#TDSU Episode 225:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:16 - Ted Blosser & WorkRamp

00:02:04 - LMS shake-up: Skilljar acquired

00:02:57 - Platform consolidation vs. point solutions

00:04:43 - The shifting buyer mindset

00:06:17 - Rob’s LMS lightbulb moment

00:07:42 - 10,000 hours saved with LMS

00:09:01 - Education as a cost-saving strategy

00:09:29 - JP’s take on internal LMS use

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Ted Blosser:

Ted's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tedblosser/

[Ted] (0:00 - 0:25)

CS teams are getting less CS ops resources. And so wherever they can, it's probably not about the money. It's more about the overall TCO long-term in terms of maintenance and headcount.

And when we see a lot of people come to us from the, let's call it the point solutions, like thought industries and tell them, it's more like, guys, I don't have anybody to manage this anymore. I just need to have a, be a, be an add-on onto the platform we already have.

[Dillon] (0:34 - 0:49)

What's up lifers and welcome to the daily standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

Hey, what's up? And we have Rob with us. Rob, can you say hi?

[Rob] (0:50 - 0:51)

What's up workhorses?

[Dillon] (0:53 - 1:07)

Oh, and we have two thumbs down from JP. Give him the Rick James.

Wish I had more thumbs. And we have Ted with us. Ted, can you say hi?

[Ted] (1:07 - 1:09)

Hey everyone. How y'all doing?

[Dillon] (1:09 - 1:15)

Really good.

And I'm your host. My name is Dillon Young. Ted, thank you so much for being here.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Ted] (1:16 - 1:34)

Yeah. So I am Ted Blosser, CEO and co-founder of WorkRamp. WorkRamp is a next gen learning management system.

We focus on sales enablement, customer education, and also L&D as an all-in-one learning platform. Hell yes. Okay.

[Dillon] (1:34 - 1:43)

So it makes a little more sense. JP, he was giving like a mimes version of a mea culpa while he was on mute. Now it makes sense.

[JP] (1:43 - 1:44)

I got you.

[Dillon] (1:44 - 1:45)

I got you.

[JP] (1:45 - 1:47)

WorkRamp, workhorses. Yes. Please continue.

[Dillon] (1:47 - 2:04)

And I've seen the name WorkRamp around. So you're doing something right, Ted. Ted, you know what we do here?

We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success? Let's talk just post-sales in general. You take it wherever you want to go, but why don't you tell us what that is for you, Ted?

Yeah.

[Ted] (2:04 - 2:28)

You know what I wanted for all of us to discuss and debate was the state of customer education. You just saw one of the biggest players get bought yesterday, SkillJar by Gainsight. It's their second LMS that they bought, which is kind of strange in my book, but would love to kind of talk about, hey, what's everyone's feelings and vibes around customer education?

[Dillon] (2:29 - 2:56)

Well, Ted, a little bummed out that you dated the podcast. You're going to speed up my editing process. But other than that, I love it.

I love it. Why don't you tell us how you feel? My one question, and I'm sure you've already thought of this, Gainsight has bought two LMSs.

I heard that broadside that you fired, but why do you think it is? Do they have different functionality? Do they serve different markets?

What's your theory on why they would have bought a second one?

[Ted] (2:57 - 3:45)

Yeah. My thought is it's more of a category thing going on right now where there's just a lot of consolidation. And I think buyers are getting a lot of pressure to consolidate their stack, and they probably want to buy their learning functionality from a core platform they already own.

And I think that's why a lot of the, let's call it point solutions, are starting to get absorbed into larger providers. And so as a buyer in the customer success world, they're probably thinking, hey, I don't have the ability to go purchase my own solution. That standalone skill jar was a great one.

And let's go see if I can go consolidate onto a broader platform in my environment that's already in our install base.

[Dillon] (3:46 - 4:42)

So I don't want to monopolize this. I just have one more question because I had this conversation with a CCO earlier today where I said, I didn't think, I didn't understand that as a strategy anymore because for as important as the customer and user experience is with something like an LMS, and as beefy as those platforms get, and as many things as they can touch. And if I combine that with the fact that I don't think it's that scary to have a number of point solutions anymore, that's one of the ones I'd be even more tolerant of being a point solution because I want the best system with the best experience.

So I don't know if I'm challenging you. I just, I don't see it that way, but you obviously know this better than me. So like, tell me what I'm missing.

Is it, I feel like buyer profiles are changing in that regard. We don't need a one-stop shop anymore. Integrations are a lot easier to stand up and to maintain, but like, tell me I'm wrong.

[Ted] (4:43 - 6:17)

I think now your customer education teams are losing staffing and resources or they're getting merged into other worlds. And I think it's more the technology maintenance that the teams are lacking. Not that, hey, they couldn't go buy something, but they just don't have the manpower to go spin up a full procurement cycle, get it up and running.

And it's basically managing almost like a whole WordPress site on its own in the customer academy world. You could see, we didn't win this deal, but at OpenAI, for example, they just launched their new, I'm going to date this podcast again, but they just launched their new academy. But what was interesting was they, you could tell they killed a couple birds with one stone.

They also let that be the foundation for their new community as well too. And so it's actually, they bought one of the community academy hybrid products. And you could tell that, hey, they don't want to go buy a separate community product, a separate academy product.

And their first release in the academy. And then you could tell it's going to morph into their live community as well too. So I do think CS teams are getting less CS ops resources.

And so wherever they can, it's probably not about the money. It's more about the overall TCO long-term in terms of maintenance and headcount. And when we see a lot of people come to us from the, let's call it the point solutions, like thought industries and tell them, it's more like, guys, I don't have anybody to manage this anymore.

I just need to be an add on onto the platform we already have.

[Dillon] (6:17 - 6:29)

All right. So Rob, earlier today, with not a single sniff of irony, you called yourself a former power user of Skilljar. You said you had some thoughts on this.

So why don't you jump in here?

[Rob] (6:29 - 7:38)

That's right. That's right. I'm in the process of becoming a power user of WorkRam.

That's how Ted and I have gotten to know each other. The best way to really capture the impact that a system like this can have, whether it's a point solution, part of another solution, whatever it, to me, it comes down to the number 10,000, because that is the number of hours that I saved, that my team and I saved of training time. The first time we implemented a learning management system.

And I know some of the people listening to this show might be like, well, what is a learning management system? You know, we have like some, we have a knowledge base. Is it the same thing?

And the answer is no. A learning management system comes with a lot more than that. It comes with everything from training modules to quizzes.

And ideally those are personalized depending on the user and their role. And, and there's a lot that you can even do with the data that comes out the other side of the system, which I can elaborate on. But really like the core principle, I had this realization once when it came to user education and how to digitize that.

I was like coming into work every day. Everybody was saying the same thing. All my teammates and I were spending eight to 10 hours a day saying the same things as each other.

And I went to Panera Bread and I saw somebody. Future sponsor. Future sponsor Panera Bread.

[Dillon] (7:39 - 7:41)

And I saw somebody. Killer lemonade.

[Rob] (7:42 - 8:02)

Yeah. In the back room, she had headphones on and she was looking at a computer. And I, and I asked the woman at the register, I was like, what is she doing?

They're like, she's training. And I was like, okay, interesting. So if, if video-based training, if a learning management system actually is good enough to train someone to make a sandwich, it sure as hell could be good enough to, to solve.

No, it wasn't that sort of training.

[Dillon] (8:02 - 8:04)

That was sexual harassment training and you know it.

[Rob] (8:04 - 8:23)

Maybe. I don't know. I don't know.

Regardless, the point was I had this, you know, light bulb moment where I decided I was like, I'm going to invest heavily in LMSs. And in the first year that we implemented an LMS, it saved our team 10,000 hours of training time. Like no exaggeration.

Training of your customers. Training of our customers.

[Dillon] (8:24 - 8:24)

Got it.

[Rob] (8:24 - 8:30)

Well, so we applied it internally too, which like a, you know, a tool like WorkRamp is versatile enough to be applied in both use cases.

[Dillon] (8:30 - 8:31)

Okay.

[Rob] (8:31 - 8:50)

But I think the interesting thing is like, I realized, okay, big goal is to expand our customers. And I look at this like onion of expansion. Peel back a layer to retain them.

We have to get them to adopt. Peel back a layer to get them to adopt. We need to educate them.

Peel back a layer to educate them. We need a scalable, repeatable system for customer education.

[Dillon] (8:51 - 8:51)

Right on.

[Rob] (8:51 - 8:59)

So it was a really cool, cool transformative thing. And that's why I'm just like the biggest believer in, in these types of systems and what they can bring to the table.

[Dillon] (8:59 - 9:01)

Ted, any quick comments before I throw it to JP?

[Ted] (9:01 - 9:28)

No, I probably the only thing I'll say is to echo Rob's point is as headcount is getting reduced with all the new technologies coming out around the AI wave, I think customer education is still a huge way to get cost savings and leverage, especially in your scaled onboarding programs as well. And so that's why I'm encouraging everyone to start looking at this as we're looking at getting more for less in terms of our headcount.

[Dillon] (9:29 - 9:39)

So JP, Ted said the magic word there, which is scaled leverage. That's the world you play in. So do you have a system like this?

[JP] (9:39 - 9:41)

I don't know what world I play in anymore.

[Dillon] (9:41 - 9:43)

You play in a lot. You're a jack of all trades.

[JP] (9:44 - 9:55)

By the way, I had to look it up because I was like skill jar, man, damn. And then I was like, that's not hot jar. I was confused with skill jar and hot jar.

Too many jars.

[Dillon] (9:55 - 9:59)

Different jar, different jar. Well, take one jar off the board.

[JP] (9:59 - 10:24)

Yeah. I think what the question I had, I believe was answered, which is that, and maybe you can answer this, Ted, work ramp is something that can be used both internally, so to be training your team as well as your customers. And the end goal of this is retention, I'm assuming, right?

That's sort of like what we... You train your workers, they're more likely to...

[Ted] (10:25 - 10:44)

That's right. Or in Rob's case, they can do something repeatable or proprietary to your business. And what's great is you can leverage...

The reason why we pitch into the top of this conversation is consolidation is you have content you could reuse and you're not creating from scratch because it's probably repeatable internally and externally.

[JP] (10:44 - 10:45)

Got it.

[Dillon] (10:45 - 10:50)

Yeah, that's awesome. JP, you don't have something like that at your job? I would imagine you do.

[JP] (10:50 - 10:53)

Yeah. I don't know if I can say what the product name is.

[Dillon] (10:53 - 10:53)

No, don't.

[JP] (10:54 - 11:24)

But yes, there is something, but typically those trainings are for... They are like video, cute little videos, and then like- Cute. Like, yeah, cute videos- Very dismissive.

Like these quizzes that you do afterwards, but they're around policies. They're not around... We don't have something around actually utilizing or leveraging one of our softwares better.

So it's more like a compliance tool.

[Dillon] (11:24 - 11:53)

See, I would think, JP, particularly in your situation where you don't have a ton of usage data or telemetry because a lot of your stuff is on-prem, that that would actually be a fantastic proxy for understanding adoption of your tool, is if you instituted an LMS and you saw a good amount of... I don't know, you'd have to do some sort of testing to understand what resulted in the retention numbers you want. But that's a decent proxy for understanding because your tool is complicated too, right?

It's hard to use.

[JP] (11:54 - 11:58)

Complicated. It's a Hydra. You cut off one head, three more sprout up.

[Dillon] (12:00 - 12:20)

Anyway, I love this. I love this topic. Ted, come back soon.

I would love to hear more about just WorkRamp in general. Outside of current events, what it is you guys are doing, what it's like to build a company like that, to talk to miserable customer success professionals all day. But until that time, we do have to say goodbye.

Thanks for having me on, guys.

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