Using the Marketer’s Approach for Training: A Conversation with Mike Taylor

CommLab Podcast with Mike Taylor

Sherna Varayath 0:48
Hello there and welcome back to the eLearning Champion Podcast where we navigate the strategies, trends, and triumphs shaping the world of digital learning. Are you ready to discover the secrets to ignite learning? Do you want to stay ahead of the curve in this rapidly evolving landscape? Well, you've come to the right place. In this episode, we are going to think like a marketer and train like an L&D professional. We have the amazing Mike Taylor here with us to identify the key strategies. Hi, Mike.

Taylor, Mike 1:24
Hey, how are you? It's good to be here.

Sherna Varayath 1:27
Thank you. We're glad to have you here. With more than 25 years of experience guiding his work, Mike Taylor is passionate about making learning practical and effective. He leads instructional design and learning technology efforts at Nationwide in Columbus, Ohio, and teaches in the instructional design and performance technology graduate program at Franklin University. He is also the co-author of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. Whether speaking at industry events or collaborating with teams, Mike focuses on real world strategies that help people do their best work. We're looking forward to hear from you today, Mike.

Taylor, Mike 2:22
Thanks. I'm excited to share some things and I'm honored that you would invite me to come talk with you guys.

Sherna Varayath 2:29
Thank you. So, dear listeners, before we dive in, make sure you'll never miss an episode packed with valuable tips, inspiring stories and the latest industry buzz by following us on your favorite podcast platform. All right, now to get started.

Mike, you open your book with a startling statistic. Organizations spend over $350 billion on training annually, but only a fraction results in improved performance. What's the story behind how you discovered this disconnect?

Taylor, Mike 3:02
Well, it's a crazy big number, right? 350 billion without significant change to show for it. And you know, I first saw it when I was doing some research for the book. And it's striking that if marketers did that, they probably wouldn't still have a job if you think. No, marketers track everything, clicks and plays, and who watches and how long they stay and where they drop off. And they're kind of relentless about measuring, particularly about measuring for the purpose of figuring out what works and tweaking what doesn't, to try to improve things. But too often in L&D, we put out a course and we just sort of hope for the best. And so that gap is one of the things that sparked the thought of what if L&D brought more of a marketing mindset to our L&D practices. And so that's where that came from, in researching the book and digging into things like that. Both Bianca, my co-author, and I both spent time working in marketing companies, and so that helped us open our eyes to some of the marketing mindset that we talk about.

Sherna Varayath 4:20
Wow. Interesting. Now tell us about that moment when you first realized that marketing and L&D professionals are essentially trying to solve the same problem. What were you seeing in your work that made this connection click?

Taylor, Mike 4:35
Yeah, I still remember that day pretty clearly. I was working, kind of teaching some basic instructional learning design principles to a marketing team. And in doing that and seeing some of their reactions and some of those conversations, it dawned on me that really we're all doing the same thing. We have the same shared goals. We both want to grab people's attention because without that, nothing else matters.

And then once we get that attention, we're trying to influence their behavior and get them to do or think differently.

And instead, what often happens in training is we're just sort of relying on gut instincts and hoping people will pay attention. Marketers design. That's part of their design process, it's very explicit, how can we get people's attention? And that moment is really what launched this whole journey in the book and everything that comes with it.

Sherna Varayath 5:37
OK. Now you talk about how our brains have this ‘always on’ mental radar that marketers exploit, but L&D often ignores. Can you paint a picture of what's happening in our learners’ heads when they encounter our training?

Taylor, Mike 5:56
Yeah. So there's something I think that should probably be more prevalent in instructional design programs and graduate schools and all that sort of stuff. It's called a dual processing theory. And Daniel Kahneman has a bestselling book out. He won a Nobel Prize for some of his work, and he talks about we have two types of thinking. The fast brain, which psychologists call system one. It's insanely fast. It's automatic, we can't turn it off. If you think of survival, we see a shadow move in the corner of our eye, and we jump when we hear a loud sound and that's the system one. Whereas the slow brain, it's much slower. It's analytical. It's solving a math problem. The system one fast system is really emotional. The system 2 is really analytical and logical. So there's a really big contrast. System one is largely subconscious. And one of the fascinating things I've learned in this process is 95-98 or more percent of what determines our behavior is subconscious.

And I was guilty of this when I first started out. You know, I'm an accidental trainer, like a lot of other folks and you just work off of intuition. And our intuition is usually we would just give people the facts and the logic and then they will do the obvious thing. And that's actually not the way it works at all. We're largely driven by these subconscious factors that we're often not aware of. And then we come, and we backfill the logic.

One thing that I think illustrates this pretty well is most of those subconscious shortcuts that our brains take, we have by the time we're six years old. So if I were to ask you, what would you do differently if you were designing for a six year old, what might that look like for you? What would you do differently?

A lot of times people say colors simplify, movement, things that will grab your attention. And my response to that is well, of those things, what do you not like as an adult?

Everybody likes those things as compared to boring walls of text, all those things. And so it's a good little training hack, design for that 6 year old and you're probably going to get more engaging, more attention getting results.

Sherna Varayath 8:46
Right. Interesting, yes. You use this fictional company Lux Kitchens, throughout the book. Could you walk us through how two different trainers, Jen and Juan, approached the same sales training challenge and why one succeeds while the other fails spectacularly?

Taylor, Mike 9:06
I think this is a relatable story and it really brings to life the difference of the mindset that we're talking about in the book. So, Lux kitchens is our luxury kitchen supply that we use as an example through the book. Jen has a marketing mindset. She opens training with an emotional story. You know, she paints vivid ‘before and after’ scenarios. She makes everything personally relevant to her audience, so the effect of that is learners, they sit up, they take notice, they feel pulled in, they see what's matters to them personally. Then in contrast, Juan just puts up a bunch of dense slides, a lot of definitions. He's the guy hoping logic will carry the day. His learners are probably pretty quick to check out. They're checking their e-mail. We've all seen those training rooms. And the moral of this story is: If you can't connect emotionally and design for real human motivation, then it doesn't matter what the information is, they're not going to pay attention. And if you don't have that, could be the best thing in the world. So Jen treats it like a marketing campaign, stories, visuals, hands on practice, getting attention, speaking to that fast, intuitive brain versus what I think a lot of our intuition is academic lecture, jargon, no emotional connection. And I think it's pretty easy to see. I've asked this question: Which one of those training sessions would you rather be in, and nobody's ever said they want to be in one session, but we still do it a lot. We see it all the time, so I think there's a gap there that needs to be closed.

Sherna Varayath 10:54
Now, like the gap you mentioned, most L&D content reads like a technical manual. You've got this framework called Sure Principles for Writing that Clicks. Can you tell us more about that?

Taylor, Mike 11:08
Yeah, we've all read those dry, boring things. You're searching for one bit, and you have to wade through walls of text. And so, the sure principles are simple, useful. resonant as in emotionally resonant, and easy to skim.

So Simple. I used to work at an agency, and we would always use the word unpacking like we need to unpack this a little bit further. It needs to be simple, but not dumbed down. I think sometimes people misunderstand simple versus dumbed. Simple can be very difficult, but it's not dumbing it down.

Useful. It's coming back to how is it personally relevant to me? Our brain is wired to pay attention to things that relate to us. So if you've ever been at a loud party and there's tons of conversations and somebody says your name across the room, but you can hear it. It's kind of that concept. Relevant, means we've got to understand our audiences. If we don't understand our audiences, we don't know what's relevant, we're really shooting in the dark at that point.

The R is resonant or resonate emotionally. We've talked about that a little bit and so striking some type of emotional chord, tapping into what people care about. What are their goals? What are their fears? What are their motivations? And that's an important part that goes along with those practical needs.

And then the last one, Easy to skim. That's using things like white space, visual hierarchy, design elements that help improve cognitive fluency so people can process and remember the message easily, they can understand what you're trying to say, and readability is an important part in all of this too.

So when you use those principles, what you're doing is, you're designing in alignment with the way our brains take in information and not just dumping it on people. And that makes your writing feel a lot more approachable, accessible, human, and much less likely to get ignored.

Sherna Varayath 13:31
Right. OK. Now you talk about how our brains make judgments about content in as little as 17 milliseconds, faster than we can blink. That's a fascinating concept, that if it looks good, it is good. How is this snap judgment affecting our training before learners even read the first word?

Taylor, Mike 13:55
Yeah. So this is kind of getting into a little bit of that system one, that fast, intuitive, emotional thinking that we were just talking about. And I think it could even be faster. 17 was just as fast as the machine could measure, and for comparison, a blink is about 200 to 400 milliseconds. So it's insanely fast. But there's some research that has said what something looks like impacts our perception of the credibility, the trustworthiness, even the usability of what we're looking at. So if I had two identical things of content and one looked really bad and one looks really good, even though it's the same content, those are going to be rated very differently. A lot of people have probably had the experience of, hey, just get this out the door, doesn't matter what it looks like. And it's really, really not true. So even things like headlines, if you were to go and look at the titles in your LMS, my guess is there’s conflict resolution 101. It's like, why do I care about that? There's no element to hook me and to bring me in and make it personally relevant, so those first impressions lead to that idea of our brain. It's another shortcut that our brain uses. If it looks good, it must be good. And then there's a Halo effect to that first impression that carries on throughout the rest of it. So that first impression is really critical and it's another thing I think doesn't always get the attention it should get in training world.

Sherna Varayath 15:24
Wow, OK. You shared your story about managing 42 workshops in 40 cities. Most L&D professionals are drowning in administrative tasks like he was. What's possible when we start thinking about marketing automation for learning and development?

Taylor, Mike 15:54
Oh my gosh. I could probably talk about marketing tools for days and days, but especially when it helps us and this is a perfect example. So 42 workshops, 40 different cities, about 1000 people. So you can imagine the data that's flying around registrations, e-mail confirmations, emailing resources. We had online courses those people took. We had follow up webinars. So a mix of platforms, e-mail tools, spreadsheets, the stuff was just going over the place. And if I were to try to manage that manually, I absolutely despise ‘Download a spreadsheet, make some edits, go to another platform, upload the spreadsheet’, it's just mind numbing. Plus, probably in the process I would probably make errors, make mistakes, because it's a lot of stuff. And so, what I discovered is a marketing automation tool called Zapier. I always say Zapier makes you happier because what it lets you do is it can connect existing tools. So in our case, we had a web form, we had Google Sheets, we had an e-mail marketing platform, which is another great marketing tool. So as soon as somebody would submit their registration, I use Zapier to say ‘if registration is submitted, add to e-mail campaign’, also ‘if registration submitted add to tracking sheet.’

So this one action is kicking off three or four other actions and other tools automatically and I don't have to touch it. And so, a little small investment of time up front saved me, gosh, I don't know, probably hundreds of hours of manual data work and stuff which didn't let me spend that time on something more valuable like the program itself and coaching and those sorts of things, yeah.

Sherna Varayath 18:05
Interesting. Well, now let's be real. Some L&D professionals might here think like a marketer and feel like we're asking them to become manipulative or salesy. How do you address that concern?

Taylor, Mike 18:24
So two things. I think the first thing is everybody is marketing something. They just don't know it. And if you don't know it, it's probably bad. So think about a dry, let's say, compliance course. You don't see how it's relevant. There's no emotion. It's walls of text. That's marketing and it's bad. And so it's giving your training a bad brand name, so to speak. And so I think that's the first part.

The second part is, when I'm talking about it, it's not slick or manipulative. But it's understanding people, what they care about. What's relevant? What helps them take action? So it's important that we're still delivering value and not just being kind of the slimy clickbait type approach that's tricking people, because that's also bad.

That's also bad marketing. And if you think about it, we're in a great place, what we do should help people work better and be better. So I think that's the ultimate value. I understand why people would ask that question. But I think in some ways it might be the wrong question.

Sherna Varayath 19:43
If someone's listening right now and thinking I want to try this tomorrow, what's one thing they could implement immediately that would make a noticeable difference?

Taylor, Mike 19:56
So I'm going to give you two. One is, look at that first impression. What does it look like? And that first impression may not start with the training program, it may start with the registration process. Is it painful? Do I have to log into three different places? What is their first interaction, to think of the whole journey and not just the course?

And in my experience it, it takes so little amount of friction for people to throw their hands up and walk away. And that's a bad first impression. And we talked about all those things.

And the other thing that is super easy. Most places have some form of annual compliance course.

Sort of leaning back to technology a little bit to e-mail marketing tools are amazing. You can build automated campaigns, so I think one low hanging fruit that anybody could do, and you could have this done in probably about an hour or two because you've already got content in your compliance course. You could just pull out key points, set up an e-mail campaign so you could e-mail one key point per month over the course of the year to reinforce what's in your compliance course.

So those are just two simple things. The great thing about all of this is it's essentially free, it's just a shift in your mindset. You don't have to buy expensive new tools or learn some new methodology. It's just a shift in mindset and anybody can do it.

Sherna Varayath 21:32
Wow, yes. Now when you imagine the future of L&D where marketing principles are fully integrated, what does that workplace look like? What becomes possible when we finally solve this $350 billion dollar problem?

Taylor, Mike 21:54
I'm excited by that. I imagine it looks like learning that feels human and relevant and genuinely helpful. So it's not about ticking boxes or pushing out content for the sake of pushing out content. It's not publish and pray. It’s creating experiences that feel timely and personalized, just like marketers are trying to make it feel like they're doing something just for you. I think we could model that approach. And then ultimately coming back to where we started with measurement, success wouldn't be measured by completion rates, but actual application and business results. And so, maybe the biggest win of this approach and everything would be people don't roll their eyes when they have to do training. They would see it as the valuable tool that it can be, that helps them grow and feel confident and do their job. And I think if we can move in that direction, we could do a lot to close that $350 billion gap.

Sherna Varayath 23:01
Well, yes, absolutely. I agree. And this brings us to the end of another insightful episode of the e-learning Champion Podcast. We've covered a lot today from implementation hacks, sure principles, snap judgment. I hope our listeners are walking away with some actionable strategies to power up their learning like marketers. Thank you so much Mike for your input, suggestions and stories.

Taylor, Mike 23:26
Thank you for inviting me to the conversation. If anybody wants to learn more, they can go to our website, trainlikeamarketer.com. We have plenty of things and blog posts and e-mail subscriptions and all the things. So appreciate the chance to talk to you today.

Sherna Varayath 23:46
Thank you so much, Mike. So dear listeners, I hope you make the most of today's episode. And do check out the website that Mike has mentioned. If you found value in today's conversation, please do share this episode with your colleagues. We've got more fantastic episodes lined up featuring incredible guests like Mike and tackling the top. That matter the most to you. Find us on your favorite social platforms to keep the conversation going. Thank you so much for tuning in to the eLearning Champion podcast. Keep innovating. Keep inspiring. Until next time, take care and happy learning.