
What’s your favorite type of training content to create and why?
My favorite type of content was our comprehensive courses and certifications. While they required the most effort by far, I found they offer the most benefits to the market, our business, and our team members.
These certifications courses are comprehensive curriculums and assessments designed to be the absolute best place a person would go to understand the topic entirely.
The market would benefit by having this free education available to them. The knowledge gained and certificate acquired would help business professionals to get a new job, earn a promotion, or get a seat at their marketing/sales table. It was also an excellent way for managers to onboard or train their team, ensuring everyone is speaking the same language and has the same base understanding.
HubSpot, as a business, was positively impacted because, with their name on the content, it helped them maintain their status as thought leaders in the industry. Support engineers, onboarding specialists, customer success managers, and even sales reps are required to take these courses which helped HubSpot to educate their team members. Eventually, our sales team members began sending leads who didn’t understand inbound or HubSpot to some classes, and they’d return ready to buy the software because they “got it.” Lastly, but not least, when a person signs up for a free Academy account, they also gain access to all of HubSpot’s free tools giving them a place to begin applying their learnings to have an impact on their business.
Seeing team member development was another major highlight of creating these comprehensive courses. Investing as much time, money, and effort into a body of work as a team can be a scary experience. For lead professors on the projects, not only are they putting their name and the HubSpot name on a thought-leadership piece of content, but they’re also developing a lot of new skills in tandem including project management, research, and instructional design, pushing them outside their comfort zone. And rightfully so, they were gaining several years worth of training in just a few months. The professor’s confidence, knowledge, and abilities were always exponentially greater after the certification courses launched than when they first began the project. Being witness to this was one of my favorite parts of the role.
What’s one of the top training challenges you’re currently facing and how do you plan to address it?
Within the past few years, educating your customers and the market with blog posts, downloads like ebooks, and courses have become so prevalent, it’s now expected by users and is the bare minimum that a company needs to do to succeed in business today.
A top training challenge I see is creating training that genuinely engages and educates. How can we, together develop content that is helpful, engaging, empowering, and is so influential that people remember what they learned for years to come? With people’s attention being more diluted and scarce than ever, we need to invest in creating content that will have a real, measurable impact on their business and lives.
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In our Training Tips series, we asked Training, Marketing, and Customer Success Managers what some of their best practices are to get the most out of a customer training program. Stay tuned for new Q&As each month!
