As we’ve finished up our last stop on our Eloqua 10 world training tour in our Santa Clara, CA headquarters last week, I’m reflecting on the craziness of the last two months and thought I’d share the results and some lessons learned.
For those who weren’t aware of this training tour, I should probably explain the lofty goals and reasons for the tour. But first, let’s set the stage. At McAfee, we have over 200 people throughout the world who are actively using Eloqua. We have 4 Eloqua instances at the last count and we’re one of the few Eloqua enterprise customers still using Eloqua 9. This month, that’s changing as we are upgrading/migrating our primary marketing instance to Eloqua 10. While working on this upgrade, we also took this opportunity to change a lot of our processes around how we use Eloqua and its connecting systems. We’re gutting asset templates, lead scoring, integration to CRM and much more.
The differences between E9 and E10 are enough of a reason to require that we train our global users but since we were changing most of the processes as well, we knew that we absolutely had to provide an in-depth training class for all of our global users. We also knew that we couldn’t simply give them the canned training from Eloqua since the bulk of the training our users needed was McAfee process oriented and the lesser part was using the tool.
In retrospect, this turned out to be an excellent decision since the lion’s share of our 3.5 day training classes was spent discussing McAfee policies, procedures and best practices. I did struggle a bit with it though. In each of the 7 classes/locations around the world, some of these discussions would take us down a deep rabbit hole and we’d end up spending a significant time discussing things that really had nothing to do with Eloqua. Don’t get me wrong. These were good, valuable discussions but knowing our limited schedule for the class, it was at times a bit frustrating to try and pull people back on topic for the class. Luckily, we set these classes at 3.5 days so our timing worked fine in each location, but had the class only been 2 days, there’s no way we could have covered all of the material and held these important discussions.
The tour itself turned out to be a great success. But there were several key factors/decisions that made it all work so well and without these, the training would have been an epic failure.
The first of these factors was the decision to make this training a tour; rather than having users travel to North America – which was the original plan. Fortunately, we realized that if we did this, we would be lucky to get maybe 1-2 attendees from each geo to come to the training and this would leave the bulk of our users without training. So, we took it on the road. We held seven of these classes around the world and the locations/schedule looked like this:
- Plano, TX
- Sao Paulo, Brazil
- Sydney, Australia
- Tokyo, Japan
- Bangalore, India
- Slough, UK
- Santa Clara, CA
The second factor (and probably the most crucial) was to partner up the global demand center and marketing operations to prep, manage and conduct these classes. We had two trainers – one from the global demand center (myself) and one from marketing operations (Jeff Breyare). Traditionally, the GDC had owned Eloqua training. I (and the wonderful Abby Bell before me) had conducted dozens of E9 classes in different locations around the world and that experience would go a long way for this E10 training. However, since this was such a huge shift in policies and procedures – especially in terms of all of the back end functionality and integration, it was vital that we partnered with Ops.
I actually get chills (not the good kind) when I imagine trying to do this alone. Jeff and his team were fantastic. They provided the operational expertise, the system support and the sanity we so desperately needed. I truly believe tour would have been an epic failure if the GDC and Ops hadn’t partnered up so closely and effectively.
The third factor was getting agency help with preparing the training materials. I had always done this myself for previous classes but this time around, the GDC was so busy launching global campaigns and working on many other projects, there is no way in the world I would have had time to prep all of the materials. So we had our agency help us put together the main slide deck and other materials. It was such a life saver.
So those were my main keys to success. Here are some things we learned and/or had challenges with. Much of it might seem like basic common sense but we found them to be pretty profound.
First off, with the primary goal of this exercise being to turn our many field marketers around the world into E10 gurus, it was super important to us that the information we were relaying was received and understood well. Some of the classes/locations were awesome in terms of learning and applying the knowledge, and others were less so.
Our most successful group was our LTAM team and we believe the key to their success was that their sr. director told them that during the class, they were not allowed to check email or work on their day job. This was wonderful because it allowed the students to focus completely on the material. And for their final project, they all built the most robust, interactive campaigns with no difficulty.
Conversely, many of the students in other locations were not given leave to completely focus on the class materials. I would walk around the room while presenting and see people working on things from their day job and (I know this will shock you) these people are the ones with the most questions and having the most problems on the new platform. The lesson I see here is probably the philosophy of that sr. director from LTAM – if you’re going to agree to take people out of their jobs for 3.5 days for training, shouldn’t you make it worth that sacrifice by ensuring that these people are allowed to focus? Otherwise, why send them at all?
Although it wasn’t a huge challenge for us, one notable challenge we ran across in a few of the classes was some people had a really difficult time changing their mindset to adapt to the new policies, procedures and workflows in E10. To explain, like many enterprise companies using E9, we had, over the years developed several workarounds in order to solve a business problems that E9 couldn’t handle right out of the box.
These people had these workarounds so engrained in their day to day lives that they couldn’t pull back from them. They would ask; “Today in E9, we do <insert workaround here>. How do we do that in E10?”. When this happened, we struggled to pull the person back and make them ask this instead: “What is my business requirement here and How can E10 solve/handle it?”. Again, it wasn’t huge but it was something we to spend quite a bit of time on that we didn’t foresee.
There were many other small things we learned along the way but those are the ones that stick out most in my mind. As mentioned before, the tour was a great success and people loved it. Even the biggest detractors were sold by the last day of the class. They were all excited to use the new platform. The favorite sections of the students were (in order):
- Image creation, upload and insertion with Eloqua and Pixlr.com
- Email and landing page editor (seriously, nice job on this Eloqua)
- Eloqua Insight
- Cloud Components (social sharing, youtube, etc.)
- Campaign Canvas
And depending on the student’s area of expertise, some loved the CRM integration portion while others loved working in Campaign Canvas.
Well, that’s all I can think of to report. As of today, our new E10 instance is live and all global users are on the new platform and thanks to the fantastic application, the great external (Oracle/Eloqua) teams, world class internal teams and our awesome agency, I feel confident that we, as a global organization are ready to leverage the tool to make 2014 the most epic year ever for McAfee and marketing automation.
Lastly I'd like to extend a special, formal thank-you to:
- My partner in crime Jeff Breyare for being such a great travel partner (and CRM integration rapper)
- Matt Calnan for putting up with all of my emails and making everything work
- Kim Grant for keeping us all on track and organized
- My team (McAfee GDC) for helping guide all our requirements
- CRM Technologies for doing so much heavy lifting
- Heather Durante and Jubair Ahmed for the awesome trainer-training and putting up with all our emails for Insight logins!
- And everyone else who made it such a success. Thank you!!!
Onward!
- Sterling