Stop Hiring SMEs as Trainers: How Optro Scales Live Training That Actually Protects Revenue

Narrator: You've heard the buzzword for years. Scale onboarding. CSMs shouldn't be doing training. Digital is a strategy, not a segment. But here's the truth. Most customer success teams are juggling a mess of tools, changing priorities and have barely enough bandwidth to read, let alone scale. That vision we've all been chasing it is finally real. Learning isn't trapped inside an LMS anymore. It's embedded across the entire customer journey. And that's where Skilljar, now part of Gainsight, is changing the game. Skilljar is becoming the backbone of scalable self serve learning, whether it's in your academy, inside your product, in your community or beyond. And because it's integrated with Gainsight's customer os, it connects to where your customer data and your CSMS already live. This isn't theory, it is happening now. Companies like Airtable, Zendesk, uh, Okta, Miro and Asana are already doing it, with Skilljar and Keensight leading the charge. So if you're ready to stop duct taping your customer education strategy together, visit skilljar.com today.

Dave Darrington: Hello and welcome to C Lab, the customer education lab where we explore how to build customer education programs, experiment always with new approaches and exterminate all the myths, all the bad advice and work against all of that stops growth deadness track. Because when the industry here that speed and velocity to market matter most. Um, I'm Dave Darrington and let's do a quick intro. Tim Devine, welcome and please introduce yourself briefly and then we'll get on with the show.

Tim Devine: Perfect, thank you. Happy to be here today. Um, my name is Tim Devine and I manage the software training team at Optron, um, formerly known as Audit Board. Um, I started in 2000 or 2021, uh, and have been there since.

Dave Darrington: Awesome. Well, I'm excited to talk with you today. You've got some really great points to make and I think it's all really relevant as we're going to be talking about live training, instructor led training. It's come back with a vengeance. We're out there again. We got through Covid. Um, before we start that off though, and let's do what we always do, which is our international day of today. Uh, we both look at the page, uh, and pick our favorite. It's always kind of fun. So Tim, what's your pick of the day? What do you think is fun?

Tim Devine: I am going to have to go with National Cheese Day. I am a cheese enthusiast.

Dave Darrington: What's your favorite?

Tim Devine: Oh man, I like a nice soft like a baked brie. Can Spread that on a, on something and some toast. That's, that's where I go.

Dave Darrington: That's good stuff. Um, I'm a Jarlsberg or, uh, a five year age Gouda kind of guy, or ten year age Gouda. Great stuff. Um, my pick of the day. This is, uh, apparently national hug your cat day. So for those of you cat fans like me, you know, pick up your furry feline friend and say thanks. But it's funny. I've got two. They're crazy. Getting older. All right, let's get into the meat of this. This is, ah, let me frame it up like I always do. This is more of a hypothesis today, which is, um, do you, do you really need. And we're talking about live training, instructor led, whether it's virtual or in person, on, in a classroom setting, uh, do you really need to have subject matter experts? The people that know every nook and cranny, your product, everything about it? Um, and that's what we're going to orbit around today. What I'd like to get you talking about is some of the things that might be counter to what you might think about live training. And I think before we were talking previously, there's things like, hey, do we do bespoke stuff? How do we get to that? Um, how do we get trainers up to speed with the product so that they look confident and competent? So let's orbit around that today. Okay, Tim?

Tim Devine: Yeah, that sounds great. We'd love to talk about that more.

Dave Darrington: Okay. Um, and just to expand on that a little bit, we're coming from a place where I like this pattern, or maybe we call it an anti pattern because it's something we don't want to do. And I've been guilty of it as well, where you have that one legendary type expert who knows everything, all the nuts and bolts, but there's a lot of things that happen around that and I don't want to get into there and bury the lead right now. I want you to talk about your journey, what you built in your program, how you've gone about it, and just really break into the topic today. So let's start it out. Uh, there is a phrase that actually I'd like you to say your mic drop phrase that you told me. Um, go ahead and, go ahead and riff on that because I want you to say it, not me, because I think it lands better.

Tim Devine: Okay. Yeah. One of the things I learned early on, um, in this role specifically, um, is the idea that as, um, live trainers, or really as anyone that's helping customers implement a software, um, is the idea that we're not meant to be genies, we're meant to be experts. The idea behind that is, um, customers come in and we, um, think that the right thing to do is to say, hey, what do you want to know? What do you want us to show you? How do you want us to. To build this? Um, when in reality, that can be a really overwhelming experience for customers because they don't know the product very well. Um, and so I think a big piece of what they're paying us for is not just to come in and say, tell me what you want and we'll build it for you. I think they want us to come in and say, here's what you need to know in this product to get going and to get, uh, value out of the product right away. Right.

Dave Darrington: I think there's a lot of threads to pull on that. Um, so let's go into your approach to hiring your team. And I'm coming from a place where I've had multiple teams, I've taught at a university setting. Um, there's assumptions that I make about that, and I've made some mistakes before. One of the first things that you've talked about, so I like that, you know, we're not genies, we're experts. Okay, how do you build that? Where do you start? Maybe from the beginning, which is you're looking to hire somebody. What's that journey look like? You're getting your resource up, up to speed on your product.

Tim Devine: Yeah, I think, um, and maybe I'm biased because I also have the education background, um, working in, you know, middle school, high school with professor for a while, too. I, um, think what I'm looking for is the. The ability to learn and the ability to teach. Life training is a. Yeah, life training is a very unique skill, and I think a lot of people think they can do it. Um, but, you know, the difference between somebody who has training in this skill set and somebody who's maybe just kind of jumping in to fill a quick need. Um, in that. In that regard, um, I think we're looking for people when we hire who have an understanding of adult learning theory, um, and not just, like, where they could write a book on it, but enough to get the idea of when do I need to pivot on an idea because it's not landing. How do I recognize the fact that the way I'm approaching this isn't clicking for the audience, and how can I pivot on that so that they can, Um, I Think, especially with a product and a platform as robust as optro, we've got nine, maybe 10 different products now within our umbrella, so there's a lot to absorb. Um, and from a customer's perspective, I think the biggest challenge that they face and the biggest thing we have to do is managing cognitive overload.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, so let me riff on that a little bit. So you're saying, and I like where you're going with this, you're looking for an ability to learn, an ability to teach. Uh, within that, uh, how would you approach that in an interview process? Do you do something like, do you have a rubric that includes activities? Or you have them pick a topic or maybe even do one of yours? What is it that you're doing that you're queuing off of?

Tim Devine: We do have a round of interview where we ask them to prepare a short presentation, um, for us on, you know, some kind of software that they like. Um, the first. The first software trainer we ever hired, who is one of my all stars, she's incredible. Um, her name is Alana. So, Alana, if you listen, shout out. Um, but the thing that Alana did was she came in and she showed us how to build a Spotify playlist. And so that's a good one.

Dave Darrington: That's practical and fun and relatable for everyone, right?

Tim Devine: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the question is, can you come out of there knowing how to do it or is it like, you know, a full 30 minutes of just straight demoing and here's every feature and here's everything you can do? Um, and then, you know, it's an easy thing to tell because if I don't come out of that knowing how to do it, then I know that that's probably not the direction we want to go.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, yeah, that's good. I saw somebody do a slack demo like that too. Like, hey, just go train us on this. And when I came out of some of that thing, hey, you know, I actually learned something new. And this was just an interview.

Tim Devine: Yeah, exactly. Um, the other thing I look for when we interview is I always like to ask a question, something to the extent of. Tell me a time in a previous job where you took a big swing and it didn't work. And then what did you learn from that and how did you apply it? Um, I think asking questions like that, number one for you to answer, to even answer that question, you've got to have some courage, right? Because you're in an interview, you want them to think you're perfect. So, right away. Let's see if this person is courageous enough to answer the question honestly. And then the other thing that I can get from that question is, is this someone who, ah, is fearless and really coming in and training a product where you have no expertise in the field that it's built for? Um, you have to be fearless to be able to jump in and stand in front of a room of experts or log on and teach a room of experts, um, on a platform that is new to them.

Dave Darrington: That's. Okay. I want to hold that space for a minute because that saying that again out loud matters because, okay, I'm going to use I've Got My Bastard on today because I work there and I'm going to be in a training role or at least I'm working to develop all the training to do it myself and then train others. And that, that fear creeps in because I go, oh, my gosh, how am I going to learn all this? This is a field that's totally blowing my mind. Where do I start? Where do we begin? So then when you're in that, when you're in that interview and you spot that, um, you get that transparency of saying, yeah, this is a lot. And this is how I break. I broke it down. And since I work with things, then you're actually, you're actually doing a good service to both you and that person because you want them to. You're going to have to pivot on your feet right when you're in a training and it's going sideways because somebody asks you a crazy question or, I don't know, have you had a case where what happens when somebody's not behaving well and you're having to deal with that you. From what you did school teaching too, so.

Tim Devine: Oh, my God, Yeah, exactly. Um, college was my favorite because there were no parents to report to. And it was really just on the learner to be like, if you want to be here and you want to learn this, I'm going to teach it to you. And if you're not that interested and you don't show up, then that's fine by me. Because it's your, you know, it's your education. It's, you know, you're paying for this. So, you know, as long as you're not being disruptive, um, then, you know, I'm doing this kind of to entertain myself and kind of because I enjoy it. And I think focusing on yourself first and making sure like, you're enjoying what you're doing and you're having A good time. It makes you better. At least it makes me better. Um, you know, I. I tend to, you know, in the beginning, I spent a lot of time as I'm training also trying to imagine what they're thinking about my training. And I just drive myself crazy with, like, oh, did that make sense to them? Are they going to ask about this? I hope they don't ask about this. What are they. Are they thinking, like, this is such a waste of my time? Um, so I think, like, shifting the focus a little bit, as counterintuitive as that is, at least for me, makes me a much better trainer because I'm more relaxed and more personable, um, and more, uh, you know, human sounding, ultimately.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, I like that. Um, I'll tell you transparently one of the experiences that I had where I made some assumptions. I was teaching a university class on game design and I did not prepare as well as I should have. And, uh, that experience haunted me because I walked out of there going, oh, my God, it feels just terrible. Never let that happen again. Um, but then that was kind of, um, that was a thinking on your feet kind of thing to say, okay, well, what did I do? What did I do wrong? Why did it not land? Oh, and then he even went, you know, further and asked some people, could I do differently? Not within that, you know, overtime. Um, okay, let's ask. I want to want you to talk more around this subject matter expert hump, because. And let me frame it like this. I have been in so many startup environments where we needed to do training. We found somebody who was in the company. They like, they know everything, they're brilliant, everybody loves them, and now that person, here they are on stage or in a virtual instructor, like, class, and things aren't working out right. This happens more often than not. But I want to get you talking about that whole hump. Like, what is. What are. How are you working around that?

Tim Devine: Yeah, I think what I've learned and obviously what I had to learn coming in. So as I mentioned, we're auditing. You know, auditing, risk management, um, you know, GRC platform. Um, my background is in humanities, so it's about as far away from auditing as you can get. Um, but I think what I learned moving into this role is that coming in as a novice to the industry, it really, really is an advantage if you're willing to see it that way. Um, when a subject matter expert is putting together what they consider to be a training, um, they know everything and they feel like a good training, communicates everything to the customer. And that goes back to that cognitive overload we were talking about earlier. Um, when you're brand new to something, the way I was coming into Optron, um, you really have to start from scratch. Um, and as you're learning the product, you're really learning what the core competencies are. And so it's kind of, you know, filtering through the expertise a little bit to nail down, like, this is what somebody who needs to use this product has to know. And without that background, without that, you know, subject matter expert knowledge there, putting a lot of noise in your head around that, then it becomes a lot easier to break it down to what the core competencies need to be.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, and it's. I like what you're talking about here, particularly because, okay, you've got, what is the phrase we say the sage on the stage, where if I feel really confident about a subject and I get up on stage, then it's easy for me to talk about it, but I want to tell you everything yet I don't have that kind of time. And when I do, we. I think the thing that's, that's tough is when, And I like this, this discussion around, hey, you're coming in as a novice. Why does that matter? Why do we actually want that? And it's because that, you just said there's a lens as a filter. If I don't get it as a teacher, how can I teach a classroom? Right. And then there's also another filter in it because if we're, if our product is not at a place where, as a novice trainer, I can't get my, you know, I can't present it, then we have a different kind of a problem.

Tim Devine: Yeah, I like to think of it as, um, you know, whenever I have a daughter and we love playing board games together. And so I compare it to like, okay, my job is to teach them the rules of the game. You know, this is how you play, this is how you optro. Um, I'm not up there and I'm not going through that process and saying, okay, let's learn every single strategy right up front so that you know every possible move or every possible play you could make in order to win the game. We're here to establish the rules. And then once you know the rules, then you turn the people with the, uh, expertise in the industry to play with the system, um, adapt the system better, you know, work within the system. And they can do that because they have that base understanding of what the rules of the game are. So I think a lot of it is really just saying, you know, setting the playground rules within those rules, you know what you're doing. So now you're empowered to go do what you need to do, um, efficiently, because you know where to go, where to click, how to make those things happen.

Dave Darrington: Yeah. Does that translate any differently as, uh, to how you would articulate your training sequence? Like, what is. I love the analogy to a game because I taught game design for a long time and I love games. And that, uh, that moment that you're describing is that magical moment where, uh, I'm getting the nuance from you that you're that person. We want to go, hey, okay, well, okay, we got to read the rules. Because there's always that one person that reads the rules better than everybody else. And you go, forget this. You just tell me, right? And then it comes together. And so do you think a really good trainer, you know, an instructor, is then that person that has that little bit of, uh. Like, we go back to what's your first class? Right. Tell me a little bit more about that at Optor, because I don't know anything about the space, and that might be a really good opportunity. Is. What are you laying out? What are the first principles in our first course that I would join? You know.

Tim Devine: Yeah, if we're making recommendations, the first thing we would do is our. What we call our core user training. And the way I like to think of this is this is why you bought the product. So whether that's, you know, doing audits in the system, um, whether that's testing your, your company's controls to make sure they're working effectively, um, there is a. There is a reason you bought this product, and this is the ground floor. This is how you use that. Um, from there, we're able to build up a little bit. And the next thing we would do is go to admin training. So we wouldn't start with admin training, even if we're working with the administrators on the implementation, because that's level two. Um, and they need to. They need to understand level one. So the way we'll structure training, if we're comparing it to the rules of a board game, we'll say, here are the six things that you need to understand. At the end of this, we're going to do the first one. Here's what I'm going to tell you. I'm going to show it to you. I'm going to go have a slide that summarizes what we just said now and only now Are we going to pause for questions? And once that happens, there are no more questions. Then we say, okay, guess what? You've accomplished something. You have that rule down. Let's go to the next rule now. And you're building on that, you know, building that foundation, but you're also allowing them to sort of chunk those bits of information so it doesn't get overwhelming at any point.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, you're. You're hitting on the game design theory stuff. You know, you're. You're chunking, you're telescoping, you're doing all these different tactics. That's a really good analogy. Think of your program as setting the field of play, field for the game and the rules and stuff. And now I kind of like where you go next. One of the points you're talking about is, and I want you to expand upon is your audience. Learn the language. You've already talked about that, and then trusting your audience and fill in the gaps. So is that like the analogy of I'm in training and now I'm getting that interactivity between the learners who are. Actually, I found the most powerful. Some of the most powerful training I've ever seen is that we go on platform and we say, hey, Tim, you show me. You. You do. I'm just the instructor. I want you to take the screen and run through that. Do you do those kinds of things too?

Tim Devine: Um, sometimes. Uh, not too often. Um, when we do our standard trainings, we usually have people logged in to our site, and so we can actually see that they're doing those things along with us because the site will literally change and update as they make those changes. So, um, we are checking for, um, comprehension as we go. Um, the big piece that we have to do is really scale as much as possible. And so, um, we have to format our time where we get them all of that critical information in a very efficient manner. And so, um, we like to do more of a do it with me kind of style than a we show you, you do it. Then we check for understanding there. Um, so that's kind of how we make sure that the training doesn't go on for four, six, eight hours, multiple days, um, and that sort of thing. So it really is a balance between what they need to do and us making sure we give them the chance to do it.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, it's cool. Um, I want to talk more about, uh, the do it with me, the scaling. There's some things I was really excited about when we were pregaming and we were talking last week about Things leading, um, up to that. You've talked about a couple strategies that you use. Let's stay here with this a little bit. The SME on deck model, um, and then guardrails that you're using and how you're. You're bringing guardrails into play for those training engagements. Um, can you tell me a little bit more about that? Like, the SME on deck one is something I really want to learn more about, because I'm trying to get into that kind of a strategy as well, too.

Tim Devine: Sure, yeah. So, again, because we have to be at scale and because we have to be efficient with our time, we, um, don't always do what you might consider, you know, typical best practice. Um, so the way we're going to approach a training session is, um, we're a Zoom company, so we set up Zoom webinars. Um, that means we're going to have cameras and microphones disabled for our learners. Um, and what we're going to ask them to do is we're going to ask them to use the Q and A feature in Zoom to type questions. And as I'm going, um, that allows us to do a couple things. Um, number one, it makes sure that we don't, you know, go down a rabbit hole where one person has this really unique problem that they're trying to solve but isn't really relevant to the rest of the group. And, um, it also ensures that we're going to get through the critical information in the time we have allotted. So with that, um, what we will do is we set that expectation on our call with the client. Um, we're going to be in our webinar format, so no mics, no cameras. But we always do ask during that discovery call. We say, hey, we're going to need someone from your business to be promoted into a panelist role for that call.

Dave Darrington: Oh, that's cool.

Tim Devine: We want you to be there to fill in any questions that are more specific to your workflows and your, you know, business, and maybe comparing, you know, this system to something you've been doing in the past that we wouldn't have a lot of insight into. Um, so we have customer panelists, um, that have been working on the implementation process. They're there to field the methodology specific questions. Um, we even ask them to keep an eye on the Q and A and encourage them to type answers to questions if they know the answer. Uh, so that by the time we do get to the end of the learning objective and it's time to jump over to the Q and A and see what questions have come in. Um, a lot of times those are either cleaned out or, um, you know, there might be one or two. We'll ask. I'll ask my panelists. You know, it looks like you answered this question in the Q and A, but would you like to jump in and expand on this a little bit before we move to the next thing? So partnering with our, um, company subject matter experts really takes a lot of pressure off of us because they're sort of the expert in their business and we're the expert on the system. So together we make a pretty, A pretty powerful team.

Dave Darrington: I like that. I really like that, that I've called it different things in the past encourage, like a champion or a sponsor, um, whatever you call it. But having that. I like the panelist name where. So. And would that person, if you had multiple sessions, carry through, or would you kind of cycle them out or designate somebody else for each individual session?

Tim Devine: Um, we would let them decide, but usually we're working with, you know, hopefully just a few people on that discovery call. And so usually they volunteer as tribute for all of them most of the time.

Dave Darrington: And that usually volunteer as tribute.

Tim Devine: That usually works out well, um, because they understand the format and, you know, they've been briefed on how this is going to work and what we're going to ask them to do during this session.

Dave Darrington: I like that model. Well, tell me, go a little bit further and talk about how you keep everything on the rails, on track when you're dealing. What kind of size are you usually hitting for your training sessions? Um, are you like, 20, 50, 100? How big are your sessions usually?

Tim Devine: Yeah, they can vary significantly. Um, I think usually if we're doing a core user training, so this might be our internal auditors, the primary users of the system, um, that can be anywhere from 5 to 35. And with our larger customers, we're getting up into the 50s, 60s, sometimes. Um, sometimes we'll also train what we call our stakeholders. So these are the people who are receiving requests in Optro, and they don't really do anything in Optro other than go in and respond to those requests. Um, that can be a huge audience because that might span the entirety, you know, of the, of the company. So if you've got, you know, you've got this idea of control owners where they're in charge of making sure a control is working. Um, you know, you might have seven or 800 control owners and at a company, and so it can get pretty. It can get pretty Big, um, we can have pretty, pretty large, uh, audiences depending on which uh, target audience we're focusing on in that particular training.

Dave Darrington: That's cool. So tell me more about your guardrails here. I like your comment. Guardrails is a feature, not a limitation.

Tim Devine: Yeah, our approach is that we're here to be very prescriptive. I um, think, you know, instinctually guardrails feel like something that, like you're nervous to put them in place because what if the customer doesn't like that and what if they're pushing back and what if they're asking for, you know, for the moon? Um, and I think, I think my experience early on with doing this is customers really appreciate this. Um, they, they have their everyday jobs and they don't have, you know, eight hours a day, five days a week to dedicate to learning this product. So they're actually appreciative of the guardrails. Um, they also really love the fact that we bring our recommended agendas to a discovery call with them. So we're not going to come in and say, okay, you bought this product, what do you want to know about it? And let them guide us. Um, we're going to come in and say, here's what you need to know to be successful in the product. So this is our recommended agenda. Um, if you want to make some tweaks to it, we're obviously open to doing that. Maybe you're not using this feature or maybe this feature is really important so we'll spend some extra time here. Um, but we're going to bring that agenda to the client and I think it really, uh, removes a lot of stress for them because customers don't know what they don't know. And you know, that goes back to us being the experts in the product. We know what you have to do to be successful in this product.

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Dave Darrington: Can I interrupt real briefly on this point? Customers don't know what they don't know. I think that really is a sticky phrase and why this is important. What you're saying here is something that I think when you're first starting building training programs or you don't have a lot of experience with that, and now you're in front of an enterprise customer and they're a big count. Right. There's that kind of willingness to kind of go along with what the customer wants. And, uh, why I think this is a really important part of a conversation is because I've had customers say, no, we want to learn this and this and this, and we want to do it this way and we want these kind of sessions. And I'll come back and say, yes. And I understand that we have to get through this material in a certain way. This would be more efficient, expeditious. It'll save you time. Let us get through this this way and then come back and fill the gaps with office hours or, uh, additional sessions if people. But I think what you're identifying here is that those guardrails have to be in place for your trainings. Uh, and you have to be prescriptive to a point. Otherwise it's like a free for all workshop. And

Tim Devine: you're not.

Dave Darrington: And I want to get us back to scale because I want you to talk about that again. You're not able to scale because you're always saying, yes, I'm going to give you whatever you want. And then you're all over the place making really crazy stuff, whereas we've got to get things done. Can you talk to me more about that? Uh, like how you're scaling out with this approach?

Tim Devine: Yeah. Um, you know, Optro has, um, a core value of customer obsession. And I think most companies will say in one way or the other, like, our customers drive what we do. They're the most important piece of what we're doing. Um, but I think defining what that actually means is sometimes the step that a lot of places miss. Um, I have a daughter that I'm pretty obsessed with. Um, I don't give her ice cream for dinner every night, even though that's what she wants. Um, that's because I want what's best for her long term. And just as an adult, I have a little bit better sense of things like nutrition and what's going to benefit her. Uh, and I think, you know, that's really what customer obsession means. When I think about it. It's I want you to succeed and therefore I'm not going to give you ice cream for dinner, even if that's what you're asking for. It can be, you know, a challenge to say it the right way. Uh, and I think a lot of times what we do is we say, okay, essentially, you know, in an abbreviated version, we say, let's do it our way. And then if you don't feel like we accomplished what you wanted to accomplish, we can come back and have another discussion. Like, no promises, no. Like guarantees on any extra time. Just we can revisit. Let us do what we do first. And the vast majority of the time, the customers, after those trainings, the customers say, okay, no, we're good. We get the system now. You know, we had all these questions. We can solve these, you know, these issues ourselves now that we understand the baseline of how this works.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, this is a good discussion because I think there's a lot of perils in customer education in particular, because sometimes we just find ourselves all of a sudden, let's go to the training thing again. And I get a subject matter expert. They become the trainer, and they think, I'm just going to be telling you all about the things and the way I do it. And then it doesn't land what you're coming together and piecing your approach, which is generally our approach too, where you have more customer involvement. They're accepting of an on the rails program, but now we can tweak and modify that. For instance, I'll come in and then give an agenda. And if somebody says, well, I really want to do this and I really want to do that, then I might just get on a call with that stakeholder and really explain. I actually did this yesterday about how we were going to approach attorney. Um, customer wanted to have very small pieces, like an hour at a time over. And I'm like, this is going to take us weeks, guys. And I get it, but from experience now. And I went back to them and said, this is the way that is best structured. We've done this for a long time and we've just improved it. And they're, yep, fine, great. And now that opened, uh, and it was actually a little bit. That pushback was a confidence thing for them, too, because that means we're showing them. Look, we understand how this works really well. We've tuned it. We've used CSAT scores or surveys or whatever. And I really like, Tim, what you're saying about that customer obsession. This came out of customer success, too, where there was a, uh, well, we're just going to give the customer what they want. No, it's not always being. Yeah, you can't have the ice cream tonight, kid. Sorry, we've had it three nights this week already and you know, dad's not looking to in shape. Um, in interest of time, I do want to move back into the do it with me um, subject where this is. We've talked about this. I think, I think we had Dan Brathwaite on. I can't remember exactly when. It was a year ago. And the do it with me thing is so freaking important. Tell me your perspective on this because we can always use more information on this approach.

Tim Devine: Yeah. And again, I think ultimately in a perfect world, there would be enough time for us to show and then have them show back. I think that's probably one of the most effective ways to teach something. But realistically, um, with the amount of trainings that we have to do with the, you know, the, the staffing that we have and just what we have to turn around, um, I'm a big believer in the do it with me approach. So, um, when we're training, when we're doing our custom trainings for clients, um, they have a temporary support site that they're building with their, um, implementation lead. Um, they're putting their information into their live site and then they're moving it to the support site. The support site allows them to test things, try things out. Um, but what ends up happening is they have this temporary support site and once their user acceptance testing is done, we can have them, uh, copy over their finalized live site into that temporary support site and we can extend the account expiration date on that long enough to train them in that site. So the first rule here is we're showing you your data, your workflows, your templates. You know, everything's going to look almost exactly like it will when you're doing this work in the system next week. Yeah, um, the other principle that we always do, uh, on the discovery call, we're going to ask them, okay, for this course, who is the audience? And tell me exactly what roles, what permissions they have in the site. For each session that we lead, we're going to log in with those exact same roles and permissions. Once again, we can tell the audience this is what your site will look like almost exactly down to your specific data points. Um, the third piece of that is that we encourage customers to be logged into that support site and clicking along with us. So the do it with me approach, it saves us a lot of time. It keeps the session interactive so they're not just staring at a screen. It does naturally produce some really good questions. And some very relevant questions. Um, and it also encourages folks to show up for the training and make sure that they're there because they're going to have an opportunity to do something they might not get to do, um, if they're just watching a recording later on.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, I like that so much. And I think you have the good fortune to have a platform that enables you to do that. What you're talking about there is aspirational for some companies. Like for me, uh, our platform is quite sophisticated and I don't want to get all the details. Let's just say it's very difficult to emulate the customer's environment unless we have it all set up. But, um, I really like this approach because just simply by merit of clicking along, um, you're. Oh, oh, I see where that is. And a lot of the questions that you have built up will be mitigated right away. Uh, is there anything else that you do uniquely in that? I mean, you're lucky that you can set it up that way so everybody can see exactly what it's going to look like. Um, but I don't know, maybe 50%, I don't know what the number of people that would actually be able to do that would be.

Tim Devine: Sure, yeah. Um, and you know, not all of our customers are entitled to receive those custom training hours. Um, it's usually just the highest tier customers, uh, who purchase the product at the highest tier. Custom training is one of the benefits of doing that. So in order to make sure all of our customers have an opportunity to attend, we also do, uh, what we would call our standard instructor led training sessions, uh, on multiple products during different weeks. For those weeks we might do our product and then we would do admin training and then we would do core user training and then we would do, um, our work stream training, which is kind of a product that works with all of our main products. We're doing those in our demo site. Um, it's not the customer's data necessarily, but we're still able to, um, have folks register in Skilljar, assign people to some dummy users. So even during the standard training, they're still able to log in with the similar roles and permissions as what they're going to have in their organization. And we're still going to be logged in that way so they can still at least get a better feel. Um, but they still have the chance to follow along, click along and get a sense of what the system is going to look like for them.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, I like that. That's like your regular scheduled training for anybody. So it's not. I might have people from many different companies show up and that's on the calendar. I could go to your skilljar portal, sign up and do that. Um, that matches a lot of what I would do as well. I mean, I like to run. I do those as webinars right now. So the expectation is this is not going to look like exactly what, but we're going to go through all the high level stuff and you can do it anytime. And it's usually free or very discounted. Um, now we're talking about platforms and technology. Let's make the big chunk here that we have remaining. I want you to talk about your tech stack and AI in particular, where you're starting to use it. And one of the things that we had talked about last week was you don't talk about training as a cost center. You talk about it in terms of revenue protection. So I really like that. And I want you to dive into what, you know, some of the stats are. What, what are you doing? You actually. And in this I'm really excited because I'm an original gainster. So I worked at Gainsight. You're using that platform. I've, I've used skilljar for a long time, so. Know a lot about that. Um, break into that a little bit for me. Talk to me about how you think things are working out.

Tim Devine: Yeah. And I think I will say that I feel really lucky that from the beginning, um, the person who hired me, um, she, you know, convinced the company and everyone was on board that we don't want to put up too many barriers to training. And so, um, we've never been looked at as you have to charge for training and you have to charge enough to break even with your salaries or anything like that. Um, and I think we validated that approach by showing the effect that we've had on our, um, on our ARR. So our annual, uh, revenue rates. So, um, you know, that's great. Yeah. So we can tell from uh, from data that we pull from our um, zoom, you know, zoom action or zoom, uh, attendance numbers. We can pull and see what customers have attended a live training with us. Um, we can see which ones haven't and then we can see their, you know, time at renewal and Salesforce. What we see is a 13%, uh, renewal rate increase for clients who have engaged with one of our live training sessions.

Dave Darrington: That's a solid number.

Tim Devine: Yeah. Now obviously, correlation, causation, there are definitely other factors there. Um, there are also probably other Factors where customers might share in that, you know, no amount of education could have, could have prevented that outcome too. Um, so I think, you know, 13%, um, we engaged with about a quarter of our total customer base in 2025. Um, those numbers get pretty, pretty significant pretty quickly. So I think we're showing that we are extremely valuable in what matters most to our C suite, which is the ARR numbers and uh, making sure we protect um, that information. We're um, obviously again to validate that number, um, we have to put some other data next to it that also says, um, there's a little more correlation going on here than just this and then this. So when we look at that number we also take a look at other data that could support that claim. Um, we are looking at um, our training CSAT scores, um, for both custom and standard training. Um, we've never scored below a 98% uh, recommendation rate for a quarter, which we're all very proud of. Um, and then we also have our post implementation CSAT scores for customers who got training versus customers who didn't. Um, overall product satisfaction, um, it's plus 16%. Um, product knowledge is plus 17%. Um, and then other impacts, um, that you wouldn't think of necessarily directly related to training. Um, customers felt like we were, you know, extremely communicative at a 12% higher rate. Um, they found timely correspondence, 14%. Um, increase product functionality, just their overall satisfaction with the product increases by 16% when they've gone through our training. So um, we like to put those numbers together and that allows us to continue to um, defend our place in the company as revenue protecting. And not just how many bodies did we put in a Zoom call on last week? And counting those up.

Dave Darrington: Yeah, you're doing it right, Tim. Um, and this is the other things that I'm interested in is so you've got your stack where you've got Zoom and Zoom integrations, you've got Gainsight, you've got skilljar, which has a tight integration with Gainsight as well. Uh, and maybe come back to some of these things, um, Amplitude you're using for your product telemetry. I always have to say that. Yeah, uh, yeah, please talk about it because I haven't heard too much about it being in our space.

Tim Devine: Amplitude's a really cool product that just gives you insight into what's happening in a customer's site at any given time. Um, so the simple way to think of it is we pull our data from our attendees. Um, we're able to create a cohort in Amplitude and then we're able to plug in a learning objective that we taught them in one of our trainings and we can actually see how much they were doing it before this point in time and then how much, you know, if that number increases after their training is over. So Amplitude's a really cool way to see our customers actually doing what we're showing them in the system.

Dave Darrington: Oh, man, that just gives me goosebumps because that's the kind of stuff that is so hard for many companies to get to. I really like that you had brought this into your whole stack. Um, SkillJars, your LMS background. How are you feeling about the integrate in the integration with all of these things? So you've got Amplitude, you've got Gainsight now you've got through lines, I'm sorry, Salesforce, and then you've got skilljar too. So all of these are threading together. Are you able to get some really cool dashboards set up, um, in your Amplitude platform or elsewhere?

Tim Devine: Yeah, so we can build them in Amplitude. We also use Tableau.

Dave Darrington: Okay.

Tim Devine: Um, for Tableau as well. That gives us, um, some really interesting dashboards that we can look at and that also helps us, um, project capacity based on what we're seeing in Salesforce, justify headcount ahead of time. Instead of playing catch up up and saying we can see what's coming down the road, this is what we're going to need in order to fulfill training. So, um, that helps us make the case for headcount before we're in a, in a dangerous place. Because it can take a, it can take a little while to get a trainer fully up to speed where they're actually, you know, contributing instead of taking time from experienced trainers to help them get up to speed. So.

Dave Darrington: Right.

Tim Devine: That's all helpful and really important for us as well.

Dave Darrington: That's amazing. That's really cool. Again, consider yourself lucky because even at this time I'm building out all of that tool stack, um, because I've been in different companies, I joined an earlier startup, so we don't have them yet. But you're showing something that's truly aspirational for a lot of us. Then maybe you can even share some sanitized screenshots, uh, or something about what your reports look like. That would be really cool to see. Um, before we go. So we got about five, six minutes. I'd really like to get you talking about some of the things you're seeing with AI uh in our space. Um, we've talked about some cool Things that I hadn't brought in, even my loops. Um, talk to me about some of the things that you're using AI for that you're finding really valuable and you're bringing into your workflow.

Tim Devine: Yeah, we're getting some pretty quick win quick wins. With, um, Zoom, we found their AI companion. Um, we found that we can turn on a setting that's going to automatically turn our training recordings, um, into chapters. So making it really easy for a customer to skip right to something they want to see without a lot of effort on our end to do anything, um, you know, recording, editing or anything. So when we send those to customers, um, that's already built in there, which is really helpful.

Dave Darrington: That's super cool. And I think from our community, um, from our network, Courtney Sembler is now at Zoom, we can get her talking about that. I like that you talked about that because often I just think about Zoom being a. This is my recording. But the auto chaptering thing. Oh, my God. Yeah, turn that on, please. Now I can really quickly take and build webinars and stuff out of that content. But then the advantage to our customers is you can jump around, right? You go, oh, oh, oh, there's a chapter. Oh, my gosh. And. And now it's more like that YouTube thing where, you know, YouTube tries to do that. As long as you're set up correctly.

Tim Devine: Sure.

Dave Darrington: Um, what else are you seeing? You've mentioned, you know, we, we talked about things like, there's still resistance to AI in different places. The ship has sailed. Um, but you're immediately getting value out of things like the AI that's inside of the tools that we have are immediate quick wins that you could bring into your workflow. Um, you mentioned another AI tool that you use, and this one might be good to share. Is it called Interpretation?

Tim Devine: Yes, Interpret. Um, spelled with an e. Interpret is essentially a way to parse your customer feedback from all different types of platforms and bring everything together. Um, you can go very deep with it. You can build your own custom dashboards, you can search for specific things. Um, but they also just have a setting that's called Interpret Wisdom. Uh, and this allows you to really just talk to it and have it search everything. Um, I used this. Um, we did something we don't do very often, which was a customer wanted Optro to present at an on hand or an on site for them. Um, so we don't usually train experienced customers who have been the system in a long time. At least my team doesn't. Um, so the way I was able to do this, was. I was able to go into Interpret Wisdom and I was able to ask it. Okay, here's the company. I need to build a training plan for them. It's going to be four hours of training. Tell me what their pain points are, what are they putting in support tickets about. Look at their gong calls and tell me what they're asking and what they're frustrated with. And essentially in about 10 minutes, I was able to get the basic outline for that four hours of training, which probably would have taken me hours of discovery to try and do on my own. So I'm a big fan of Interpret Wisdom, really, um, helpful to pull all that information together quickly.

Dave Darrington: That's. I have not heard of them, so that's super cool. I've seen some similar products emerge in the market, but I'm glad you brought that up because for going back to training, custom training, uh, I was recently at Atlassian where we were like, no, no. Custom training. That's a hard line for me to always push. Because this case that you talked about is, no, I have something I've got to do special right now. You're able to leverage the best of AI in that enterprise scale that's going, getting everything together for me and then come back. And now you can probably synthesize the pieces that you do have, put everything together. Now you've got a scaffold. Wow, that's cool. How long have they been on the market? I'm like, I'm always learning about new products. I haven't seen that name come up.

Tim Devine: We picked them up last year, I believe. Um, I'm not sure how long they've been on the market, but we had, um, someone who does a lot of our voice of the customer work, um, bring this in. And, um, he found the product, I believe, and brought this in so that we could use it. It really just unlocks customer feedback, um, from pretty much everywhere that we get customer feedback. So easy to access all of it without having to go to Gong Zendesk to read their tickets. What do the email threads look like? Tell me about this conversation you had with them. What did you think the main points were? Um, really easy to see what a customer is struggling with and what we should do with the time that we have with them.

Dave Darrington: This is great. And this is the kind of stuff that we're always asking via the C Lab and our network in general. How are you using AI today? These are some gems I hadn't heard of before or hadn't even thought to because the act that we have to do right now is all collaborate and share these tidbits of things like we're using. Um, some of us are getting into the agentic land. Interpret is one I want to sit down and look at. The zoom stuff is amazing. And you're doing a little bit of stuff with Gemini too. Um, I think you're using that to do. Do you have any agents running like gems, or are you generally just using, uh, canned prompts that you have on a repeating basis?

Tim Devine: We do have gems that we've built as a company that are really helpful for anyone to grab and use. Um, my favorite use for Gemini is to get a practical example that's going to make sense to an audience. So I might ask it to create a business process control that a customer in the financial services industry might need. I couldn't do that in a million years. Um, but with Jim and I can spit it out right away. And so when I'm showing, like creating a new control for a customer, I get to show them a real example instead of just saying insert description here. Um, which I think can be pretty powerful and much more relevant to the customer's learning experience.

Dave Darrington: So to close this out then, with Gemini, similarly to what you have with interpretation, Gemini is, you're a Google shop. Then your company has. So you have things in Google Drive. Gemini has access to that. Uh, are you leveraging any notebook LM type instances? I think all that is. Like, we go on forever about this, but just in this conversation, I really like your approach. Your tech stack is envious.

Tim Devine: You're very lucky.

Dave Darrington: You're very lucky. You're blessed, I would say. Um, we do need to wrap up, so let's do this. So how can we find you, Tim? Are you out there on LinkedIn? Is there any other places that you would direct people to, to see you or your program even?

Tim Devine: Uh, yeah, I'm mainly on LinkedIn. Um, Timothy Devine is, I believe, is my profile. Um, I don't do a lot of social media. Um, but yes, I can be found on LinkedIn. Um, you can connect with us there. And then, um, obviously I'm really proud to work for Optro and it's a great company. And so if anyone has any questions about that or wants to reach out to get more specific about what we're doing with any of these products, um, with our tech stack, then I'm always happy to connect. Um, I'm, you know, this is, this is selfish for me. I'm putting myself out there and saying, hey, come Find me and tell me what I could be doing better too, and what you're doing that I could learn. So love to connect with anyone out there who's facing similar issues and learn from you as well.

Dave Darrington: Absolutely. And that's the spirit of what we're going after, Tim, because there's a lot that we have to learn together and if we share that and we don't safeguard it and hide, but the fact that you're out there and you're putting yourself out and say, hey, this is my program, it's exciting and I really appreciate that. We all appreciate that. Got a couple of gems out of this one as well. And what I really appreciate Tim, is the repositioning and the surfacing of how important instructor led training, live training is to us. We can't ever get away from it because customers will always want it. But the way that you're articulating your approach is really good. You're not leaning in too heavily to custom, but you could still kind of affect that at scale by doing the approach that you've done. So well done. Great program. I want to learn more. And if you want to learn more, please reach out to Tim. He'd be happy to entertain you and thinking about learning more. Um, as usual we, you know we have our podcast website at Customer Education and you can find all kinds of stuff there. We are out there on LinkedIn all the time. You'll probably find us from there but please, you know, find us on LinkedIn. Share, uh, um, share a um, five star rating on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to your pods. Uh, special thanks to Alan Cotta as always for theme music and get out there. Um, leave us a review and uh, help us keep this going if you like. Tim, want to share about your program, uh, reach out. We definitely want to hear from you particularly on pushing back against myths and us and diving deep into AI today. So to our audience, thank you, thanks always for joining us. Get out there, educate, experiment and find your people. Thanks. Mhm.

Tim Devine: Tim, thank you.

Dave Darrington: It.