2025 is wrapping up, but we’re still excited and full of inspiration from the stand-out advice shared by customer education leaders this year.
These experts didn’t just talk strategy – they delivered practical, actionable insights that can supercharge your program’s growth and maturity.
We’ve handpicked eight of the most powerful pieces of advice from three trailblazing customer education gurus. Think of this as your ultimate 2026 playbook for success. Ready to shake things up? Let’s dive in!
1. Get Buy-in From Executive Leadership
Customer education programs thrive when executives see them as drivers of business outcomes, not cost centers. To earn that support, you must anchor your strategy to the priorities executives already care about: revenue, retention, adoption, efficiency, and growth.
Tom Studdert, VP Customer Experience at Ensora Health makes it part of how he builds his customer education program from day one:
“I interviewed every one of my C-level executives and asked, ‘What do you need from me to do your job successfully?’ That’s how I built my education program. If you can draw a clear line between customer education and the business outcomes they care about, you’ll win them over every time. When I finally cracked that nut at the first place I worked, I remember the CEO actually stood up in one of our monthly operating reviews and clapped because he said, “you finally got what I care about.” Tom Studdert, VP Customer Experience, Ensora Health
Each executive has a different lens: CROs focus on upsell and cross-sell, which you can impact by helping customers use your product to its fullest extent. CPOs focus on adoption, which leads to renewals and retention. CMOs care about leads, and you can create Educated Qualified Leads who are more likely to convert, while CFOs need selling on expenses and revenue impact. The amazing thing is that customer education influences them all.
2. Segment Your Customer Base for Training
Effective customer education starts with understanding who your audience is. Instead of relying solely on your company’s existing go-to-market segments, step back and map the full landscape of learners. This helps you design programs that align with real needs and real business goals.
As Vicky Kennedy, CEO of Echtus explains,
“We start with how the organization thinks about segmentation today, but we certainly don’t end there. I like to get the right people in a room or virtual room together, grab a whiteboard, and map all the different groups who interact with an organization, whether they are currently thought of as a segment or not. Once we see that bird’s-eye view, we can connect segments to the business goals we’re trying to drive.” Vicky Kennedy, CEO, Echtus
By looking beyond traditional tiers like SMB vs. enterprise and examining learner-level segments, such as prospects, admins, partners, sub-roles and more, you gain clarity on which audiences require which programs. Perhaps there’s a new product feature on the horizon that’s perfect for a certain sub-segment such as Admins, for example.
3. Manage Your Customer Education Program Like a Business
For Julie Cochrane, VP of Education Services at Charles River, running the educational services team at Charles River as a business is a top tip. It gives her a lot of independence, and helps her to prove to the C-suite that their team can positively impact the bottom line in tangible revenue and non revenue-based contributions.
Julie’s advice includes:
- Define what success looks like alongside leadership: Which goals do we have in mind, and what metrics will we use to measure those goals? Having this defined and discussed upfront allows you to show the value that educational services is offering to the business.
- Involve Finance: Moving from a free model to a monetized training model means having conversations with Finance. We love how Julie commented she had a mini MBA by the time she had learned the true cost of producing training and how to make sure pricing is fair for both customers and the business.
- Offer tiers: Julie’s advice is spot on here – tiers allow you to provide options.
“You don’t want too many, but you want enough, because you want the ability to cater to different budgets and business needs without out-pricing yourself. And you want to also reduce any budgetary barriers that may come through.” Julie Cochrane, VP of Education Services, Charles River
4. Make Product Adoption One of Your Onboarding KPIs
Another great piece of advice looks at reframing how you think about onboarding. If onboarding is where customers first experience value, then customer education must be measured as a critical part of that journey.
As Tom Studdert said,
“Customer education is an essential component of onboarding. Years ago, I coined the phrase ‘training equals retaining’ because we have to treat education as a real vehicle for business outcomes, and that includes revenue and retention. And it’s our job in the customer education world to really draw that line between what we do and what the business needs.” Tom Studdert, VP Customer Experience, Ensora Health
Tom argues that onboarding shouldn’t be measured by time-to-value alone, but by product adoption, the moment customers are using your product in the ways they define as success, not just how your company defines success. “No customer can adopt a product they don’t know how to use,” he adds.
By making education a formal onboarding KPI, you directly link training to adoption, retention and renewal, and over time, to LTV and expansion. These are the metrics the business cares about most.
5. Make Product Training a Line Item in Your Contract
Another effective way to increase customer lifetime value, and to ensure deeper product adoption, is to formalize training as part of your commercial agreements. When training is bundled into long-term contracts, customers not only commit to learning the basics but also return for further education. This creates a predictable renewal stream for education teams and a clear path to expanding impact.
As Julie Cochrane explains,
“When we bundle training with long-term contracts, we give the opportunity for customers to purchase additional training. That improves their lifetime value – and ours. When they come back for more, we see increased adoption and additional revenue over the life of the contract.” Julie Cochrane, VP of Education Services, Charles River
6. Spotlight Customer Education in the Sales Process
When it comes to Sales, customer education shouldn’t just be a post-sale function or an afterthought. It’s already influencing deals whether you realize it or not, so it makes sense to put some strategy behind it. Tom Studdert notes,
“Customer education is part of the buying process already, even if you don’t know it. Your sales teams are talking about onboarding and training and education programs because they have to. What prospect doesn’t want to know how they’re going to learn how to use the product? They need to know that. But that conversation usually happens at the tail end of the buying process, when it can and should be used much earlier.” Tom Studdert, VP Customer Experience, Ensora Health
7. Work Cross-functionally to Define Your Segmentation Strategy
It’s not just Sales teams who need to get in on the customer education action. Segmentation becomes far more powerful and accurate when it’s built collaboratively and when teams can break down siloes which lead to fragmented content, duplicated efforts, and inconsistent learner experiences. Bringing multiple teams into the room creates alignment on who you’re targeting and why.
Vicky Kennedy explains how it works in her work as an education strategy consultant.
“We see a lot of different education teams working disparately from each other. So we try to bring anyone in who is doing, let’s say, the help center, the knowledge base, webinars, training, more formal training, professional service training, and maybe someone from the Product side and the Marketing side. If you get all the right heads in the room to start that whiteboard exercise, you can start to see you might have different teams creating content for the same segments, and you can all get clarity on what the learning experience should look like.” Vicky Kennedy, CEO, Echtus
8. Frame Customer Education as a Revenue Multiplier
Finally, for Tom Studdert, the success of customer education is all about how you frame it, to ensure that the whole business can see its value.
“Don’t frame customer education as a cost of service. Don’t talk about how much you’re spending. Talk about how much you’re bringing in the door. Speak to strategic leverage and position education as a driver of customer success.” Tom Studdert, VP Customer Experience, Ensora Health
When you position customer education as a revenue multiplier, leaders stop seeing it as support and start seeing it as strategy. Frame customer learning around the revenue, retention, and adoption it creates, and the business will treat it like the growth engine it is.
Ready to accelerate the maturity of your customer education function by unlocking customer value in 2026? Let’s talk.
