6 Key Steps to Secure Executive Buy-In and Scale Your Customer Education Program

You've built an amazing customer education program—your content is on point, your platform is intuitive, and your learners are engaged. But there's one crucial challenge holding you back from maximizing its impact: getting the rest of your organization to see its value. If your program isn't fully supported, it can be tough to secure the resources and partnerships needed to advance it.

To get your program into the spotlight, you need more than great content. You must gain buy-in from busy executives and align with cross-functional teams.

In a recent Skilljar webinar, our experts and education leaders shared six strategies to overcome pushback and get your program the recognition it deserves.

In this article, we'll dive deep into these six key strategies, showing you how to:

1. Build strong cross-functional relationships
2. Align your content with business goals
3. Quantify your program's value with a learning health score
4. Use a value chain approach
5. Present your data in business terms
6. Extend your influence across the organization

If you're ready to position your customer education program as a key business driver and secure the executive support needed to scale your efforts, let's get started.

Why Cross-Functional Partnerships Matter

When it comes to making your customer education program a critical part of your organization’s success, it’s not enough to work in silos. Strong cross-functional relationships are key. They boost your program's visibility and drive real business results. Teams like product, sales, marketing, and customer success care about your training's impact on business goals. 

Matt Robinson, Head of Training and Enablement at Reltio, shared how his program gained traction by setting up regular touchpoints with key executives. “My monthly meetings with the executive leadership focus on how training impacts customer retention and reduces support costs,” he noted. By framing the conversation around measurable business outcomes, Matt positioned his program as a strategic contributor rather than just a support function.

How to Strengthen Cross-Functional Alignment

• Schedule Regular Check-Ins: Set up monthly or quarterly meetings with key executives. These aren't just casual chats—come prepared with data and insights that showcase your program's impact on their specific areas.
• Become a Product Launch MVP: Collaborate on initiatives like product launches. When you align your training with new features or updates, you're not just educating customers—you're driving adoption and showcasing your program's strategic value.
• Share Your Wins (and Learnings): Keep stakeholders engaged by regularly sharing success stories and key metrics. Did a training module lead to a spike in feature adoption? Did it reduce support tickets? Shout it from the rooftops (or, you know, in a well-crafted email update).

Aligning Training Content with Business Priorities

Your customer education program must prove it helps meet the company's goals. Only then will it get the buy-in and resources it needs. Aligning your training content with key business goals is vital. It ensures your program delivers the right value in ways that matter to the bottom line.

Jill Glynn, Senior Manager of Scaled Engagement at LinkedIn, emphasized how crucial this alignment is: “We integrated our training content with product marketing efforts to ensure our materials are included in all product release announcements. This has significantly boosted feature adoption rates.” By strategically connecting their training to product goals, LinkedIn was able to drive user engagement and demonstrate the immediate value of their educational initiatives.

How to Connect Training with Business Priorities

• Map Your Modules: Clearly link each training module to specific business metrics like product adoption, support cost reduction, or customer lifetime value. Make sure these connections are evident and directly aligned with the company’s strategic objectives.
• Engage Cross-Functional Teams Early: Effective training alignment starts with strong cross-functional partnerships. Engage teams like product, sales, marketing, and customer success from the outset to understand their goals and ensure your content directly supports their objectives. For example, Robinson mentioned creating a cross-functional forum that meets bi-weekly to align on upcoming product releases and coordinate training initiatives. This kind of regular collaboration ensures that your training content remains relevant and timely.
• Tailor Content Based on Stakeholder Needs: Different departments have different priorities. By involving stakeholders early, you can tailor your training content to address the specific needs of each team. For instance, aligning with the product team on new feature rollouts or working with customer success to reduce support tickets can drive clear business outcomes that resonate across the organization.
• Measure, Report, Repeat: Regularly evaluate how well your training initiatives support business goals. Instead of generic updates, focus on tailored reports that showcase specific outcomes, like a spike in feature adoption or a measurable decrease in support tickets. Use data visualizations to highlight these connections clearly and compellingly.

Using a Learning Health Score to Prove Your Program’s Value

When you’re presenting the impact of your customer education program, metrics that show engagement or satisfaction are good—but they’re not enough. To secure ongoing executive support, you need to quantify how your program contributes to key business outcomes. That’s where a learning health score comes in. By developing a score that tracks critical aspects like certification levels, course completions, and key performance metrics, you can draw a clear line between training engagement and business results.

Robinson shared how his team approached this challenge: “We created a simple learning health score model, tracking key roles and certification levels. Presenting this data in our quarterly business reviews helped us secure additional funding by showing a clear correlation between training engagement and business outcomes.” With this approach, Matt’s team demonstrated that accounts with higher learning health scores saw improved customer retention and lower support costs—metrics that speak directly to business objectives.

How to Build and Leverage a Learning Health Score

• Identify Key Roles and Set Specific Goals: Map the critical roles in your customer base, like admin users or operators. They are key to success. For each role, set specific goals for certifications and courses. They must align with your business objectives. For example, you can target 80% of admin users to complete certification within a month. Or, have them fully complete new features training within a quarter.
• Track Nuanced Metrics That Matter: Use your LMS reports to monitor detailed metrics. These include course completion speed, skill improvement over time, and certification retention. Automated reports should simplify data collection. This lets you focus on trends and strategic decisions.
• Connect Training Data to Business Results: The true value of your learning health score lies in its ability to correlate training engagement with tangible business outcomes. For example, do accounts with certified users show higher renewal rates? Has there been a noticeable decrease in support tickets as course completions rise? These insights are key to gaining executive buy-in and reinforcing the strategic value of your program.
• Review, Refine, and Evolve: Your learning health score isn’t a one-time metric—it should evolve as your business does. Present these metrics regularly in quarterly business reviews, using the opportunity to gather feedback, refine your scoring model, and ensure that your program continues to align with broader company goals.

Using a Value Chain Approach to Prove Your Program’s Impact

Traditional models like Kirkpatrick have long measured training effectiveness. But, they often fail to show your program's broader business impact. That’s why more forward-thinking organizations, like LinkedIn, are transitioning to a value chain model. This approach goes beyond tracking engagement and satisfaction. It ties your training metrics to financial outcomes like revenue growth, customer retention, and efficiency.

Glynn explained how LinkedIn’s customer education team adopted this model: “We moved from the Kirkpatrick model to a value chain that aligns our metrics with business outcomes. For example, our value chain includes reach, satisfaction, engagement, realized value, and commercial results. This shift has allowed us to more accurately demonstrate the business impact of our training programs, particularly in driving product adoption and improving customer satisfaction.”

How to Implement a Value Chain Approach

• Map Out Your Value Chain Stages: Begin by defining key stages like reach, engagement, satisfaction, realized value, and commercial outcomes. For instance, LinkedIn tracks metrics like account penetration, user engagement, and the impact of training on customer renewal rates. Each stage should be directly tied to specific business metrics like revenue growth, customer retention, and reduced churn.
• Align Metrics with Stakeholder Priorities: The strength of the value chain model lies in its ability to connect directly with what matters most to different teams. By aligning your metrics with stakeholder goals—whether it’s product adoption for the product team or churn reduction for customer success—you can effectively showcase how your training program drives value across the organization.
• Track and Report Financial Outcomes: Go beyond traditional training metrics like course completions and certifications. The value chain model emphasizes tracking outcomes directly impacting the bottom line, such as increased upsells, reduced support costs, or improved customer lifetime value. For example, LinkedIn found that trained customers had a 25% higher NPS and a 20% reduction in churn—clear metrics that executives could immediately connect with business growth.
• Regularly Review and Adapt: The value chain isn’t static—it evolves with your business. Continuously assess how well your training aligns with business outcomes and refine your metrics as needed. Regular reviews ensure that your program remains aligned with strategic goals and continues to demonstrate measurable business value.

Presenting Your Training Data in Business Terms with Visual Storytelling

Executives don’t want to hear about course completions or quiz scores—they want to know how your customer education program impacts the bottom line. Translating training metrics into business language is key to getting their attention and ensuring your program remains a priority. Whether your focus is reducing churn, improving NPS scores, or boosting revenue, your data needs to be presented in a way that resonates with decision-makers.

Robinson emphasized the importance of shifting from training jargon to business outcomes: “We moved from training jargon to business terms. By showing that customers who completed our certification program had a higher renewal rate, we gained significant executive support.” 

Similarly, Glynn shared how aligning metrics with customer success goals helped them demonstrate that trained customers had a 25% higher NPS and a 20% reduction in churn—outcomes that executives immediately recognized as valuable.

How to Cater to Different Learning Styles with Visual Storytelling

To show your program's value, present your data in ways that suit your stakeholders' different learning styles. Visual storytelling engages your audience. It combines clear data with compelling stories. These are easy to understand and act on. It is better than static reports.

• Leverage Interactive Dashboards: Dynamic, real-time dashboards allow stakeholders to explore metrics that matter most to them. A self-serve experience lets them explore data that aligns with their goals. They can track how training affects customer retention or measure the ROI of specific initiatives.
• Use Infographics for Quick Insights: Infographics are a powerful way to distill complex data into digestible visuals that can be easily shared across teams. A good infographic can quickly show your training's value. It can link certification completion to increased product usage without overwhelming your audience with numbers.
• Incorporate Video Summaries: For stakeholders who prefer to absorb information visually or audibly, video summaries are an excellent tool. Consider creating short, engaging videos that highlight key metrics and success stories. These can be included in executive updates, shared in leadership meetings, or posted on internal communication channels to keep everyone informed.
• Tailor Your Visuals to Different Stakeholders: Different teams and executives prioritize different outcomes. Your CFO cares most about cost savings and retention. Your Head of Customer Success focuses on reducing churn and support tickets. Tailor your visuals and presentations to each audience. Highlight the metrics that resonate most with them. This ensures your message is clear and relevant.
• Show and Tell with Data-Driven Narratives: Visuals alone aren’t enough. Combine them with narratives that guide stakeholders through your data's story. For example, use charts and a short story. They should show how a recent training effort cut support tickets and raised NPS scores. This approach makes your data more relatable and actionable.

Maintaining Visibility with Strategic Communication

A successful customer education program is only half the battle. You must keep it top of mind across your organization. This requires ongoing, effective communication. To keep your program visible, share its impact across multiple channels. Use personalized emails, dashboards, or internal platforms. The key is to provide relevant, digestible updates that resonate with your stakeholders.

Robinson shared a simple yet powerful strategy. "Forwarding key updates to individual executives has been a game-changer." It ensures they see and engage with the information, which wouldn’t happen with group emails.” 

Glynn noted that LinkedIn's interactive dashboards give stakeholders real-time training metrics. This has built trust and support.

How to Keep Your Program Front and Center

• Personalize Your Updates: Don’t just blast out generic emails. Send targeted updates to key stakeholders, highlighting the metrics and outcomes that matter most to them. Make it easy for them to see the direct impact of your program on their areas of responsibility.
• Leverage Internal Platforms: Use every tool at your disposal. This includes newsletters, intranet posts, Slack, or any other internal communication tools. Regular updates keep your program visible and demonstrate its ongoing value.
• Engage in External Communities: Communicating beyond internal channels can boost your program’s visibility and influence. For example, Glynn's team engages in LinkedIn groups and forums. They connect with users and share valuable training content. Use community spaces, industry forums, or social media. Promote your training content and gather insights from a wider audience. This engagement builds credibility and strengthens your program’s reach.
• Create a Dashboard: Develop an interactive dashboard that provides real-time insights into your program's performance. Make it accessible to stakeholders so they can check in on progress anytime.
• Be a Guest Star: Seek opportunities to present at leadership meetings, all-hands gatherings, and team calls. These are golden opportunities to showcase your program’s impact and reinforce its strategic importance.
• Celebrate Wins (Big and Small): Did a customer share a glowing testimonial about your training? Did you hit a major milestone in course completions? Share these wins across your communication channels. It keeps your program in the spotlight and builds positive momentum.

Elevating Your Customer Education Program with Strategic Internal Marketing

Securing executive buy-in and scaling your customer education program doesn’t happen overnight. It needs a data-driven approach and strong internal marketing. This will keep your program visible and valued. 

You can position your program as a critical business driver by building strong cross-functional relationships, aligning your training content with strategic goals, creating a learning health score, presenting data in business terms, and maintaining visibility through effective communication.

But remember, it’s not just about the strategy—it’s about action. Start using these strategies today. They will make your customer education program a key driver of business success. By proving its value, you'll unlock the resources and support needed to elevate your initiatives and drive lasting outcomes.

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