Rebels with a Cause: How Marcomm & Techcomm United at Salesforce to Create Trailhead
1. Rebels with a Cause
How Marcomm & Techcomm United at Salesforce to Create Trailhead
Gavin Austin
Principal Technical Writer
@GavinAustinSays #LavaCon18
2. Forward-looking statements
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7. BUSINESS IS LIKE A
WAR WITHOUT
BULLETS
Phil Knight
Co-founder, Nike
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8. The Problem with Marcomm…
• Content is inaccurate!
• Changes terms on a whim!
• Doesn’t understand the product!
• Doesn’t care about customer service!
• Gets all the praise, resources, and visibility!
@GavinAustinSays #LavaCon18
9. IN CONTENT MARKETING…
THE ASSET IS THE AUDIENCE
—NOT THE CONTENT
Robert Rose
Author, Content Marketing Strategist
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10. The Problem with Techcomm…
• Content is boring!
• Avoids risk and changes!
• Doesn’t understand the business!
• Doesn’t care about sales or prospects!
• Whines too much, complains a lot, and is never happy!
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11. THE GOAL OF TECH COMM
IS TO ENABLE CORRECT
ACTION
Mark Baker
Author, Technical Writer
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12. Complete Content Confusion for Customers
Marcom
m
E-books
Techcomm
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Online Help
Whitepapers API Guides
Social Media User Assistance
UI Text
Graphics & Videos
Websites
Quick Start
Guides
“WTF!?”
Customers
13. THE PURPOSE OF BUSINESS
IS TO CREATE A
CUSTOMER
Peter Drucker
Author, Management Consultant
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24. Stats on the Salesforce Economy
• 3.3 million new jobs by 2022
• $859 billion new business revenue 2022
• Currently 1 million learners on Trailhead
• Currently 10 million badges earned on Trailhead
• 1 out of 4 Trailblazers has a new high-paying job
• 25% of learners got a raise or promotion with Trailhead
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Who here is Marcomm? Who here is Techcomm? About me, what Salesforce is, speak for 30 min, Q&A at end
Before I begin, a piece of content from the lawyers at Salesforce, who I like to keep gainfully employed. Salesforce is a publicly-traded company and make all your future purchasing decisions based on what’s currently available.
What we’ll take about today follows this plot
I like to begin every preso with the takeaways first.
Whether you’re marcomm or techcomm, we’re damaging our customers, their experience. Let’s talk about the elephant in the room between our two disciplines, shall we? No one here is innocent
Can you relate to this? Marcomm not invite you to meetings. Techcomm doesn’t understand the business. We all write content. Different content. But we can’t we all get along? Why are there these silos between us, our tools, our words and sentences?
Let’s air our dirty laundry, like Agile retrospective meeting, or group therapy, and examine the problems of marcomm as seen by techcomm, and the problems with techcomm as seen by marcomm.
Marcomm, these are some of the problems we have with you, says techcomm.
Do the techcomm folks in the room agree?
But perhaps techcomm, instead of just being mad, needs to better understand the purpose/goal of marketing, which is put forth beautifully by Robert Rose.
And now techcomm, these are the problems we have with you, says marcomm.
Marcomm folks in the room, do you agree?
But perhaps marcomm, instead of just being mad, needs to better understand the purpose/goal of techcomm, which is put forth perfectly by Mark Baker.
Every Page is Page One: Topic-based Writing for Technical Communication and the Web and Structured Writing: Rhetoric and ProcessÂ
https://everypageispageone.com/2014/02/10/the-goal-of-tech-comm-is-to-enable-correct-action/
Whether we’re marcomm or techcomm, we need to admit that we’re creating complete customer confusion with content, even though we should all be on the same team at our companies.
You as a customer probably don’t care who made what piece of content from what tool, you just need to find your answer or learn something. You have what Robert Rose calls a “job to be done,” and you want to do it as easily as possible without wasting time searching for it.
As customers, we’re all like, WTF?!
As Peter Drucker famously mentions in the Practice of Management…
And are we really creating customers, or our customers collateral damage in our quest to do for them what WE think is right? In our quest to meet dispirit and different bonus goals?
Now we’ll talk about how Trailhead came to the rescue at Salesforce of this internal battle between marcomm and techcomm.
First, I want to remind you of the takeaway that accidents make awesome assets.
Frankly, Trailhead, our wildly successful e-learning platform, almost never happened. It was an accident.
It started with a question by a developer marketer named Josh Birk. And more people started adding ideas to it, such as a person named Chris Duarte.
We wanted to take a risk and write about CRM and developer content that was unusual, weird, different, and had a new voice & tone from our “business casual” voice & tone. This new style, we called “fun-gaging.”
What if we added characters, who we call Salesforcelandians? And these characters guide customers through they’re learning journey or learning ”trail”? Get it…
What if we wrote with contractions and added minor jokes and didn’t take things too seriously?
And customers could see a slick dashboard to choose what they want to learn, at their own pace? And once they completed learning modules, that include a mix of marcomm business story, with techcomm instructional content, they earned badges through good ol’ gamification?
What if to help them retrain the content they learn, we pieced together playful learning projects toke build a communication uplink to mars with Salesforce…
Or build a space to help them learn things beyond tech, like cultivating equality at work, or the Drucker Business Essentials courses?
What if we helped each person create an online profile/resume where they could show the world what they’ve learned from the badges. Maybe it could help them with their careers?
It is not replacing all of our content; you don’t want to take the time to complete a module if you need to solve an immediate business problem: online help, knowledge articles, will do that.
Arguably, all of this content—form Marcomm & Techcomm was already there, just packaged together with some humor, characters, and fun.
Trailhead is an online learning platform with self-paced, bit-sized content with a gamification element.
Now, let’s talk about why marcomm and techcomm united at Salesforce to create Trailhead—how it’s been a victory for both and especially our customers.
And it all came about with the third takeaway, about how convincing metrics, inside and outside our organization.
Let me share some of these stats metrics
The IDC reports that demand for Salesforce-skilled people will create 3.3 million jobs in the Salesforce ecosystem by 2022.Â
"1 in 4 learners found a new job with Trailhead and 25% of learners got a raise or promotion with Trailhead." - Nucleus Research: The Real Economic Impact of Trailhead
The economic impact, career impact, of learning Salesforce, coupled with the “fun-gaging” aspect of Trailhead, led to this new brand/customer identity called the Trailblazer.
Organically, people helped each other learn online, comment on Twitter, start user groups all over the world, have Salesforce Saturdays online, working with each other to further their education and careers.
Hoodies, golden hoodies. Ethos of helping people advance in this new economy, the 4th industrial revolution.
“storyhelping” term from Robert Rose, helping people accomplish new things with their careers, the overwhelming ask for more Trailhead and how much they love it, shaped our company.
Our annual user conference, Dreamforce, which attracts 180,000 people, is all about Trailhead. The themes and motifs have taken over.
This call for more and more Trailhead is what organically help marcomm and techomm come together with clear message of giving our customers the content they want, no matter who internally creates it: marcomm or techcomm.
Do you? It’s not hard for us to determine what to create or create, because our Trailblazer community lets us know on Twitter, IdeaExchange, Trailblazer Community site, and Salesforce user groups. These spring up organically, partially fostered by the playfulness, approachability of Trailhead and how it’s shaped our brand.
And it’s united our tools internally. Techomm creates XML/DITA, and we built a tool called Trailboss that lets marcomm write and convert their content to Trailhead too.
We have Scrum/planning meetings that include both teams now. It’s clear we can be more successful for our customers together than apart.
Check it out for yourselves! See how it can work for your business.
I like to begin every preso with the takeaways first.