One to Many: Lightweight Enablement for Scale
A while back, I did a blog on how to get people to retain information better, replacing ‘boot camps in Bali’ with more thought-out mentorship-based approaches. That’s all well and good for internal training or even high-touch customer training on complex systems, but what about more simple products? Systems designed with Ease of Use as a core tenant? Can we ignore this involved method? Are boot camps back? (spoiler they are not) how do we enable customers at scale in velocity product motions?
Well, I am glad you asked!
Enablement does not need to be heavy-handed; it should fit the situation. Let's take a theoretical SaaS product, sold at low cost (in the tens of dollars a month) with a goal of being the ‘easy to use’ option in the field. This is going to inform the design, so it should be straightforward at the outset. But there are always barriers to entry and this type of product needs wide appeal. So, how do you balance simplicity and clean design with ensuring time to ROI?
First, look at your pain points, these will be the points in the product your users drop off or get lost. In a SaaS environment, this can be done easily with tools that track users through the product. Where are your free trial users leaving? Where are they spending a lot of time? Find these points and build up content around them. Depending on your bandwidth (and engineering bandwidth), This can be done in various ways, from in-app tooltips and guides to videos and documentation. I prefer a mix, different users learn differently.
If you can get a good handle on the pain points the next focus is heavily used features. These are the places in your product that get a workout and, thus, the ones where you will get the most bang for your buck when it comes to content creation. Here I would recommend more in-depth content pieces, for example, walkthroughs, case studies, and anything that shows value while also demonstrating powerful user-level interaction.
So far what we have been crafting could be done by one to two people with some engineering support and maintained current at the same time. This allows you to have people focused on retention and time to value while not overloading a budding company with headcount. Eventually, your product will catch on, and you will need to move from reactionary to space leadership enablement. This is where you will start looking at leveraging all the content you have been creating into a cohesive framework for product certifications. Every great SaaS play eventually lets users get certified in various aspects of it, with badges and bragging rights posted all over social. This is the growth phase when your self-starter ‘enablement specialist’ or single person ‘Head of Enablement’ will need to scale for a content creation team that can create, support, and maintain a suite of enablement tools. Maybe you start offering live training, maybe integration services, maybe there is a reseller network to consider. All this comes with time.
One to Many enablement focuses on quality pieces created in the right sequence to leverage the people you must quickly create the best ROI and retention. Thoughts, questions, rebuttals? I am always here to talk on LinkedIn and at jeff@karellenconsulting.com.