Think Like a Marketer with Bianca Baumann and Mike Taylor

Speaker A: Start small, Try one or two things. Don't try to do it all at once, because if you do, you're going to fail and get people excited around you in your organization to help you.

Speaker B: My advice would be to not be intimidated. It doesn't require a big budget. It doesn't require expensive tools. It's really about adopting a mindset. And, you know, there are three things that I think encapsulate a marketing mindset, and it's if you can make things simple, uh, make them useful and have them resonate emotionally, you're probably going to do pretty well.

Speaker C: Welcome to the Learning Web Working Podcast. If you're new to listening to the podcast, I'm Robyn Pettide, the host of the podcast and the founder of Sprout Labs. In the last episode, I mentioned that I was taking a bit of a break to rethink a few things about the podcast. Actually, if you're a regular listener, I'm more than welcome to hear from you if you've got any ideas. When Mike Taylor and Bianca got in contact and said that they had been working on their new book and they'd like to talk about, it felt like it was a good time to jump back in and spend some time talking with them on the podcast. Both Mike and Bianca have been on the podcast before, talking about insights to do with the linkages between marketing and learning. They've been working closely together over a number of years, running workshops around these ideas about the linkage between learning and marketing. It's great to see that they've now started to bring all of this work together into a book. Their new book is called Thinking Like a Train, Like An L and D Strategies to Ignite Learning. It's due to be released at the end of May. You'll find a link in the show notes. In this conversation, you'll learn about ways to understand your learners more deeply, how to build personalized learning experiences, and how to think about learning, uh, in terms of being a journey. Welcome back to the podcast, Bianca and Mike.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having us. Robin. Really excited to be here.

Speaker B: Yeah, me too. Good to talk with you, Robin, again.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's so nice because, I mean, when I was doing more on marketing, uh, I talked to you both separately and then she wasn't just before COVID actually spent that time and learning solutions with both of you as well.

Speaker A: That's right. I forgot about that. Yeah. Everything seems such a blur before COVID so.

Speaker B: And it seems like about a million years ago.

Speaker C: So you two have been working On a book. What's the book about?

Speaker B: Yeah, so the essence of the book is kind of the, uh, things that marketing and L and D have in common. And that's mainly both the marketing field and people in the L and D field. We're both trying to do the same two core things. We're trying to get people's attention, and we're trying to influence their behavior, maybe get them to do something. Something like that. One of the things that we propose in the book is oftentimes marketers are quite a bit better at doing that than typical L and D people.

Speaker A: Yeah. And the book has really been a long time in the making because Mike and I have been working together since 2017 on, um, various conferences and articles and you name it. A little bit over two years ago, we decided to put our mutual wisdom into this book, which is really a collection of our experiences and success stories and failures and actionable takeaways. And, um. Yeah, so it was really great when, I guess a little over two years ago, we decided to go this step. And so it took us about 18 months. And we wrote nine chapters and an intro and a conclusion. And, uh, yeah, it's kind of all coming together.

Speaker C: Like, you just sort of talked about the fact that marketing and learning has this dual sort of desire to get a change happening in people. Is that the main reason you wrote the book?

Speaker B: For me, I'm curious to hear Bianca's answer to this, but for me, it's trying to share some practical things Bianca mentioned. We're sharing things we've learned, including failures. And so the book is really meant to be a guide. We've got end of each chapter has some activities that anybody can do. You don't have to have marketing expertise and trying to sort of show the crossover and some of the things that marketing does that works really well and translates seamlessly to anybody in a learning role would do. And so for me, that's kind of the main drive for us for writing that book. And I'm curious if Bianca has anything to add to that.

Speaker A: Yeah, that for sure, Mike. And I think also, I mean, looking at how we design and develop learning experiences today is not necessarily the best way of doing this. And, you know, you touched on this, Mike. There's obviously ways of doing it differently. And so for me, it's really a big driver behind the book was to have our voices heard, to really go beyond, you know, our LinkedIn and our webinars and conferences and have a bigger reach and. And hopefully have a positive impact on the Industry. And the book is also a mix of tactical uh, elements that as Mike was just saying at the end of each chapter, there's just some quick steps everyone can take tomorrow to implement in their organizations. But there's also strategy element to this book that helps L and D professionals educate their organizations on the same approach. Because it's not just something you can implement tomorrow. Right. It takes time. It's a mindset shift. And so there's a stakeholder education piece to it and you could really translate that out into the larger ecosystem that is an organization as well.

Speaker C: Okay, so part of what you're talking about is shifts that we need to have happen both in learning and our uh, organization. What's the greatest, the biggest mindset shift we need to make in L and D? To think more like a marketer.

Speaker B: I think to me one of the biggest things, I refer to this quote by John Sweller and he talks about if you don't understand cognitive architecture, any kind of training is just like shooting in the dark. Uh, and so I think one of the biggest things is we have uh, one of the first chapters in the books is talking about designing learning for the way people think. And so that involves things like there's a lot of things that happen in our mind subconsciously that influence our behavior and ah, in fact there's some, there's some science behind, you know, 99% give or take of our behavior is influenced by subconscious factors. And then we back, we come in and we sort of backfill the logic. So we think we're behaving logically but we're not always. So to me that's a really fascinating principle we get into in that chapter. Things that visual things and the way you write and the way you frame content is super, super important. And so I think that's kind of uh, one of the foundational things that we touch on early in the book. And I'm sure Bianca has some things to add to that.

Speaker A: Yeah, for me it's that shift from order taker to being that business partner as well. And you know, we all were have been in situations where it's like can I get a 30 minute e learning m module? Right. It's like whoa, okay, hold on a second. Right, so why do you need training in the first place? And why a 30 minute eLearning module? And we're looking at the business need behind it, behind learning and development. So really building a stronger connection between learning and development and the business, but then also putting for example a content strategy in place so with the, with the rise in AI, what we see a lot right now is, oh, we can create content faster and more of it. And it's like, well, but is that really helpful? Right? And so for me, that, that, uh, strategy piece kind of builds the foundation. And then, you know what Mike was saying, okay, once we have identified what is needed, how can we get the biggest bang for our buck? Like, how can we get the most learning out of these experiences that we create? And I think that in combination is a huge shift because we're just used to reacting right versus being much, much more proactive.

Speaker C: What's the big thing that marketing brings to that? Alignment between business outcomes and learning?

Speaker B: I think one of the things marketing has an advantage just sort of inherently in the nature of the way marketing works is they have a direct or a more direct connection to, uh, what Bianca was saying with business outcomes. So we're running a marketing campaign, sales go up. We can attribute those sales increases with a fairly high degree of confidence to that marketing campaign. And so being able to, to go and say, okay, this is what we did. This is the results, and see that in numbers that the business understands. Oftentimes, you know, we hear a lot of L and D people talking about that. Oftentimes. Granted, it's challenging, but I think that's the type of scenario that we should be striving for.

Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree with what, uh, Mike is saying here. So what we trying to book is we, you know, we introduce marketing ideas and concepts and frameworks really purely from the marketing side, and then we take that idea and say, okay, how can we translate this into learning and development? And sometimes it works really well that you can translate it one to one, and other times, you know, you have to tweak it a little bit. But what, allow. What, what that allows us to do is that, you know, we speak the language that the business is speaking. And I think that is just where we can learn a lot from marketing.

Speaker C: When I'm doing any learning design, I ask about the sort of, how are we going to monitor and what metrics existing in the business. You just reminded me of a really interesting moment where the client turned around and said, more phone calls from people. I was like, okay, um, let's just let that sit for a little while. We've got something. And we went into a learner, um, co design session. And about midway through it, I sat there, went, oh, my God, that person shouldn't be doing any of that work. She needs to ring them. And afterwards, it was just Sort of like it was like she gives an advice that she just was not qualified or anything to do that she should have. And it was good because it was like she helped me sit there and go, ah, uh, what seems like a fuzzy thing and in such an indirect thing would actually make a huge difference to the business. And that's a, the senior manager for that change during that time. And that person had been in a program management role for a little while and he was very big on um, numbers. And that was, it was interesting because essentially he ramped that up, which was

Speaker A: really sweet, I think Robin. It's um, you know, when I hear phone calls. So one example we kind of carry throughout the book is, you know, we have the sales consultant that is selling kitchens, right. High end kitchens. And you know, when we look at measures of success instead of looking at seat time and you know, completion rates, which are really like vanity metrics, they don't really, you know, have, there's no meat to it, but looking at more actionable metrics that really allow us to tie it back to the business. So if I think about a sales consultant and I think about, we want them to improve on their lead management skills, right. And if, if it comes to phone calls, and that's why, you know, this just triggered that thought for me, is, you know, we want to make sure when they take phone calls that they ask the right discovery questions on that phone call, that uh, they take good notes in a, in a customer relationship management system. So then in the end we can actually improve the quality of leads, which then hopefully turns into higher revenue. And so the end goal really being our sales training will help this organization increase revenue year over year. What are some of the leading indicators that we can look at that can get us there? Well, for example, right, like good discovery questions and phone calls, good CRM notes and so on and so forth. Right. And so this is just so powerful and we often don't make that connection because we're just checking the box. Yes, they attended the training.

Speaker C: That's a nice example. I've actually asked a bit of a provocative question because you just triggered it by the uh, mentioning sales. So one thing that's sort of experienced and thought about it couple of times, that's very different between learning and marketing, especially in complicated businesses. There's a step of marketing and then there's a step of sales of an actual, actual person helping someone through the behavior change. And good sales, by the way, is making sure someone is getting the right fit, right problem. It's not about sort of convincing anyone. So just to sort of put that into, into play as well. Keep on sitting there going, what's the equivalent in learning? We don't have that sort of ability if everyone through every course had a customized coach, but we don't have that. So how it gets used. Uh, Finn, help me sort out the mess I just made. So I'll turn that into a question. So how can marketing approaches or sales approaches start to help people make that behavior transfer?

Speaker B: Well, I, I think one of the ways it kind of comes back to sort of building blocks of behavior change. And it starts with attention and the way we, we talk to people. And even before that we have to have uh, an understanding of the, the people in our audience. So, you know, we could create the, the world's best elearning that's ever existed. But if we don't know our audience well and you know, we have a chapter on this that gives to, you know, what are their challenges, you know, what are their ambitions? Really digging into the audience to get to know them as much as possible. I mean, I think that's a, uh, super important part. And Bianca can speak to that, I'm sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean for me, I kind of envisioned a marketing funnel right on top. Just like in the real marketing world, you have that awareness stage and Mike just calls that attention. And for me, even on the learning side, you know, you still need to create awareness around the training and learning offerings that you have. Because no one ever, you know, came to work and said, today I want to log into the LMS and see what's new. Right. So it's really about creating that awareness. And then in a marketing funnel, you move down into, into consideration. So this is where people now start thinking about, well, you know, on the marketing side, they're considering a product, they're comparing one or two products. Obviously in, in our world and in learning, we're not comparing two products. Kind of like we have to take the training. Right. It is what it is. But we can still think about the motivational aspect behind this. Can we create an environment where these learners are actually considering to be excited about the training is what I'm trying to say. And then that goes back to what Mike was saying. If we create good research based learner Personas, it can really help us better understand what that messaging is and what pushes their buttons in a good way. And then they move into that conversion phase where usually, you know, that's where you put your credit card down and purchase the product or service and for me, in learning, the conversion phase is where we take the actual training and formal training. And so those first two stages are kind of marketing. Right. And I know it's called a marketing funnel, but then that conversion piece, that's where sales is happening right in my mind. And then you have to advocacy and customer loyalty after that, which is really very equivalent to a, uh, champion or ambassador program. If you look at learning and development,

Speaker C: it's a really nice way to frame that around the funnel, uh, as well. Personas, these are something that I'm hearing more and more people talk about. And one of the practices I have when I'm using AI to do any instructional design is to have a, to make sure that the session knows about the Personas. And I'll quite often do a whole. What would each one of the Personas think about this? Give it a score. At the same time, they've become more common. I'm actually wondering if they've really helped us make the shift to being, uh, more centered on what learners really need.

Speaker A: It's such a good point, Robin. And you know, we mentioned this in the book as well, that learner Personas are at a point now that a lot of organizations create them, but without a real approach behind it. And it's becoming another checkbox exercise. Oh yeah, we've created this Persona most of the time not research based. Most of the time it's not representative of who actually is in this organization. And then on top of that, uh, they gather virtual dust somewhere because we check the box and then we go into the design and, and just design without it anyway. And you know, we really have to reframe how we use these Persona. So for one, I just mentioned they need to be research based. You can't just go out and make assumptions and you have to take the time to have learner interviews to look at data to really come up with who this Persona is. And AI helps a lot with that now in terms of synthesizing and analyzing all the information that we get from those interviews. But then once you have them now, you start designing for them. And it's, you know, at the program level where you really try to understand, okay, what does Persona A need? What does Persona B need? But as you go down to the asset level, you know, Mike touched on this a little bit earlier. It's like the tone of voice, like, how do we want to write for these people? Right. So it really carries throughout the entire design process. But I agree with you, Robin. I've seen it unfortunately, more than enough that they're A, not done well and then B, not used after, which is probably because they're not done well. I don't know. But so, you know, um, yeah, it's a really good observation there.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I just want to just add like a lot of times I've seen this, often people want to just jump straight into content and they sort of forget about the people aspect. And so Personas are a really good way to sort of keep that human, human centered learning approach in the center.

Speaker C: It's actually literally redesigning a course at the moment. Mike to. Because I spent the second session focusing on Personas and I. And people were like, oh, we just want to get into it. How do I cater to this desire for people to get into making content and then pull them, uh, pull them back again. And I sat there and went, actually, I'm going to let them do it. And then we'll go over it multiple times so we get that out of the way. Is probably the best way to.

Speaker B: There's a good example like, so we take retirement planning, right? You have a learning goal for, for retirement planning. You would not approach somebody who is an early career young person, the same as you would as somebody a late career, you know, or even into retirement. But if you're skipping that human piece, right. You're probably one size fits all is really one size fits none is the way it usually works.

Speaker C: So also this interesting generational shift as well, where we quite often design in the way we want to and um, then a younger person will have different schooling experiences. Question, how do you think Bianchi just talks about people not being excited about going into a learning management system? What's getting in our way with learning technologies to be able to implement these types of approaches?

Speaker B: So one of the things we talk about in the book is, uh, this concept of learning campaigns. So, you know, first off, not everything has to be in the lms and it's really important. I've, I've experienced this, gosh, feels like a million times over the course of my career is it takes such a small amount of friction, I can't remember my password or something's not connecting and people will just walk away and completely give up. So I think it's actually getting easier and um, better to create learning campaigns with new tools and um, educational technology. And there's some really great marketing technology that helps as well. So kind of thinking about your audiences back to that human centered concept, you know, where are they already? That's another thing. Don't make them Go to yet another new place. Where are they hanging out? Are they in Salesforce? Use that as a platform? Are they hanging out on LinkedIn? Like, find out where they already are and try to go there. And then if you take a broader, more strategic approach to a, uh, content strategy, which I'm sure Bianca can add some value to that conversation. Right. Like you're, you're reaching them. And it's really, I think it resonates with most people, the idea of a marketing concept where you'll see a billboard and a TV ad and a radio ad and all these things fit together. So I actually think it's getting easier instead of harder to do some of that stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think where we have challenges with technology is that, uh, oh, we have this new technology, let's just make it fit into what we have. And that just doesn't work. The learning experience itself has to come first, and then we can identify what technologies help us elevate that experience. And to Mike's point, ideally you use, um, technology that we already have in place. So you also make it easier for our learners to actually use that technology. So Mike mentioned learning campaigns. If you even take a step back, what we're suggesting in the book is that you actually look at the learner journey first. Like very high level strategic overview going back to our salesperson. What does it take for a salesperson to get from lead management all the way to customer loyalty? Right. There's all kinds of steps in between. Call them steps or milestones, tasks, whatever you want to call it, lead management. There is negotiations, there is, you know, closing the deal, all those, all those steps. And then the learning campaign itself is a much more strategic way of implementing that. And that is where then that technology piece really comes into place. But yeah, without a good foundation, including the content strategy, yeah, technology just won't fit the overall bill because it feels disjointed. You know, we know any good marketing campaign, it's just flawless.

Speaker C: What's your definition of a learning campaign?

Speaker A: One of the things that Mike and I reflected on as we're writing the book and finishing the book is that, uh, our opinions and point of views have changed as we're diving more into research and getting this book together. But a learning campaign for me is, you know, as I just mentioned, let me actually use the term learner journey again. So the learner journey for me is the overall task. It takes someone to complete a certain goal. So if, you know, we want to increase revenue year over year, starts with lead management, goes all the way to closing the deal and follow up. And so that is again, strategically, these are the steps we all have to go through. A learning campaign is then the tactical implementation of that learner journey. And now I'm getting very tactical in terms of. Okay, in order to learn more about lead management, I need phone, uh, etiquette, I need email etiquette. I need to be able to talk to people face to face that just walk in. I, uh, need to be able to take good notes. I have to ask discovery questions. Right. So there's a lot in there. And for me to campaign is that tactical execution of each of those different topics that you then tie into a blended, uh, learning experience that uses multiple modalities and the communication strategy to create that learning experience.

Speaker B: To me, a learning campaign is sort of, it's a focused learning mission, whatever you want to call it, designed to reach a specific group to teach them something new using a variety of methods over a set time.

Speaker A: There you go. That was a good summary of what I was trying to say. So very complicated.

Speaker C: It's interesting because essentially there's sort of what you're talking about is the same. But Bianca, you've got your learner journey, which is big almost. I'm actually wondering whether a learner journey is the right. Right term. It's actually almost the. The workflow and then sort of it drops into that. So then what does someone need to learn to actually do that workflow and then what are the right tactics and blend that's needed to do it? So you sort of build it from a sort of higher level down.

Speaker A: Been in final print, I would have added that I would like that word very much like flow the workflow, like. Yeah, but that's different term of describing the learner journey. I like that a lot.

Speaker B: Um, so whenever I really dig down and start thinking about the learner journey, it, it often reminds me of jobs to be done. And so I think in my mind there are some parallels to that as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, uh, I, we do compare it in a book to a more traditional task analysis. Right. You would sit down and figure out what are the different tasks I have to do to complete an overall task.

Speaker C: Always really fascinated about the fact that organizations don't always have this written down and or subject matter experts have embedded it so far in the brain that they forget that it's written down. Was another one, one particular project where the instructional designers kept on asking what's the steps we do and we went, oh, we just do. Then eventually someone Said, oh, this is. Oh, you want this page on the Internet? And they're like, yes, that's what we've been asking for.

Speaker B: Uh, oftentimes a large part of our job is translation.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Like, how are you translating what the subject matter expert is saying into plain English? And then action.

Speaker C: Yeah. Talk about the campaigns and the sort of modes and channels and different types of blends. Is there another tactic that's useful for us in learning from marketing? What's another tactic that's useful from marketing for us?

Speaker B: One is, um, personalization. So it's kind of like the concept of you could be at a large dinner party and it's very loud and noisy, but as soon as somebody says your name, you can catch that unfailingly. So, you know, that's one thing which, going back to technology, that marketing technology, a lot of other technologies make super easy now. So, for example, I'm a big fan of email marketing tools. That is, I can send Bianca the right information personalized to her particular situation based on things like her job role, her geographic location, dynamic content based on maybe things that she has or hasn't done with previous content. And so I think personalization is one that's really good.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think we mentioned content strategy a couple of times already here too. And marketers are lucky to have more money than we do, so they also have the luxury of having a role that is just the content strategy strategist, a content marketer. I know we're already stretched in learning and development, so we're not proposing to, you know, I mean, if you can, it's great to hire a content strategist getting organized around our content. I mean, just, I don't even want to know the amount of time and dollars we waste on, um, looking for stuff and, you know, our learners looking for stuff. And Mike mentioned it earlier, right? Like our threshold of waiting for something and finding something. I mean, I compare it to, you know, you're getting ready Friday evening, you want to watch a show on your favorite streaming platform, and, you know, you have a cold beverage and a warm meal, and, you know, 20 minutes later in a warm beverage and a cold meal, you still haven't found anything. And so this is how our learners feel right when they come m into our LMS or lxp. So getting organized around our content is huge and is going to save us so much time and improve the learning experience overall. Because what's tied into this as well is do we have to create content from scratch? Most of the time we don't uh, Mike came up with this term of content atomization. Right. You have a piece of content and how many pieces of content can you create out of that one piece of content that you can then leverage?

Speaker C: I'm really looking forward to reading the book by the way. It's going to be great when it's out in May. Vague feeling. It's going to open up more questions for me. Yeah, just even that particular thing of the atomization and um, the uh, contact strategy as well. It's a couple of wrap up questions from both of you. What's your greatest piece of advice to learning people who want to try to adopt some of these thinking our biggest

Speaker A: one is definitely start small. All right? Start small, try one or two things. Don't try to do it all at once because if you do, you're going to fail. Right. And so I think that that is important. Hopefully you will pick up the book and read it. As Mike mentioned earlier, there are some actionable steps at the end of each chapter to help you get started. And those include free tools or low cost tools or no tools, technology tools at all. So you really just have to do that. But yeah, get started and get people excited around you in your organization to help you.

Speaker B: My advice would be to not be intimidated. It doesn't require a big budget, it doesn't require expensive tools. It's really about adopting a mindset. And you know, there are three things that I think encapsulate a marketing mindset and it's if you can make things simple, uh, make them useful and have them resonate emotionally, you're probably going to do pretty well.

Speaker C: Thank you for both of you, that's a really great wrap up. As we were recording this, the book isn't out yet. How can people find out more about the book once it's out and um, even now?

Speaker A: Yeah. So it'll be launching on May 27th of this year and uh, there's already an Amazon link out there. So if you Google, think like a marketer, train like an LD Pro, you'll actually be able to find the link. There's also information on the atd, uh, website as well.

Speaker B: And if you want to get connected and be sure not to miss any updates, you can subscribe for book updates by going to trainlikeamarketer.com wonderful.

Speaker C: Thank you for a really great conversation.

Speaker A: Well, thank you Robin for having us. It was great.

Speaker B: Thank you Robin. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Learning While Working podcast. If you enjoyed this show, please leave a review. If you want to find out more about Sprout Labs, go to sproutlabs.com.au we regularly run webinars and publish ebooks and guides about learning while working.