This is the second post in a blog series on how we’re using our own platform to fuel success. This post is by Ginger Tranter, Senior Manager, Education Services at Salesloft. You can check out the other articles in this series here:
Part 1: How Salesloft Uses Salesloft to Drive Customer Success
Part 3: The Journey Cadence: Don’t Stop Drivin’ Customer Success
Part 4: The Optimization Cadence: Intervention That Drives Adoption
Do you believe that just two people could educate thousands of customers at scale?
I’ve been at Salesloft for 3 years now, where my primary focus is training thousands, not hundreds, of customers.
What do I mean by that? Well, we want to ensure that Salesloft training serves not just a subset of users, but that everyone can find value in the materials we’re offering.
If you were tasked with such a feat on a team of two people, what resources would you want to provide for customers?
You could create FAQs or a knowledge base or online training (all of which Salesloft has), but even that may not seem like enough. Because, let’s be honest, even the most well-designed training hubs can be daunting for brand new users.
But with Salesloft Cadences, we can take all of our training assets a step further.
The New User Cadence helps us serve up training highlights for new users, right in their inbox. Customers receive a self-guided, self-paced tour of how to get started with Salesloft. Let’s talk about that.
Forget Hundreds, Train Thousands
What does the New User Cadence look like? It’s a 100% automated sequence of five emails that stretch over 10 days. These emails are chock-full of information that allow thousands of users to self-serve. The goal is to drive customers to Salesloft University to make them aware of all the training materials they have at their fingertips.
By organizing key assets from Salesloft University and the Salesloft Knowledge Base, we’re empowering customers to answer their own questions anytime.
Let’s say someone is working on a weekend or off-hours when they may not be able to reach us. Or, they simply want to find the answers for themselves without having to wait — all the information is there, whenever they need it.
Teach a Customer to Fish
Let’s take a look at the New User Cadence in detail. Here’s an outline of the five emails we send:
Welcome to Salesloft! This introduction provides an overview and the right links to get started. We share a startup checklist for users to set up their accounts, videos to help them do it, and links to Salesloft University and our knowledge base.
Establishing your personal settings. This email covers creating your account, installing our Chrome extension, and creating your settings. We also invite users to our weekly webinar and, again, reiterate the knowledge base as an excellent resource.
Ready to build content? Here we cover templates (including a video on how to create one) and cadences, along with snippets best practices and common uses. We also share email deliverability best practices.
It’s time to talk strategy! Once a user has created a cadence, they may need help running the steps. So, we cover that in this email by providing a list of videos and knowledge base articles to guide users through the process. Also, we share everything you need to know about sales email personalization, best practices and benchmarks for sales cadences, and invite folks to subscribe to our podcast, Hey Salespeople.
Now that you’re amazing at this, how do you prove it? How can a new user tell if they’re crushing cadences? Here we introduce them to the Analytics Page so they can see for themselves. We also talk about how to get Salesloft-Certified and share the Salesloft User Forum, a place that brings Salesloft users together to ask questions, deliver answers, present best practices, and share successes.
This Is How We Do It
Every day we get a new user report. Two times a week, we add all new users to the New User Cadence and we typically kick off this cadence every Tuesday and Thursday.
Every Wednesday at 9:30 am ET and 2:00 pm ET, we host a webinar for new users, and we use feedback obtained from this cadence to inform our webinar discussions. This helps us keep webinar topics fresh and ensures we’re addressing our customers’ most current needs.
These Are Our Results
We’ve had many customers tell us these emails help them. That’s backed by an average open rate of 50-60%, and click-through rates anywhere from 3-9% depending on the email.
For reference, Campaign Monitor says that your average email open rate should be between 15-25% and average click-through rates should be about 2.5%.
After we launched the New User Cadence in September 2019, we saw an increase of 400 unique page views for Salesloft University in the first month and a half.
One of the most valuable benefits we experienced? A new account executive replied to one of the emails in our cadence with a number of questions about how to start their day. These questions provided content for a workshop around how a closer spends their day in Salesloft. Now we can help so many other reps with similar questions in one fell swoop.
Give Your Team The Gift of More Time and Reach
Whether your company is large or small, your teams only have so much time in the day. They need efficient, trackable ways to disseminate information so that manual knowledge sharing doesn’t become someone’s full-time job.
Using this cadence provides an efficient, effective way for us to market our training materials to our customers — all this without doing extra legwork or throwing more people at the effort. It empowers us to educate each new user about Salesloft training resources, at scale.
We’ve found the New User Cadence is especially useful for reaching customers coming in as part of an expansion, or those backfilling a position who’ve missed their team’s initial Salesloft launch. Providing these customers with resources in this way ensures they’re getting the supplemental learning they need and prevents them from falling through the cracks.
Your teams can easily employ the best practices shared here to encourage customer engagement at scale.
As always, we’re here to help with any of your Salesloft platform questions. Join Salesloft experts for a live Q&A session during Office Hours, hosted twice daily. Bring all your burning questions on topics like Cadence Best Practices, Automation Rules, Admin Settings, and more. Register here.
Or if you prefer independent learning, check out the Salesloft Knowledge Base.
Stay tuned for our next post about the Journey Cadence.