Webinar attendees: If you didn’t get your questions answered during the live webinar, scroll down to the bottom of this post for the full Q&A session!
In our recent webinar, Skilljar’s VP of Marketing Michael Freeman, served as air traffic control to an ace team of training experts from Gong, the leading revenue intelligence platform, flying high on the success of their Customer Education program. Customer Training Specialists Nicole Pettit and Chris Maironis, along with Instructional Designers Andrea Ivy Cantrell and Tim Halter, shared their best practices on how they build, deliver, and track engaging Virtual Instructor-Led Training (VILT).
Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be an incredibly informative ride!
View the on-demand webinar or read the recap below.
An Intro to Gong’s VILT Content Offerings (Bird’s Eye View)
Nicole explained how Gong’s customer education and training team provides live and recorded trainings (including custom and VILT), as well as self-paced content (including courses and guides) that users access through the Gong Academy, powered by Skilljar.
They will soon offer a certification program designed for program managers who are launching the Gong platform at their companies to teach them everything they need in order to manage its implementation. They plan to add additional tiers of certification for program managers and other key personas.
Their team rolls up directly to Stephanie Pellegrino, Director of Customer Education and Training, who reports to their Chief Customer Officer. This interaction sets their team up extremely well for success, as it helps to fully align them with the greater customer organization and ensure that they’re part of the discussion regarding how to create raving fans at Gong.
Because the education team rolls up directly to the customer organization, we were able to create trust across both of our teams to really create a process that was mutually beneficial to all involved.
-Nicole Petitt, Customer Training Specialist, Gong
Since Gong implemented Skilljar in June of 2020, they’ve built over 200 courses, with over 65,600 registrations and 27,700 active students.
Related: Getting Started with Certification for Customer Education
Build Engaging VILT Content (Pre-flight Checklist)
Next, Andrea took attendees through the end-to-end process for building the content that becomes engaging virtual instructor-led content.
If you’re starting to ideate on live training, you’re probably trying to figure out what to build. Andrea advised: ask yourself where in their journey do your customers need the most explicit hands-on support? For most, this is probably when they’re new to your product and trying to learn the ropes.
Gong’s first live trainings offered a series of high-level overviews that addressed the immediate needs of their newest customers. From there, the next-level content honed in on more advanced workflows and parts of their product.
Once you get this foundational content out of the way, how do you know where to focus your offerings next?
Tap into your customer success and professional services teams, Andrea said.
The key to getting CSMs to buy in to the content referral process is to deliver the content they ask for–what training customers are requesting or what trends they are noticing in calls with customers.
–Andrea Ivy Cantrell, Instructional Designer, Gong
Use ongoing surveys or sit-downs with these “boots to the ground” teammates to identify topics that meet at the intersection of product functionality and best practices — topics that will ultimately change the day-to-day behaviors of customers as they use your product.
Conduct research by listening to customer calls. Then, set out to create the courses that demonstrate to the user what’s in it for them and that you understand their needs.
Go back to where the request originated, Andrea said. It’s a great opportunity to check in and make sure you understand the request and can clarify the desired outcomes. Plus, it helps to continue building trust and partnership with the wider team, including product management, professional services, customer success, and marketing.
Now that you’ve done your research, how do you turn those ideas into a live training that will help customers grow and improve their daily practices?
“It’s a climb,” according to Andrea. And you need breaks during a climb. Her advice is as follows:
- Start by introducing the key concepts you want your customers to walk away with.
- Provide social proof for the big ideas using demos and storytelling to help them see things in action. This gives them a break from information overload, helping them to digest big, important concepts.
- Allow time for hands-on practice so your customers will walk away with an understanding of the context of the behavior change you’re encouraging. They will remember concepts better if they are actually practicing what they learned.
Our trainers are the secret sauce to our live trainings at Gong. Getting their buy-in and having them incorporate their own flavor into the content is a critical part of the training development process.
–Andrea Ivy Cantrell, Instructional Designer, Gong
Deliver a Best-in-Class VILT Learning Experience (Cruising Altitude)
Next up from the flight crew was Chris, who talked about how to attract users to VILT sessions to learn about the product and get the most out of it – and then how to engage them once they’re there.
Gong leverages Gainsight to create email campaigns to create excitement for special trainings. They also leverage Gong Academy using a tab on their homepage to make it easy for users to find and register for courses. Lastly, they use Skilljar to enable bulk registration, in which you can export a file with user names and bulk register them all with just a few clicks. This also enables Gong to easily track how many people are attending tailored courses as well.
Once you’ve gotten your students interested in your VILT courses, how can you create a really great experience for them?
Chris offered some best practices for trainers to engage their audience including:
- Smile and go on camera. This breaks down barriers between you and the audience, holds you accountable as a facilitator, and keeps you more conscious of your delivery.
- Leverage social proof by telling personal stories. Use anecdotes and quotes to support your points. Understand why you’re there and come up with ways to pull your audience in.
- Leverage chats and polls. Ask your learners to give you input on what you’re discussing. How do they approach certain situations? What tools do they find helpful? Also incorporate polls. Find out more about who your audience is by asking them their degree of experience on certain topics.
- Check for understanding. Make sure learners feel comfortable before moving forward and address any concerns they have by using the chat feature as well.
- Build in hands-on activities. Allow learners to practice. Give them two minutes to actually apply what they just learned or break them into groups and then have them share a finding from their breakout session. This breaks up the learning momentum so that students aren’t overwhelmed with information.
- Provide a call to action. Ensure learners know where to find the resources they need for their post-training. At the end of every training, give a clear call to action on how they can continue to level up. Send a follow-up email and include a link to the recording (just like the link to this webinar with Gong!)
You can have just as impactful a session virtually as you can in person, you just have to create a warm and welcoming environment where learners feel comfortable and at ease engaging with you throughout.
-Chris Maironis, Customer Education Specialist, Gong
Follow Up & Measure VILT Impact (Nearing Your Destination)
Chris continued his discussion of creating best-in-class VILT training by sharing how Gong uses Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) scores as an important driver of success. The team provides a survey at the end of each live training, as well as through a post-session email, and then funnels all of this information back into a master spreadsheet to interpret across trainings. This information is used to iterate content to improve the training experience. (Their hard work pays off as Gong sees a 95% positive CSAT score on all of their VILT collectively.)
As the webinar came in for a landing, Tim discussed how they use tracking and reporting to measure the impact that Gong’s live training sessions have.
The entire premise of Gong revenue intelligence platforms is to help customers get a clear picture of what’s going on with their deals – no opinions, no hunches. It’s got to be based on data, according to Tim.
So, the education team really strives to walk the talk, applying this same principle to their own training metrics to prove that the training they deliver has a positive impact on knowledge, adoption, and helping customers achieve their goals. Data also helps you iterate on training programs to make sure they are hitting the mark.
In order to do this, Gong relies on reporting tools and integrations such as Salesforce and Gainsight to gain visibility into which users for a given account are registering for and completing training. These metrics are tied to a customer’s overall health score. Integrations with Segment and Amplitude also help to correlate user training to platform activity.
It’s essential for us to determine what the training impact is on interaction, engagement, and adoption levels within the actual Gong platform.
-Tim Halter, Instructional Designer, Gong
Once you uncover the nuances of training success, you need to celebrate the successes, Tim said. You need to build credibility for your training organization and communicate those reporting numbers throughout to prove your worth and build that trust both internally and externally.
Gong’s education team sends out monthly emails company-wide to let everyone in the organization know training attendance levels and what noteworthy courses the team is planning next. They also hold monthly check-ins with their enablement team.
We strive to get the majority of our users to attend training because we know informed users who understand the value of the platform are going to adopt new tools and processes faster. We need all (internal) hands on deck to get the word out there and drive people to the academy and to our live trainings.
-Tim Halter, Instructional Designer, Gong
View the on-demand webinar!
Post-event Q&A session with Gong
The Gong crew certainly delivered on all of the best practices they spelled out in this virtual training experience with Skilljar webinar attendees! The chat feature was indeed used to engage the audience on many levels. Since we weren’t able to answer all of the questions you asked during the live event, we’ve captured the complete event Q&A here.
Webinar Questions
(Click on a topic heading to view the Answers for that section)
Customer satisfaction
Q. How do you survey your attendees to garner feedback and evaluate if the session was helpful?
Q. Are you able to filter your CSAT scores by customer?
Q. Any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. I wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
Scaling training
Q. When you were scaling up live training, what data did you use to predict demand and plan for the number of trainers?
VILT training and content
Q. How frequently do you update your VILT content? How do you manage the course maintenance phase or version controls?
Q. Do you have any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. Wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
Q. What kind of asynchronous training do you offer customers? Videos? Rise courses?
Q. How long are your longest VILTs?
Q. Do you have a max class size for your VILTs?
Q. How many people are in your Customer Ed team?
Tools and integrations
Q. I am hearing about Gainsight for the first time. How does it help you in maintaining your health scores?
Q. What eLearning authoring tools do you use?
Q. Do you use a project management tool internally as you build content (Asana, Wrike, etc.)?
Q. What kind of asynchronous training do you offer customers? Videos? Rise courses?
Q. What do you use for certification badging?
Who do you send the monthly customer education updates to? Is that just internal? Q. Is that monthly update sent by email or another way?
Product adoption
Q. I would love to learn how you are able to connect training consumption to product adoption. What types of metrics do you use?
Hands-on learning
Q. What kinds of hands-on activities do you use for virtual training? Besides Zoom polls.
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
Q. How do you manage attention virtually if you’re having them do hands-on stuff?
Customization/Tailored VILT content
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
Q. Adding tailored training for specific customers – how do you ensure other customers do not access the course, or inversely, ensure the right customer has access to the tailored course card?
Q. How much content is reused between user personas within customer/employee/partner learning tracks?
International presence/Localization
Q. Does Gong have international customers/staff and how do you schedule your live training for different geos?
Q. Do you offer trainings in multiple languages? How do you handle offering live learning experiences for non-English speakers?
Q. I love the idea of “tailored” VILTs – are these fully customized for each customer? Could you share (high level) how these are scaled?
Internal (employee) training and reporting
Q. Understanding that your Gongster (internal employee) platform training is handled by a different team, does your content overlap at all or do you create all different content (specifically eLearning) internal vs. external?
Q. Does your customer education team also have responsibility for employee education about your platform or is that a separate team?
Q. Who do you send the monthly customer education updates to? Is that just internal? Is that monthly update sent by email or another way?
Sandbox environment
Q. Is your customer sandbox environment built in-house, or are you using some virtualization system?
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
Working with Skilljar
Q. Why did you choose to use Skilljar rather than a traditional LMS?
Q. Any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. Wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
Webinar Q&A
Customer satisfaction
Q. How do you survey your attendees to garner feedback and evaluate if the session was helpful?
A. We share a CSAT survey link (Google form) at the end of every session and include the link in our follow-up emails.
Q. Are you able to filter your CSAT scores by customer?
A. Not for the one-to-many sessions as we don’t capture email or company as part of the survey, but some respondents opt to provide it. Obviously, the one-to-one sessions are a different story as they focus on a single customer, so we are able to pull CSAT scores for each session to see the associated scores.
Q. Any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. Wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
A. We did establish prerequisites with some self-paced content but ended up backing off of it because we found that customers wanted more flexibility.
Scaling training
Q. When you were scaling up live training, what data did you use to predict demand and plan for the number of trainers?
A. Before we led live trainings via Skilljar we were hosting these outside of an LMS. This meant we had a good understanding of attendee rates. We were then able to make assumptions based on product and company growth. One thing to note that makes a large difference is where else users can go for education. We tried really hard to make sure that all training was funneled through the EDU team and not the Customer Success or Accout Executive teams. This meant that when we began offering live trainings there was hunger for them from customers and a push for adoption of them from Customer Success.
VILT training and content
Q. How frequently do you update your VILT content? How do you manage the course maintenance phase or version controls?
A. We currently update content on a quarterly basis, but also make high priority edits/changes anytime as needed when a release feature/change is high impact. Additionally, our trainers submit feedback requests and changes are logged for end-of-quarter updates unless deemed high priority.
Q. Any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. Wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
A. We did establish prerequisites with some self-paced content but ended up backing off of it because we found that customers wanted more flexibility.
Q. What kind of asynchronous training do you offer customers? Videos? Rise courses?
A. Yes to all of the above. We have many shorter videos, playbooks (Rise), webinar recordings, self-paced courses and multi-course paths.
Q. How long are your longest VILTs?
A. Typically our VILT sessions are 45 minutes to an hour. An hour is the longest duration for any single session.
Q. Do you have a max class size for your VILTs?
A. We currently do not, but if we have sessions that have a large number of attendees, we ask education and/or CSM colleagues to join to help with answering questions.
Q. How many people are in your Customer Ed team?
A. Currently. we have five Training Specialists, four Instructional Designers, one Certification Program Manager, and a Director of Customer Education.
Tools and Integrations
Q. I am hearing about Gainsight for the first time. How does it help you in maintaining your health scores?
A. We sense this question is less around training and more around the overall way in which a tool like Gainsight can help track and support customer health needs. We encourage teams to look into tools like Gainsight. That being said, one of the reasons we love Gainsight is the ability to push data from Skilljar/SFDC to it and show the impact this is having on customer health. At Gong, we strive to ensure that 50-75% of users with an enabled license are trained. We can show each CSM how their accounts are measuring up to that goal right in Gainsight (a tool they live in often!).
Q. What eLearning authoring tools do you use?
A. Our primary content authoring tools are Articulate Rise, Storyline, and Camtasia.
Q. Do you use a project management tool internally as you build content (Asana, Wrike, etc.)?
A. Airtable is our main system for managing content production and updates. We also document progress on new content production using a Content Brief document in Google Docs.
Q. What kind of asynchronous training do you offer customers? Videos? Rise courses?
A. Yes to all of the above. We have many shorter videos, playbooks (Rise), Webinar Recordings, self-paced courses and multi-course paths.
Q. What do you use for certification badging?
A. We use Accredible.
Q. Who do you send the monthly customer education updates to? Is that just internal? Is that monthly update sent by email or another way?
A. Internal. Those are sent out via email to Customer Success and Leadership, but our Director of education really takes them to the next level with Mixmax templates.
Product Adoption
Q. Would love to learn how you are able to connect training consumption to product adoption. What types of metrics do you use?
A. This is a work in progress, but we try to identify key touchpoints in Gong’s platform (especially early on) that are proven indicators of engagement and adoption. We have three core personas that we focus on and identify key touchpoints for each. From there we look at the percentage of users who did or did NOT complete steps 1-2-3 in the software and compare this to whether or not they completed a live training session that covered that specific process. We also do the same comparison for self-paced content. There is a future state where we can look to tie this to customer improvements and maybe even revenue increases for customers.
Hands-on learning
Q. What kinds of hands-on activities do you use for virtual training? Besides Zoom polls.
A. We typically follow a see/do model: our trainers demo a particular workflow and ask customers to follow the same workflow in their own instances (typically pausing for 3-5 minutes to allow time for this practice). Trainers then ask participants to share their findings with the group.
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
A. For our 1:many VILTs, we use our Gong Demo instance and have customers who attend the training leverage their own instance to follow along. With regards to our custom VILTs for an individual customer, we log into their Gong instance and train them live from within their own Gong account.
Q. How do you manage attention virtually if you’re having them do hands-on stuff?
A. Typically we follow a see/do model and pause in the session for three to five minutes to give attendees time to “do.”
Customization/Tailored VILT content
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
A. For our 1:many VILTs, we use our Gong Demo instance and have customers who attend the training leverage their own instance to follow along. With regards to our custom VILTs for an individual customer, we log into their Gong instance and train them live from within their own Gong account.
Q. Adding tailored training for specific customers – how do you ensure other customers do not access the course, or inversely, ensure the right customer has access to the tailored course card?
A. These courses are hidden, and learners are registered in bulk by our training team.
Q. How much content is reused between user personas within customer/employee/partner learning tracks?
A. Great question. I’d say there is a fair amount of content that is leveraged between some personas as well as customer/employee/partner tracks. In fact, all of our Partner training is based on existing content, but it’s a very different track in the end as courses and videos are pulled from several different personas.
International Presence/Localization
Q. Does Gong have international customers/staff and how do you schedule your live training for different geographies?
A. We have international customers and also an office in Dublin (there are no Education team members there -yet!), and we have trainers and Instructional Designers on the East Coast and the West Coast of the US – this helps us accommodate EMEA, APAC, and other time zones.
Q. Do you offer trainings in multiple languages? How do you handle offering live learning experiences for non-English speakers?
A. Right now we just offer sessions in English. We’re rapidly moving into EMEA and APAC, so localization is certainly on the horizon.
Q. I love the idea of “tailored” VILTs – are these fully customized for each customer? Could you share (high level) how these are scaled?
A. These are completely customized for each customer’s use case. In terms of content development, the Instructional Design team creates collateral that includes “everything but the kitchen sink” so that trainers can pick and choose what topics they need to cover for a given client. Custom training is woven into our services packages, so customers have to opt into (and pay for) tailored training sessions.
Internal (employee) training and reporting
Q. Understanding that your Gongster (internal employee) platform training is handled by a different team, does your content overlap at all or do you create all different content (specifically eLearning) internal vs. external?
A. We partner very closely with Product and Enablement to make sure we have open communication and those meetings have saved us from duplicating content. Yes, we do share content when the opportunity arises.
Q. Does your customer education team also have responsibility for employee education about your platform or is that a separate team?
A. Gong has an internal Enablement team for Customer Success and a Sales Enablement team, so while we work closely with these departments we’re not directly responsible for internal enablement.
Q. Who do you send the monthly customer education updates to? Is that just internal? Is that monthly update sent by email or another way?
A. Internal. Those are sent out via email to Customer Success and Leadership, but our Director of education really takes them to the next level with Mixmax templates.
Sandbox environment
Q. Is your customer sandbox environment built in-house, or are you using some virtualization system?
A. Customers typically use their own instances during training. For one-to-many sessions, trainers use a demo environment that’s managed in-house.
Q. Do you have a sandbox account for hands-on practice? Is it in your platform or do you use an external virtual lab platform?
A. For our 1:many VILTs, we use our Gong Demo instance and have customers who attend the training leverage their own instance to follow along. With regard to our custom VILTs for an individual customer, we log into their Gong instance and train them live from within their own Gong account.
Working with Skilljar
Q. Why did you choose to use Skilljar rather than a traditional LMS?
A. There are many reasons, but I think the most important for us was its customer service. Skilljar really treats customers as partners and thinks strategically about the best way to present, deliver, and track learning. Skilljar also sees around corners for us. A great example is relevant to today’s session: When we told our CSM and Implementation Consultant live training was a pivotal part of our business, they helped us think of all the things we would need to configure to have the system work for us.
Q. Any experiences with using required pre-requisites in Skilljar? I’m on the fence about how often to require these and how many in some cases. I wonder if you have any feedback that VILTs with pre-requisites get higher CSAT scores or any other benefits of doing this.
A. We did establish prerequisites with some self-paced content but ended up backing off of it because we found that customers wanted more flexibility.
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