Training Tips with Doug McDaniel, Engagio

In this edition of our Training Tips series, we asked Doug McDaniel from Engagio to share his insights and tips about training customers!

What are your responsibilities at Engagio? 

Engagio is still a very young company, and as such, I find myself wearing many different hats. The majority of my time is spent onboarding new customers to Engagio's Account Based Marketing Platform. The rest of my time is spent designing and building courses in Skilljar, creating and curating other content and documentation, enabling the success of our customers, and dabbling in product marketing. Needless to say, there is never a dull moment.

What does it mean to be successful in your role?

It may sound cliché, but success is customer happiness. While I know that's not the most provocative answer, I think for Engagio, that success really falls into four different categories:

1. Adoption: Are our customers using our software? We deploy several softwares to track adoption of our platform across intended user groups. The goal is to have more than just our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) leveraging our platform on any given day. My goal is for Engagio to become the bridge between sales and marketing making both happier to work together, which isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

2. Decreasing Time to Value: How long is it until a customer gets what they wanted out of Engagio? The faster people understand how to find what they want and understand what they're looking at, the more they can utilize our system. My goal is to get them seeing new things and acting on them sooner to make their marketing programs more effective. Ideally, customers see value in the first 14 days of implementing Engagio. 

3. Customer Happiness: So they use the software, but does it delight them? I want customers to love Engagio and what it stands for. To me, this means trying to deliver Ritz-Carlton level service to every customer at all times. I'm always trying to anticipate every customer's needs so I can help them before they even know what questions they're trying to ask.

4. Ease of Renewal: But will they re-sign with us? How difficult is it for our Customer Success Team to get a renewal with our customer? My goal is for the customer to never say "we never got going" or "we couldn't find value." This means working hand-in-hand with the rest of Engagio's amazing CS Team to provide solutions and troubleshoot anything and everything. 

How do you share your successes across the company?

Transparency is a core value of Engagio. Every two weeks, we have a company all-hands where we are encouraged to share our successes and give updates on progress of key business initiatives. For my team, that means celebrating customers progressing through onboarding milestones, teams that are adopting Engagio across their organizations, or when our users share their own successes through our Engagio Community (hosted on Slack).

Outside of presenting to the entire company, my partner-in-crime, Kim Tran, has taken the reins on creatively dispersing our progress through infographics, piktocharts, and slide decks - which get the entire org bought into what we're working on. 

What's in your customer training toolbox?

Patience Pants - I sadly couldn't find anything on Amazon to link to - but I really wanted everyone to have to click a link. 

Eraser - Be ready to do things over again. And over again.

Project Management Software - Helpful for balancing project deadlines, tasks, sub-tasks, sub-sub tasks...

Skilljar! - My favorite LMS system on the market. A great tool for standardizing training, measuring adoption, and backed by an awesome team that genuinely cares about your success (I swear I'm not sucking up). 

Pendo - An amazing software that helps track adoption through our platform. With Pendo, we've been able to track feature clicks within our application, segment by user groups, and create in-app notifications and guides to better inform our users. Highly recommended.

Elev.io - Intelligent documentation site. We recently migrated to Elev.io because of its abilities to integrate our in-app support, documentation (based on app URL and user segment), and ease of use. Pretty cheap to get started, too!

My CS Counterparts - I guess you could call them all tools (that's a joke). But seriously, the team around me has supported our customers in an infinite number of ways and continues to impress me every day. Without their collective knowledge and dedication, customer training wouldn't be a thing for us.

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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!