Best Practices: Cohort-based Customer Programs

What on earth is a “Value Accelerator”?

If you're reading this, you're likely eager to make your customers ultra-successful, but ultra-efficiently for your team. Say hello to the Value Accelerators program I’m inventing. I wanted to share what I’ve learned so far.

• This is more than education; it's a results-focused, multi-session boot camp, including homework. Participants will work collaboratively to actually build specific products. (In the case of Gainsight CS, this means that they will configure workflows.) 
• Instead of relying on your team for advice, ideas, and hand-holding, your customers can lean on a different group: Each other. (You would teach them the necessary knowledge through a curriculum of webinar recordings, blogs, education courses, etc., not live training.)

Whatever it is your customers commonly need to achieve, this type of program is not just about acquiring skills, but about applying them in real time to create tangible impacts.

In the past few weeks, I’ve spoken to numerous people who have run ‘customer cohort’ programs like this. Here’s the best-of-the-best guidance on how to do it.

TL;DR

Promise an outcome that’s clear, tangible, and essential

Describe exactly what outcome a participant will get out of the program. (You’re asking them for a big chunk of time!) They need to know that they will significantly improve something they’re responsible for, as a result of participating.

Emphasize not just the knowledge they’ll get, but what they’ll do: 

• Learn-by-doing through hands-on activities with peers
• Meet experts
• Build valuable, durable products
• Collaborate and network with peers

Key messaging points:

• The professional network and know-how that participants build will serve them not just in the program, but in their future work.
• You’ll attract the right participants if you find people who agree with the message, “This is going to be work, but look at what you're going to get out of it!” 
• Emphasize testimonials from previous participants.

Pick a topic that suits a voluntary, group-based program

A customer cohort is a poor fit for many customer needs. But it’s a beautiful fit for some.

• Must be a burning pain -- "If I don't have this, I can't do my job."
• Keep the topics extremely basic, almost painfully fundamental -- it’s basic for you, but it’ll be intimidating new territory for participants, with stumbling blocks you’ve forgotten about
• Scope is narrow -- there’s a single thing you get from the program, or else every participant will pull the conversation in a different conversation

Create a fertile environment for engagement

A collection of strangers doesn’t automatically leap into solving each others’ problems. Design your program to reduce that barrier.

• The sweet-spot is 8-15 attendees
• Make participants feel like they’ve made a commitment (but not a massive one!) -- this is a bigger deal than signing up for a webinar
• Your communications should be so, so simple and clear. Outside of the sessions, they’re distracted, so, even when you get their attention, you only get a tiny corner of their brain.
  • Set expectations multiple times (all throughout the program, and even before and after)
  • Give lots of reminders (email and in-session)
  • Send recaps
• Use gamification and a playful theme to make it feel welcoming and exploratory, instead of grave and intense
• Keep people connected outside of live sessions
  • Online community group for conversation (and emailed summaries of recent conversations)
  • Online repository of session recordings and materials
  • Online repository of curriculum content (ideally so you can track who’s viewing it)
  • Email campaigns and even in-app engagements keep things feeling ‘active’

Put the right people in the room

You need to invite selectively. An exec from a large company can’t help a tactical individual contributor from a small company, and vice versa. Attendees don’t need identical roles and employers, but you need a group who share the same goal, and have enough in common to offer advice and ideas to each other.

Key Criteria

• Have a goal directly related to the curriculum
• Have the prerequisite products, features, integrations, etc.
• Have the appropriate role for the ‘level’ of conversation
  • For strategy conversations: The right attendees will want to make sure they’re avoiding pitfalls and doing what the best companies are doing. You need to confirm they have the needed seniority.
  • For tactical conversations: The right attendees will want to succeed at their job responsibilities, more easily or more excellently. You need to confirm they have the needed capabilities.

Pro Tip: Don’t ask people to “Register”, ask them to “Apply”

• Exclusivity increases registration and a sense of commitment
  • Emphasize exclusivity with messaging (“You’ve been nominated!”)
• An application allows you to confirm fit with the criteria above, and gently decline improper fits (“Can you find someone more tactical?”, etc.)

Launch elegantly

You need to set yourself up for success, and first impressions make a massive difference.

Before the first live session

• To maximize attendance rate, send an email that feels like “A big thing is kicking off!”
• Send a pre-course survey
  • Detects topics or needs that could come up
  • Sets expectations of what will be involved
• Send an orientation video
  • Set expectations
  • Generate FOMO with company logos or headshots of registrants

During your first session

• Review results from pre-course survey
  • Ask participants what they most need/want from the program at this time; be open to what the program will need to provide to be valuable
• Build a sense of, “You have committed to doing something wonderful for yourself”
  • Emphasize exclusivity and official-ness of being a member of this cohort
  • Mark the beginning with some kind of ritual, like a step everyone takes together
• Focus the session content on preparing people up for the first round of homework: discovery conversations and clarifying their personal goals for the program

In every session, generate psychological safety

You know that feeling with friends where you’d say anything that comes to mind, because they know that they ‘get’ who you are? That’s psychological safety, and it’s essential for group creativity and problem-solving. It rarely happens organically, but there are organic ways to create it.

• Establish an assumption that participants should build towards feeling connected
  • Use your position as facilitator to share info about participants
  • Use getting-to-know-you activities, like breakout room ‘speed dating’, or a Linkedin profile scavenger hunt (where they also Connect with each other)
  • Use icebreakers / warm-up activities that playfully allow gentle vulnerability
  • Demonstrate the warmth and conviviality that you want to see
• Explicitly set the vibe for the call (such as, “Be open with half-baked ideas”)
• Establish a zone of reasonable privacy, using a guideline like the “Chatham House Rule”
• Lower the stakes
  • Lighthearted, experimental tone
  • Create casual moments, like walk-and-talks
  • To battle the discomfort of learning a new concept, use fun problem-solving exercises or playfully absurd role-play
  • Talk about growth mindset: we participate to improve, not to pass a finish line
• Create moments where a person would feel comfortable voicing their imposter syndrome or first-timer frustration, so that struggling people feel closer to the group, instead of left behind or left out
• As the facilitator, use open curiosity to create a welcoming environment for new ideas (“What does that make other folks think of?” instead of “Here’s how that idea fits.”)
• If the facilitator awards gold stars, people will stop speaking up with silver-star thoughts. So, validate good input with attention, not agreement. “What are other folks’ thoughts on that point?”

Generate collaboration

Even with psychological safety, it’s easy to sit quietly. But if you want participants to solve each others’ problems (instead of leaning on your team), it’s mission-critical that their brain gets off the couch and joins the dance party.

• The real thing ‘of value' to each participant in the rooms the other attendees
  • The sessions should be about inventing, problem-solving, and doing the work
  • At least 70% of the agenda should be attendees speaking with each other -- as facilitator, you’re just watching their work happen
• Force people to talk
  • “Pair-shares” (2 people per breakout room) right away in each session
  • Call on people (and remember this is a gift to that person who wasn’t quite sure if their idea was good enough to take airtime!)
  • Set expectations that you are going to facilitate by asking questions, because you will get more out of the experience by building ideas together than listening to them
• After a bunch of discussion, ask for someone to summarize, since this helps the group to make sense of new information
• Small-group mini-projects, perhaps based on hypothetical scenarios, to get people used to collaboratively building
• Create a shared virtual location for live work and for homework, like a Miro board or shared Google Drive
  • Allows people to see that they’re not the only person doing things (or can see that they’re the only person not doing things!)
  • Allows people to build off each others’ ideas
  • Kick off projects with templates based in these spaces, to draw in participations
• Bring in ‘guest stars’ (such as exemplary customers, or a participant from a previous cohort) to show what can be done, build confidence, and spark conversation
  • For example, you might watch an old webinar recording as homework, and have the presenter join your next live session
• Facilitate peer-to-peer coaching, or mentorship appointments with a ‘guest star’ presenter 

Design a syllabus that generates momentum

Since participants aren’t just learning, but building, your curriculum will fail if it’s just a list of topics.

• Embrace that you aren’t traveling a pre-built track, but forging a new trail, in every cohort
  • Set 60% of the skeleton of the agenda for the program, and leave 40% flexible to adapt to the needs of the day 
  • Use in-session polls to assess participants’ maturity, progress, needs, and interests, to decide on-the-fly where to focus
• All required information must be covered by digital content, or else they’ll need to lean on your team to fill the gaps (but the goal of this program is to make progress without more work from your team!)
  • Some extra hand-holding is to be expected, so plan group office hours with an expert from your team
• Provide specific actions for participants to take between sessions, but must be super relevant to where they are
  • Create takeaway resources / worksheets

Point directly at the impact

Continually re-energize participants’ eagerness to tackle the road ahead.

• Since the assigned homework will be pure learning, each session should generate a satisfying, tactically useful product
• End with clear next steps they should/could take
• Use reflection prompts to help participants make sense of the thing they just did for the first time ever, and which readies them to think about the next step
  • Use 5 minutes at the end of each session to go around the room: “What was most valuable for you today?”
• Expose participants to work products of people who completed the program before

Graduate thoughtfully

When it’s time for your participants to graduate from your program, don’t waste such a valuable moment!

• Honor their effort, risks taken, and achievements
  • Ritually mark the end (“You just took a step that so few people do!”)
  • Reward them with a badge for their online profiles, or a congratulations email “from” your CEO
• Have the group reflect collectively on what they want the world to know about the experience
• To further emphasize the impact, and to hand each customer back to their CSM for follow-up conversations, have participants evaluate themselves on the sophistication of what they’ve built, and if it matches what they expected to get from the program
• Consider holding a reunion a quarter later, to capture wins and troubleshoot roadblocks

Measure impact

Gather the information you need to show that your time as facilitator was well-spent, and to learn about areas for improvement.

• Get participant NPS and commentary about the program
  • Longer-term impacts can be measured in the NRR of program participants versus non-participants
• Capture anecdotes (e.g., a cross-sell that came out of participation)
• Note and nurture champions -- the most enthusiastic participants
  • Invite them to showcase what they did in community posts or a testimonial
  • Invite them to comment on what doors participation opened, or how their role changed
  • They’ll help recruit by advocating in rooms you’re not in