Assessing the impact of HubSpot's new Partner Inbound Success Training - some food for thought:
Well it's been a big week for me. Not JUST because of HubSpot Academy's #WaffleWednesdays or even the fact that next week is #Inbound14 (although the excitement is palpable). No, it's been a big week because it marked the 100th day since we launched the fully revamped version of HubSpot's Partner Inbound Success Training. The time has come to reflect on the early returns and start to measure. The thoughts that this milestone has got me chewing on lately are: Has it been working? Has all the work been worth it?
There has been some great feedback on the HubSpot Agency Partners who have taken the training. A simple look at the stream of tweets for the #HubPartner tag on twitter shows that people are watching, people are learning.
It's fantastic to see that people are using the training video content and that people are attending the live interactive "learning labs" for Partners we put on to help apply the training content.
Viewing, downloading, attending does not equal understanding of processes and best practices. .....so what does?
But through all of this great feedback and engagement data with the content we've produced with/for our Agency Partners, I'm still left wondering - what has been the impact of the new training?
What I mean is, what has changed or improved in the businesses of our Agency Partners as a result of actually applying and executing the best practices/processes that we cover in the training content? Do that actually understand the material enough to apply it? And if not, what is needed to help give them the inspiration and motivation to ACT on what they learned? This is the most important thing.
As Stephen Covey once said, "To know and not to do, it's really not to know." Are people applying what they know from the training? How can we better quantify this so we can be sure our training is actually helping achieve the impact we hoped it would have on how our Agency Partners Plan + Build, Market + Sell, Deliver + Delight?
This was a big reason we included 3 live, interactive "learning learning labs" spread across the new training content. We want to hear from the Agency Partners going through each stage what they are struggling with, and what they are doing well with. We want to disect those issues and study the cases so that we can all learn from eachother's collective experience. We do polls/assessments in those labs to quiz people on their knowledge of the material we covere in the training videos that are a pre-requisite for each live learning lab. The scores for many key questions are, well, not as high as we would expect. Are we perhaps asking the wrong questions? Could we use other assessment methods instead of a pop quiz to guage understanding?
Hmmm...what's the best way to quantify the success of training on improving staffing processes, sales processes, service delivery processes for our Agency Partners?
It's not impossible....just tricky....
As we hit our 100th day of the availability of the new training, these are a few things I've pondering. The answers to these questions will help us come up with the answer to the NEXT big question we need to address which is: what will the next level of Partner Training be?
Mapping out the training journey to Partner Agency success....what's on the road ahead?
What will the training look like for our Partner Agencies who have passed their official Partner Certification Exam? Should it be of a similar format to what we provided in the current Partner Training? Or should it be different? We can measure things like which training videos got watched more than others. We can measure things like which questions on the Partner Certification exam people get wrong more than others - but that's not really what we're trying to solve for is it? People's ability to finish videos and pass exams? We want to solve for how to transform our Partner Agencies into inbound businesses so they can help us on our mission to make the world inbound.
Your Turn: Share the impact, or lack thereof.
For those of you reading who have access to this new content and have been going through HubSpot's new Partner Inbound Success Training, I'd love to hear from you.
Is the current format for the Partner Inbound Success Training effective for you? Your team?
The whiteboarding on the future of Partner Training has begun - help us get your ideas for greater impact on the board!
If you were standing next to the white board with me to sketch out the NEXT wave of more advanced Partner Training content to follow up on the Partner Certification content, what would you be drawing on that white board? What key elements would be on it? What WOULDN'T be on it? Please share your thoughts here or contact me directly. I'm pretty easy to find :)