Have you ever prepared a report for leadership and thought, “How can my learners’ consumption data help executive stakeholders see the bigger picture”?
If haven’t started connecting customer success metrics to customer acquisition metrics, now's the time to start. As a customer success manager (CSM), understanding the entire customer lifecycle is imperative. It aligns your team with the goals of product, marketing, and sales teams.
Customer adoption metrics are now a crucial focus for organizations looking to deliver impactful customer education programs. With AI and content creation advancing quickly, many are eager to generate more educational resources. But here's the catch: more content doesn't automatically translate to more value. In fact, many organizations face a significant challenge—getting customers to consume the content they've created, let alone complete courses.
The good news? By tracking the right metrics, you can shift your focus from just producing content to delivering results. Below, we’re sharing four key customer acquisition metrics that can help you better understand how your customer education program impacts lead generation, sales, and long-term success.
Learn more: Master the entire customer lifecycle with an extended enterprise LMS
1. Lead-to-customer conversion rate
How well are you turning curiosity into commitment? Many customers will enter your funnel through customer education content such as webinars, events, and personalized email campaigns. To keep them engaged and converting, tracking how often visitors become paying customers will show you if your education strategy needs fine-tuning.
What is the lead-to-customer conversion rate?
Not a math person? No worries. The lead-to-customer conversion rate is simply the percentage of qualified leads that result in purchases. Still curious? You can find the formula here.
A qualified lead is a customer who’s shown clear signs they’re ready to buy your product or service. One common indicator closely involves your CS team—engagement with your brand. Or in this case, engagement with your customer education.
As a CSM, your content strategy can play a key role in converting leads from awareness to action. For example, if you update your customer education dashboard and your sales team sees an uptick in purchases, you may be able to track this increased revenue back to your team. Results like these can lead to a bigger budget next quarter!
How CS teams can use the lead-to-customer conversion rate
Sales teams calculate conversion weekly and monthly, so there are many opportunities to collaborate with them. Together, you can track the success of your customer education in attracting and converting leads.
Track customer education engagement in the attract phase
Align your learner engagement with sales outcomes by monitoring what content typically attracts and converts new customers with your customer education platform.
Start by asking these key questions:
- What educational content drives the most initial engagement?
- How personalized is the learning experience for prospects?
- How are our prospects discovering our educational content?
- Are we effectively using educational content to nurture leads after initial engagement?
- What topics or formats underperform in the attract phase?
- Is the educational content aligned with prospects pain points and needs?
- Are prospects consuming content that leads them further down the funnel?
Measure the impact of education on lead progression
Create a feedback loop with sales by regularly reviewing a leads’ educational progress. You can even set up custom reports that combine your team’s data (course completions, certification signups) with sales metrics. The key here is to better address prospects’ key pain points, objections, or gaps that can suppress the conversion rate.
2. Volume of educated-qualified leads (EQLs)
Is your team generating a steady stream of informed, high-quality leads? Customer education helps nurture and qualify leads more effectively. By using learning data to track lead engagement and readiness, CS teams can increase the number of leads who are both educated and qualified.
What is the volume of EQLs?
You’ve likely heard of sales or marketing qualified leads, but measuring EQLs is a metric where your learning-centered team can really thrive. Tracking EQLs shows how your education efforts drive lead conversion, customer retention, and revenue growth.
Here’s how to calculate the volume of EQLs:
- Establish ‘qualified’ criteria: Start with demographic and behavioral data from your sales team. Add interactions with your sales content.
- Create limits: Set a time period for measuring the volume. Monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Work with sales and marketing: Pull data on qualified leads from your CRM.
- Count the number of educated leads: Identify how many of those leads are educated based on your key indicators of what makes an educated-qualified lead.
- Track EQLs that made a purchase: Calculate the percentage of those leads that were well-versed on your platform before making a purchase. FYI: You can use an online lead calculator for this.
Still unsure how it works? Here’s an EQL example. At Whoville Finance, a lead needs at least 40 points to be considered an EQL. Their scoring system works like this:
- Attends a webinar (+10)
- Completes an online course (+20)
- Downloads a case study (+5)
- Passes a quiz (+15)
If most leads drop off after attending an introductory ROI webinar (+10), then Whoville’s customer education team will need to find ways to get them to 40 points before expecting a significant impact on revenue.
How to improve your customer education with EQL volume
Once you know your EQL volume, you may have just as much work to do as Whoville Finance! Fortunately, digging deeper into learner data from your LMS will make the job easier. Improve the percentage of EQLs that convert with these tips:
Segment leads based on learning progress
There are many ways to segment your leads for better content pathways. But have you tried segmenting your content by the stage of the funnel? Introductory courses, certifications, and webinars can all be shared with your sales team to help identify what stage of the buying process they’re in.
Create learning paths to accelerate lead qualification
Once you consider metrics for the attract phase of the customer lifecycle, you’ll become an expert on your learners. Plus, you’ll get more confident creating content that converts. Personalized learning paths such as courses or certifications can nurture your leads to be sales-ready.
Report on learning engagement metrics as lead qualification indicators
Even if your number of EQLs is lower than your goals, you can still report metrics that show your ability to attract customers to your brand.
A few metrics you can report include:
- Percentage of leads qualified after completing courses
- Average time to qualification after engaging with educational content
- Number of leads that advance to sales after finishing certification programs
These results could prove that your content is a key driver of lead readiness and improve your budget allowance YoY.
Tie learning content to buyer personas
Integrate your customer platform with your CRM to create make cross-departmental reporting easier and more accurate.
To increase the volume of qualified leads, you can:
- Create a customer education campaign for better targeting
- Segment your audience for more precise engagement
- Work with marketing to update buyer personas, find better marketing channels, and create targeted content to promote your customer education
- Improve brand visibility with public event attendance, thought leadership, hosting events, and social media
- Collaborate closely with sales and marketing to align on customer education strategies
3. Sales cycle length
Is your customer education fast-tracking prospects to a quicker ‘yes’? Your customer education programming can speed up the sales process. You can educate leads and prospects early on in their decision-making process to address common objections and frontload your product’s strengths.
What is the sales cycle length?
A sales cycle length is the total number of days it takes for customers to make a purchase, divided by the number of actual purchases.
How to improve your CE with sales cycle length
In the same way that there is overlap with your learning pathways, business metrics also feed into each other’s success. With sales cycle length, it can help to look closely at the data that informs your other metrics, such as EQLs. This will help you determine if there are opportunities to shorten up conversion time. And depending on your industry or business type (B2B or B2C), improving your product’s sales cycle length comes with unique challenges and opportunities.
Track learning engagement along the sales funnel
In the ‘attract’ phase of the customer lifecycle, you’ll want to look at how much content is consumed by leads in the product’s discovery phase. Discovery phase content typically includes webinars, product videos, comparison guides, and free trials. These content types show prospects how your product can solve their pain points. If prospects who consume certain types of content move to the decision phase faster, you can create more of this content to shorten your average sales length.
Compare time-to-close for educated vs non-educated leads
If leads who consume more educational content close faster, then its good news – your learning content is contributing to your business goals. But if high-value learning modules like a free certification aren’t converting well, you might need to audit your content to speed up the pipeline between sales and customer education.
Create or identify content that addresses common objections
It's time to investigate. Segment your prospects and find out what specific content solves their pain point. They might prefer product-specific webinars, technical Q&As, or even a training module on the ROI your product provides. Providing content that directly speaks to common objections to your product’s features might shorten the overall sales cycle.
4. Size of initial purchase
Are educated customers making bigger, more confident first purchases? If an education lead chooses a premium subscription over a freemium plan, it’s a clear sign they understood the value of your product.
What is the size of initial purchase?
The size of initial purchase is the total cost of your customer’s first transaction. Perhaps your customers went through one webinar and signed up for a free trial. And some of your customers purchased a premium account with two popular add-ons. A lot of helpful information can be derived from when and where customers decide to make (or not make) a decision after looking at your content.
How to improve your CE with the size of initial purchase
Identify which learners are interested in content about premium features or add-ons. From there, you can create new content that further demonstrates the ROI of your offering. Link learning engagement to upselling opportunities. Create learning paths that highlight premium features.
Segment leads by learning engagement and purchase behavior
With automated recommendations, you can use learner data to personalize sales offers. You can also report the correlation between education and larger purchases to get a bigger budget for the following year.
Create bundled learning and product offers
Make sure your customers know the value of add-ons, premium accounts, and bundled offers. Personalized calls-to-action (CTAs) perform 202% better than basic CTAs. Drive confident purchasing by creating CTAs, billboards, and content that addresses their most pressing business needs.
A fresh start: Your relationship with sales and marketing
If you’re hoping to jumpstart your customer success team as a sales enablement function, understanding these metrics is a great start. It’s all about launching a renewed collaboration with sales and marketing, from go-to-market strategy to account management.
From an L&D perspective, what is the message you want customers know and access easily? Hamish on the Return on Intelligence podcast notes that the gap in product knowledge is one that can be filled by L&D team. Going forward, choose one metric to engage with your sales team and see where it takes your team’s success!
