New role - new thinking

L&D Meets Marketing :-)

Still couldn’t be happier than to be settling into my new role at Qualtrics. I mean, look at this view…

….not to mention that I really resonate with the company’s mission of helping our customers understand their customers and their employees better and to act on that understanding. I also like my team’s mission - helping our customers get more value from the platform.

I lead our Basecamp team - that’s the team tasked with leading our customer education efforts. I like being on this side - the customer-facing side - for a couple of reasons. First, I think we’re making a product that people want. Qualtrics is a feature-rich platform that can provide deep and actionable insights and customers want to know how best to make use of it. I think that push, that tailwind if you will, is different than what I’ve felt in internally-focused L&D efforts - definitely feels more of a push there. So that explicit focus on customers is different but I really want to talk about the larger org that I’m in now.

Most of my career has been in L&D. I did take an informative and educational turn into innovation management at Amazon (and found out that I’d actually been doing that work all along as well). Yes, its true, I was there when SCORM was named (I was clearly a child at the time). No, its not true that dark magic was used in its creation. Now most of that career has been spent either in core HR as an L&D unit or in a discrete L&D org (HR adjacent). At Qualtrics though, my team sits in the Marketing org, specifically the Customer Marketing team. Makes sense since we’re focused on customer education; the content and experiences we build lead to customer satisfaction and are direct outreaches to our clients - lines up to be in an org with that as its focus. I am learning a lot though. I don’t think I really appreciated what it would mean to be externally-facing L&D while inside but its making more and more sense as I learn more and more.

Part of what I’m learning is a whole new vocabulary - motions, beats, surfaces, nurtures, and on. They really do reflect a focus that I’ve rarely seen in L&D efforts - certainly in internally-facing teams. What has struck me is not just the different vocabulary, but how the actions described by that vocabulary seek to build a relationship with the customer. As I learn, I’m thinking there may be some value here for L&D teams (even those that face internally) to take from this focus that Customer Marketing has. This essay is my first try at sensemaking here - would love your thoughts on what I get right, what’s interesting, and what I totally misunderstood or get wrong. Also, all of these are based on essentially 3.5 months of being inside a marketing org, there is plenty of opportunity here for me to misunderstand since I’m still in learning mode.

Tempo: This is really the first thing that hit me. Not just that Marketing moves fast - I mean have you met a team in tech that fails to talk about how fast it moves in like the first 5 seconds of talking to them? It’s more than that. It’s the sense of the ephemeral or that none of what you do or build, certainly not customer relationships, are in any way static. They are dynamic, they require attention, maintenance, and rapid, visible, change, is the norm. You plan for every year, you kick off every quarter, you tweak language, you feverishly collect data and feedback and make adjustments accordingly. It feels dynamic and responsive in a way that so many L&D efforts don’t.

Strategy: Another difference is on the strategy front. They (MKT) don’t talk about “strategy” as much as I’m used to. The phrasing I’ve heard so far is around “Motions.” I understand a motion to be the strategic approach to achieving a goal - the difference here is that there is a range of ways to lead a motion. The big ones I’ve seen are:

• Sales-led motion: Sales team is lead. Its high touch. The sales cycle is long and the product is complex. For an L&D team, I’d say this is how you engage other teams or orgs to say get them to move off of another LMS and onto the core one or how you build relationships with other groups to help produce content, etc.

• Product-led motion: The product itself is the lead. You’re trying out a new LMS or new learning experiences like games or maybe a new authoring tool/environment. The L&D mirror image of a freemium or free trial model would be a sandbox for teams to try out the new systems.

• Marketing-led motion: Your marketing efforts are the lead. You want to build a presence. Maybe its L&D taking the lead on raising the AI literacy in your org - something that goes beyond being a order-taker for training content. This means content creation, hosting learning talks and roundtables - moving beyond course delivery.

• Community-Led Motion: Led by a strong user community. The community itself drives adoption through word-of-mouth, advocacy, and shared knowledge. This one probably is the most powerful, and done right, the most enduring. It’s also probably the one that most L&D teams are least equipped to or need the most support to launch and run. Community creation and maintenance is a science unto itself.

What I resonate with there is that the different motions are all at the strategic level, they’re all focused on a growth outcome, and they’re all based on how they will be led - and that one decision cascades down to which tools will be used and so on. I don’t think most L&D teams think in terms of growth - we tend to talk about measuring performance and then lament the fact that that’s hard to do - and I think there is a tendency to lead with what you have vs what will do the best job so we end up not planning for or asking for or building what we really need. Now for more Thoughts from a Newbie Marketer/L&D professional.

So you how do you decide on which Motion(s) to enact? One way would be through Journeys and journey-mapping. Now this is a tool that I’ve seen deployed in L&D teams but usually in maybe a journey for a learner that leads to a certification but not necessarily one that lines up to the strategic level of motions.

I’m going to quickly mention Surfaces and Channels - I think they’re pretty easy to understand and there are corollaries in L&D. Just think of a Surface anywhere that a customer will come in content with your content or your brand. Yes, I said brand - I think L&D teams, maybe more than ever, should be thinking about what their internal brand is. I used to say that managing an LMS meant that your best CSAT or NPS score was to not be actively hated. So think about the places that customers (again I’m using that language on purpose even if you’re internal) interact with your content. Just in courses? What about customer support? Sales? Are you perceived as order takers or just that team that creates the compliance training? Channels are the ways you reach customers over your surfaces. ILT. Webinars. Those are channels. I’m moving quickly and incompletely here to get to the last two I really want to mention, beats and nurtures.

Beats: In marketing (again with the caveat that I’m drawing on whole months of experience here), a beat is “is a strategic, recurring rhythm of communications, content, or activities designed to engage a specific audience over time. Unlike a one-off campaign, a beat is a consistent, predictable pattern that keeps a brand top-of-mind and builds a continuous relationship with its target audience.” Now the only beats I can easily identify in L&D are typically around compliance - ethics, infosec, etc. We have regular course/content releases or updates but they don’t seem to be targeted consistently and designed to engage a specific audience. They’re more generalized or diffuse - once you get outside something like sales training. I think L&D and its brand internally, could benefit from an thoughtful calendar of content aimed at specific moments and specific audiences as a way to build engagement and awareness.

Nurtures: A nurture (see warning above) “is a strategy focused on building and maintaining a relationship with a prospective customer or lead over a period of time. The goal is to "nurture" them by providing valuable, relevant content until they are ready to make a purchase.” I’ve rarely seen L&D think of the people using their content or touching their systems as customers and rarer still…think about how they could build a relationship with them over time. How would that look for an L&D team? What kind of skills or roles would the team need that aren’t there now or if they are there now, its by luck instead of planning? The benefits seems obvious though. Better, quicker feedback allowing L&D teams to be more responsive. Feedback and insights of a qualitative nature that would be rich and actionable against something as anemic as a smiley sheet.

There’s one other piece here that I’m thinking a lot about but which might have to be its own post - maturity. In my current world that means how well are customers understanding, using, and getting value from the product. For L&D, I think it means looking at how people mature in their roles and the org and how content should mature along with them. We all know that if we look at our LMS, the usage, aside from compliance training, falls off a cliff when someone starts hitting the mid-levels. This is problematic for L&D as a brand because just as someone is moving into leadership, their contact with L&D content is dropping off along with any impression of value they have in it. More to come on this.

It’s taken me a long time to write this but I hope I did some of the marketing focus justice and I hope I made some understandable connections to how that marketing thinking could be used in the L&D space. If I did and especially if I didn’t, please drop me a note.