How Customer Education Supports Acquisition and Expansion

Customer education is a rapidly growing field—and the data shows growing investment year over year, with continued increase in the coming years.

But with that comes an increasing need to tie education to business impact in order to justify investment.

When customer education's remit is purely post-sale—such as with metrics including NPS, CSAT, and customer retention—proving impact is difficult. Even if you can prove a relationship between education or training and these metrics, it’s correlative at best.

That’s why it’s not surprising that recent research uncovered a change in focus.

In early 2024, Gatepoint Research surveyed 150+ customer and partner education leaders, asking “What are your customer and partner education and enablement priorities in the next 12 to 18 months?”

The top two answers were:

• Increase revenue through upsell and cross-sell (57%)
• Increase revenue through new customer acquisition (51%)

Let’s look at both in practice.

Customer Education for Marketing

Marketers have said for years: “An educated buyer is a better buyer.”

Why? Because they understand their problem, the potential solutions, and what makes your product stand out—allowing them to make more informed (and confident) decisions. 

Forward-thinking companies like Impact.com and HubSpot are creating content specifically for prospects—teaching them industry trends and best practices, then introducing their products as go-to solutions. 

But you don’t need to create net-new content to use customer education to support new customer acquisition. 

During our recent webinar with Chris LoDolce, Advisor at SaaS Academy Advisors and HubSpot Academy founding team member, he shared the following ideas:

Include customer education as a benefit in sales demos, pitches, and follow-ups. 

What your company sells is more than just the product itself. This is called a “whole product concept” and includes education, services, and customer success. 

Equip your sales team to share about your education programs with prospects. This could include a slide to include in sales calls, messaging they can work into conversations and emails, and resources they can share with prospects considering your product. 

Here’s an example of a slide you might include:

Create a marketing page about customer education program benefits to customers. 

In a similar vein, start introducing your education programs to prospects right on your website!

Today, people have so many choices of products to choose from. A differentiator is often the level of support available—and if they can get a feel for that support, even better! 

Allow prospects to access your customer education content in your LMS.

Ideally, your team has created content that’s product-agnostic (like Impact.com has done with their Affiliate & Partnerships Industry Fundamental Certification.)

But even your customer-facing content can be relevant to prospects. When a prospect is considering your solution, they want to know what’s available to them. Recently, one guest at a Roundtable shared a story about a company that analyzed its LMS data and learned that a number of people accessing product-focused content were prospects! There were people in the buying cycle looking to learn more about the product, see what kind of support is available, and get a behind-the-scenes look at the product—before talking to a sales rep. 

Customer Education for Expansion

Of the 150+ executives surveyed, 51% are prioritizing education for expansion. Customer expansion is about increasing a customer’s spend, whether through increasing usage (upsell) or purchasing related products (cross-sell).

However your company is expanding current customer accounts, education can help. 

Upsell with education.

Depending on your product, upsell might mean selling more seats or licenses, more of your value metric (like boards, tests, etc.), or more users. 

How can education help? Think about it this way: If your current users aren’t getting value out of your product, will they be motivated to add additional users or seats? Probably not. Which means you need to help those customers experience the value of your product. 

Education works across the customer lifecycle, starting with prospects, then showing customers how to best use your product to solve their problem(s). From making sure customer onboarding decreases time-to-value (TTV) to introducing them to more sophisticated uses of your product, education can lay the foundation for an easier upsell. 

Cross-sell with education.

Cross-sell might mean selling additional modules of your main product or other products from your portfolio.

How? Just like in the acquisition process, education can introduce customers to how to use your product to solve their problems. 

Here’s a real-life example: When I was at Litmus (an email testing and development company), one of the modules available in a higher tier plan was Email Analytics. Most email service providers offer basic email analytics, so why would they buy another platform that offers email analytics? The key was to show them what was different about Litmus’ Email Analytics. 

One of those differences was the ability to see which email clients (e.g., Outlook, Gmail, Apple Mail, etc.) your subscribers use to read your emails. While this might not appear to make a difference, it definitely made an impact when Apple Mail Privacy Protection (AMPP) rolled out. All of a sudden, regular email metrics couldn’t be relied upon. We hosted a webinar to show people how Litmus’ Email Analytics product works and how they could use it to identify which subscribers were impacted by AMPP—and which they could consider to be “reliable opens”, a proxy metric to measure the success of their email campaigns. 

Walking people through the problem and the solution (i.e., our product), as well as how easy it was to use, resulted in a significant uptick in upgrades. This was a small, time-bound campaign, but had real revenue impact. Your education team can do the same. 

How Can You Expand Your Remit?

Your current remit may not include revenue metrics—but that doesn’t mean it can’t. Every business, regardless of industry, is interested in revenue growth. Take a look at your current education efforts to see if there’s anything that can be used further up the customer lifecycle, to support marketing and sales. Or if there’s a way you can partner with your Customer Success or Customer Marketing teams to provide content for an expansion campaign. Your colleagues will be thrilled to collaborate!