Best Practices when building a One-To-Many Model

Marta Montero

Hi everyone,
As our company and customer base continues to grow, we are finding that our traditional 1-1 engagement model is leaving some customers behind. We are looking to implement a one-to-many model for a segment of SMB customers that would consist of alternating technical and thought leadership webinars every other week, along with weekly office hours and some email automation. 

I would love to learn some best practices from the community in how you've been successful (or failed! we learn as much if not more from our failures) in implementing a one-to-many engagement model, specifically on the following:

1. How would you define a one-to-many segment?
2. How did you decide which customers should be in the one-to-many segment? Has this changed since you implemented the model?
3. What is the desired outcome you were striving for with your one-to-many segment? Is it expansion/upsell, increased adoption, identifying new stakeholders, preventing churn? All of the above?
4. What role does email automation play in your one-to-many model and how do you map out the engagement touchpoints? 
5. Have you ever had success with cohort webinars and open office hours? What has worked and what hasn't worked? 

Looking forward to the responses!

Jarren Pinchuck

Hi @Marta Montero, this is an interesting question and a fascinating one to solve from a process and systems perspective. It is quite complex though and not solvable in the short term, I'd suggest splitting the project into phases or "versions" to borrow from PMs.

A few questions;

• Is your 1-many for implementation and training or for the entire lifecycle of the customer?
• What do you mean by "customers are getting left behind?

Here are a few points to help:

• 1-many for training and implementation is more scalable than individual implementation but it very much depends on your product. If it's cookie-cutter and not heavily reliant on solutions architects then it can work well.
• If you're going down this route, you should build out the system so it works for almost all your segments. If not, you're just adding complexity and complications. In our world, we did a split between enterprise and commercial. All commercial customers, no matter their market segment could be trained together.
• A common reason for moving to this model is the ability to train and onboard multiple customers in the same or shorter period of time. 
  • Reduces the need to constantly hire new CSMs for every batch of customers
• Think about splitting out your teams; one team to handle implementation and another long-term retention and relationships
• Do you have parts of your product that are the same no matter what segment? If so then that is the easiest way to start.
  • Schedule some webinars and call it "eCompliance 101" for example. When every customer joins they go through the "101" course to learn the basics.
  • Note: as you get better at this you could even do this as tech-touch with videos and not have any people at all for the initial training.
• For the early versions, while you're testing your process you'd only need simple automation; inviting customers to the webinars and then follow up emails with what was covered and links to follow-up materials.

I've probably written too much already but the last key take away would be, take a small cohort of customers (maybe 10-15) and trial it on them. That would be the quickest and most effective way to see efficacy early on.

Hope this was helpful.

Pam Micznik

Of course, if you are looking to build 1-many training, hire a Customer Education professional or bring on a consultant who can help you on a project basis.