[Webinar Recap] How to Secure (More) Budget for Customer Education

In our recent webinar with Skilljar’s Head of Product Marketing, Linda Schwaber-Cohen, we explored the mechanisms for securing training budget by way of demonstrating ROI.

Three Levers of Customer Education ROI

When it comes to demonstrating the value and impact of training (with the goal of getting or increasing budget), there are three key levers to consider:

1. Revenue generation: are you charging for training? If so, are you generating enough revenue to offset your costs, completely cover your costs, or make a profit?
2. Cost reduction: How are you using training to reduce business costs like the time invested in support ticket requests or enable greater Customer Success capacity?
3. Impact on key business metrics: What impact does training have on metrics like customer retention, product adoption, customer satisfaction, etc.?

Each of the levers can help you demonstrate ROI, but only if they are regularly shared with stakeholders and executives. While there is no single “right” frequency or way to share these metrics, more than 70% of webinar attendees indicated they share their results on a monthly or quarterly basis with key stakeholders.

For a more in-depth look at each of these levers, you can check out the webinar on-demand right here.

Elements of a Great Proposal

There are 3 components that every proposal should include: business objective, metrics, and measurement milestones. The following questions will help you parse out each of those components:

1. What business problem(s) are you addressing? In other words, what problems will your training program solve and why is education the best route to that solution?
   • Example: Accelerate customer onboarding
2. How will you measure success? What metric(s) will be used to indicate progress?
   • Example: Time to launch
3. How often are you going to measure progress?
   • Example: Quarterly

In addition to these elements, it’s also critical that you develop and socialize a plan, especially for the first 30/60/90 days. The plan should include your specific initiative(s), a timeline, a sense of the content you are going to create (and any resources for that development), and what your goal is for each initiative. Be sure to also establish who are the key stakeholders and what input they can/should have in the plan. This includes other teams like Customer Success, Product, Support, and/or other SMEs. By including them early on and integrating their input, you’re not only getting their buy-in, you’re also ensuring that the initiative truly meets your customers’ needs.

3 Tips for Creating a Great Proposal

As you turn towards creating your own proposal, Linda shared a number of tactical tips to keep in mind:

1. Be succinct – write an executive summary
2. Over prepare – anticipate the questions you might be asked
3. Draw on past achievements – showcase where you’ve already seen success

It’s also important to keep in mind nice-to-haves vs. need-to-haves. Your company may not have the budget to build a mansion right now, but perhaps you can work together and pitch a tent. Thinking about how you can start small, demonstrate success, and build upwards from there.