At dbt Labs, we’ve always known our training programs make a difference—for our users and our business. But like many customer education teams, we faced a familiar challenge: how do you actually prove it?
How do you show that course completions lead to pipeline?
Or that a learning path enrollment reflects high buyer intent?
Or that certifications reduce churn?
It all starts with speaking the same language as the rest of your business. Here’s how we approached reporting on the impact of education, the lessons we learned along the way, and what we’d recommend to anyone getting started on the same journey.
Translate Your Impact to Your Stakeholders
One of the biggest mindset shifts we had to make was this: our job wasn’t just to talk about learning outcomes. It was to talk about business outcomes.
As Kyle Coapman, our Director of Training at the time, puts it, “You get delegated to who you sound like. If you’re talking about Bloom’s Taxonomy or instructional design, you’ll stay in the education silo. But if you’re talking about pipeline, win rates, and customer retention, you’ll find your way into rooms with marketing, sales, and success leaders.”
Understanding our stakeholders’ metrics—MQLs, ARR, churn, partner certifications—was essential to aligning our reporting.
In other words, the more we learned the metrics that mattered most to their goals and outcomes, the better we could map training activity back to results they cared about.
This echoes a core principle from Telling Ain’t Training by Harold Stolovitch and Erica Keeps—a classic our team refers to often: “Training is not about what you say; it’s about what they learn.”
We apply this mindset with our learners, meeting them where they are and considering their motivations and needs. But it’s easy to forget our internal stakeholders deserve the same consideration. If we only speak the language of learning design, we risk alienating those focused on revenue, customer satisfaction, or retention.
The Three Metrics That Mattered Most
When we reoriented our reporting strategy, we focused on three core areas that tied directly to business value:
1. Reach (Engagement and Re-Engagement)
This metric matters most to the marketing team—they’re focused on generating pipeline and identifying high-intent leads. That’s why we started by asking: What learning actions signal serious buyer interest?
One insight came from tracking learners who entered our certification path. These aren’t casual users. They’ve already completed our flagship course, and now they’re signing up for a structured journey through six more rigorous, product-focused courses.
“When someone with a corporate email address starts our learning path,” I told the CMO, “that’s a career decision. That’s high intent—and it should be treated like a top-of-funnel signal.”
Framing it that way changed everything. It aligned our learning engagement metrics with marketing’s goals and language. Now, these actions feed into Salesforce and are used to generate and qualify MQLs based on clear criteria: company size, domain type, and course activity.
2. Quality (Program Effectiveness)
This one matters most to the customer success and post-sales teams—the groups focused on adoption, satisfaction, and long-term retention.
They want to know: Is the training actually working? Are learners completing it, finding value, and using it to succeed with our product?
That’s where our learning metrics—like NPS, completion rates, and certification achievements—come in. But instead of just reporting on them internally, we began reframing them in business terms.
A completed certification, for example, isn’t just an instructional win. It’s a sign that the user is deeply engaged, actively learning, and better equipped to get value from our product. That’s the kind of insight Customer Success can act on.
By translating “quality” into a measure of readiness and value realization, we gave post-sales teams a reason to pay attention—and a metric they could use to strengthen adoption and renewal strategies.
3. Revenue Impact (Pipeline and Retention)
This is the metric that gets the attention of sales, marketing, and executive leadership—the teams focused on new revenue, win rates, and customer retention.
Their question is simple: Does training move the needle on the bottom line?
We began pushing enrollment data into Salesforce to automatically generate leads for the marketing team. With simple rules—such as filtering by company size and corporate email domain—we were suddenly helping qualify MQLs.
That wasn’t always intentional. Kyle explains, “One day we looked at the pipeline dashboard, and there was literally a line that said ‘Enrolled in dbt Learn.’ The marketing team had pulled it in themselves.”
And that was just the beginning. “We’ve started to measure renewal rates against training participation,” Kyle added. “If one customer has three trained users and another has none, what does that tell us? Those are the kinds of correlations that get leadership’s attention.”
From Manual Reports to Integrated Insights
Before we built automated dashboards or embedded metrics in Salesforce, everything was manual. Spreadsheets. CSVs. Pivot tables. Sound familiar?
In other organizations I’ve worked with, the LMS was off in a silo. It wasn’t connected to business data, and it wasn’t growing the way it could. I think this is a very common experience for customer education teams.
That changed for dbt labs once we partnered with our internal data team. We learned how to model our learner data, clean and map it to other systems, and build reports that other teams could actually use.
It wasn’t just about proving ROI—it was about making our results more visible across the company.
Lessons We’d Share With Other Education Teams
If we could go back and give ourselves a playbook, here’s what it would include:
- Learn the language of your stakeholders.
Have a coffee chat with your CMO, Head of Sales, or Marketing Ops lead. Understand their top KPIs—and then ask, “How could education contribute to this?” - Push data to where decisions are made.
If your training data lives in a spreadsheet, it’s not going to drive impact. Find ways to surface insights in Salesforce, dashboards, or your company’s existing reports. - Correlate, then communicate.
Even simple correlations—like training engagement vs. renewal rate—can go a long way. “You don’t need a perfect data warehouse to start,” Kyle says. “Just start looking at the patterns.” - Collaborate early and often.
Your Marketing Ops team might be your secret weapon. Show them what’s available in your LMS. Help them understand what a learning path is—and why it’s a signal of intent. The more they know, the more they can help amplify your impact.
Don’t Go It Alone
Customer education is already doing powerful work. But to prove ROI, we have to be just as intentional about how we report to stakeholders as we are about how we teach customers.
Work with your data team. Partner with your stakeholders. And most importantly, translate your impact into the language the business already speaks.
Because once they see the value? You won’t have to explain it twice.
ABOUT DEE LASA
Dee Lasa is a Senior Learning Operations Analyst at dbt Labs, specializing in designing and measuring training programs that drive tangible business results. Passionate about aligning education metrics with revenue goals, she transforms learning initiatives into strategic assets that enhance pipeline growth, customer retention, and satisfaction.
