How to Build a Customer Training Process for B2B SaaS

Generally, training is a strategic tool to increase the value of your product to a customer and to reduce churn. Training during the Onboarding process is discussed in the Customers playbook. Here we will discuss retraining efforts.

The Impact: The training process can be turned into a strategic asset to your company with the goal of increasing a customer's value and reducing churn.

The Goal: Generate a training process that protects your company from incurring non-reimbursable training expenses and improves customer experience.

How can Golden Section Assist?

Background

A worst case scenario: a customer tells you he is not seeing the value in your product and as you dig into the why, you realize he is not fully utilizing key features of the product and needs a refresher training to use them appropriately and fully. He agrees, so you book travel to conduct an on-site training. You fly there, stay in your hotel room, and early the next morning meet him at his office. However, the office that day is in chaos as the team is busy managing their own operational crisis. Your customer can't take the time for training that day, and you head back to the airport. In the end, you have spent a considerable amount of time and money to train a customer, who didn't actually get trained and is no better at using your product and finding no more value than beforehand. He churns a few months later at the expiration of his contract.

To prevent this unproductive expense to your company and to improve the efficiency of additional training efforts, Golden Section recommends generating a process for additional training. We believe there are three broad occasions when additional training is required:

1. Ad-hoc ROI training when a customer is not getting the value they were expecting.
2. Client-Requested training when a customer requests additional training for new users, new features, new workflows, etc.
3. Incremental Feature Training when new features are added or updates are made.

Steps

1. Generate a process around each of the three additional training indicators. Considerations:
   • Process trigger: What condition needs to occur to set off this process for additional training?
   • Training process: Who will be responsible for the additional training? How will it happen?
   • Training location: Will training occur at the customer's office or yours? One helpful strategy is to offer unlimited free training in your office. This puts the financial and time burden on your customer.
   • Training cost: Will you charge for additional training or not? If so, additional training fees and invoicing procedures need to be included in the customer contract. Golden Section recommends requiring payment in advance for additional training. In the worst case scenario above, the customer did not receive

training in the end and may dispute any training invoice you send after the fact.

• Proof of process: What is the metric that will indicate the process is complete? Will it be some form of the adoption metric identified as a proof of process in the onboarding process?

1. A note on super-users: Two of the companies founded by Golden Section team members contractually required a super-user at each client company. The super-user would be trained during the onboarding process and then as new features or updates were released, the super-user would then train others within their own company. If possible, Golden Section believes this is an ideal model. The presence of a super-user is well-correlated with product adoption within the customer's company; the super-user typically takes on the advocate role within that company which leads to fuller adoption and lower churn. Moreover, transferring training responsibilities to the super-user reduces the training burden on your own company.