First of all, Stephanie, thank you for being here, but I’m going to just start by questioning the entire premise of today’s conversation. Why are we even talking about adoption and retention? We’re marketers. Isn’t it your job to build brand and pipeline? What are you doing?

Well, I would really argue that adoption and retention are critical for both brand and pipeline. If you really think about it—whether you’re a consumer buying a car, or a business buying software—you’re buying a brand promise. You’re hooked in by what the brand tells you it will deliver. You’re sold on the value, the transformation, the experience. And you want to see that promise come true. Now, if we’re talking about software—technology is multifaceted. It evolves fast. It’s not always intuitive. I mean, honestly, my 11-year-old will pick up my phone and go, “Mom, here’s how you actually do this…” And I’m like, “Okay, digital native…”

But you think about software, software keeps evolving. It can really be hard to keep up with that. So you buy this brand promise. You used the product you used the old product. It wasn't as good, that's why you switched then your not really getting that full value out of it. So what happens, what happens to the brand? The brand might be a little tarnished in your eyes. Your not really delivering on innovation. So when that company comes back and says " Hey can we get a story from you? Can we understand the value you're seeing in ROI? All those great transformational stories..."your like its fine". So you don't get that story. And then when that company, comes back to you and says "What do you think about buying more?, we have all these great solutions?". Well you say to yourself "I'm not getting full value at what I got and its pretty expensive so I'm not really ready to expand". So you see it all comes back togerther.

It does. And I think we all know how it feels when a company only reaches out with an ask—“Hey, buy the next thing,” or “Check out this new upgrade”—and your gut reaction is, “Where were you when I actually needed help?” Which brings me to your point—yes, I hear you about the value and the brand promise. But isn’t that Customer Success’s job? Why is marketing doing this?

So you know, when you say something about like going back to brands, you'll hear marketers say we're all brand ambassadors, right? You call, you talk to someone on the phone, you talk to customer support, you talk to sales—that all contributes to your view of that brand. So I would also argue that adoption should be everyone's job. We should all be accountable to ensure our customer success because it's critical to the health of the business. We have a job to help our customers, to help our customers see value and to keep our company healthy. So I see marketing as success ambassadors as well. You know, we should be really helping customer success better do their job. You shouldn't be throwing over a bunch of customers who aren't seeing value, who aren't happy, who are frustrated, and then just look to them to fix it.

OK, that's the why. And thank you for being patient, right? I wanted to challenge right out the gate.

No, it's a fair question. I get that a lot. And I think there's often discussion and debate around who really owns this. I personally see it as a partnership.

Right. Exactly. And I'm going to I'm going to have you switch hats now from, you know, this customer strategist and brand strategist, Lepow, to now this marketing Lepow. Right. So from the marketing perspective, getting down into the next level. That's what we want to do. We want to drive better adoption. We want greater customer success. We want to message that. You've got a lot of options at Workday. What content works well to drive adoption and retention and growth?

So I think it's content. I would say, you know, you can have content in different formats that really it's all about education. So you do have to build awareness. Sometimes you do, just like in regular kind of marketing. You have to maybe build awareness, like take AI as an example. It's a very hot topic right now. You might need to help your customers understand, well, what is this? What can you do? How can it actually benefit you? Why is this not just a buzzword? And what does this actually mean to you in the context of your role and what you're trying to do with your solutions and what you're trying to do in your business?

But then you really need to take it deeper. So I think that's a thing that I always talk to my team about with our content, is that it has to be a click deeper. You know, you can't just put out a cool, shiny infographic and say, like, here you go. Good luck. Go forth and conquer. You might need to get a little deeper in an e-book. I mean, some of our content might be a little bit longer than you see for a typical marketing e-book, but it's really getting into the why, the how, and what are your next steps.

I think when it comes to adoption content, you want to help them understand. But then if they leave that, if they finish your e-book or they go to your webinar and they're really excited, how are you directing them? Because it might not be a salesperson calling them and saying, like, oh, looks like you're interested. Let me help you further this opportunity. They might need to go explore your education offerings. They might need to get help with a service engagement. They might need just guidance on, like, OK, if I'm the system administrator, what do I turn on in the software to get this moving?So I think thinking about that full circle is really important.

Exactly. And this is where I was going to go with this—let’s go another click deeper into the content. Right? Of course, there’s newsletters and there’s emails—gosh, so many emails, right? But can you—do you guys—have you developed anything else? Do you have any sort of programmatic or serious content? Give an example.

Yeah. So my team actually developed a really popular series with our customers. Prospects sometimes come too. It's called Looking Forward with Workday. And why it’s worked is that it’s really, again, that kind of holistic approach. And we’ve been using these more for demand, but I’ll get to what we’re doing in a moment. We try to get a customer whenever possible or a really expert speaker—talk more at the business lens, then go into product, go into a demo, and then give them clear next steps. It’s been a really great formula. And within that series, we would sprinkle in some adoption-focused sessions. Now that my team has kind of pivoted and we’re really going deep on adoption and retention, we created a new stream called Adopt and Advance. So we’re doing those at least monthly—we might add in more. We’ve done a lot on AI, really going under the covers into security and compliance and the things that companies really have to worry about, because it’s not just an exciting new technology. There’s actually a lot of implications.

So going a little deeper there—we just had a great series on our release, our spring release, by different buying centers, helping our customers really understand what are the key highlights they need to care about. And then pairing that with some guides. And we have a lot of content out in our community as well. But what we’re doing is really addressing a broader audience. So sometimes you go out into content on your community, which is huge—and a community is a big part of it and we have a great partnership—but you don’t want to just talk to that system administrator. You also want to talk to the line of business user. So a lot of our content goes there.

Something else that we did recently—we have a bus tour. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it. So Workday Illuminate Bus Tour. It’s super cool. It looks like a rock star bus. We’re going to different cities. And then with that, we have a lot of different events aligned with the bus tour, and we’ve had regional user groups. So that’s been great.

And we’ve done a lot of presentations on AI—again, helping our customers understand our latest innovations. But then, since it’s close to the spring release, we’ve been doing those highlights too.

And I have a lot of friends at Workday. I’m actually—probably one of my friends helped create your bus tour. I know them. So there’s a little mini flex on both sides here. Workday is one of our favorite customers. So we do know each other really well. Yeah. I want to, though, I want to take where you went there with the broad variety of engagements. And yes, marketing is going to create these things—these aren’t going to have a customer success. I think you made that point really well. I want to shift to how are you scoring or measuring these engagements? What’s the data behind this sort of engagement that would help sales to know when to, you know, step in—or when to maybe hang back?

So actually, we are building. And I do want to go back to customer success, though, because one thing that we're actually doing right now—in strong partnership with customer success and with others like our solution consulting team and our product team—is helping customers who have bought a product but still have to implement it. So really making sure we're going back to the why—you know, what's exciting with this product, what might be new with it, what's on the roadmap—also giving them really prescriptive guidance on, you know, how do you implement it? How can we help you?

And then our customer success team is actually following up. And they're really driving a lot of those conversations. So I do think—even though I’m saying marketing is creating some of the content and it’s not all from customer success—they’re a really critical partner. And I would say we’re working together more and more, because they know the customer so well. And at some points, it makes sense for them to take the baton. Or sometimes it might make sense for sales.

When it comes to tracking—really work in progress—because we track a lot. You know, I think we have really good systems in place for tracking pipeline. We've got it down. Work really closely with our sales teams. Now that we're in this new world, you know, you can use some of those traditional marketing metrics. You want to look at engagement, and then you can ideally tie that back to: OK, if I did a program on AI adoption, can I go look and see, did we have an increase in customers who adopted more AI features? And can we go back and track that to: OK, these customers engaged, and now they've adopted—similar to this customer engaged and eventually they bought something.

But, you know, you're working with some different systems. Customer success teams work in different systems than sales teams. So something I'm working on right now is really understanding, like, what should that infrastructure look like from a process standpoint—and then how do we get all the systems to talk together?

So come back to me in a few months, and hopefully—hopefully—I'll have it all figured out.

Oh my God, I’d love to bring you back. This is fantastic. So I will say, for those that are in the audience—because we have some great brands with us today—those that may not know retention marketing or customer marketing that well, you mentioned one that I think a lot of people forget: they purchased but not implemented. So just straight up—the implementation phase—before any ROI. Then there’s adoption, made of how they’re using it and rolling it out, and you could expand into new use cases. Is there anything else? Or is it just those two phases: implementation and adoption?

I mean, I really think it’s—you want to be with them through their whole life cycle. So there are points where the customer buys with you initially, they need to get up and running, or they’re hopefully buying more as you go along. So they could have something—they could need help with implementation—and they’ve been with you for years but they have a new product, right? And then of course, as they’re getting toward renewal, you’re going to be having different conversations—making sure that the account’s really healthy, that they’re ready for a successful renewal.

But really throughout their life cycle, I think it’s understanding—looking at their product landscape, understanding where they could maybe get more value by adopting more features of a certain product or, of course, by turning on what they’re entitled to. But then it’s also just ongoing innovation. So every time you have a release, every time you have an enhancement, every time there’s something really new happening in the industry—it’s not just always about, “Hey, we have this cool feature.” It might be, “Hey, AI is coming more into your world.” I keep bringing up AI, but it’s so present. Or you and I were talking about this before we went live—skills—moving to a skills-based strategy.

You can’t just sell software and be like, “Hey, here you go. You’re ready to go. You’re ready to really switch the way you think about talent management.” It’s really a mindset shift. There’s change management. So I do actually see a role in marketing—and adoption/retention marketing—to really be business partners and help educate customers on how this all fits together, and how we can really go on the journey with them.

Now, this is perfect—because there are many coming back to the content and how you design programs, not just individual assets, right? There are many ways that you could build a framework for this in the sort of traditional revenue and market conquer landscape. So I’m curious—how do you guys do it?

Do you see it by industry?
Do you see it by company size?
Do you see it by job role?

How do you organize how you’re driving that customer marketing production, so to speak?

Right, yeah, I mean, I think it depends.

I think there’s certain things or certain topics where you really need to have the industry lens. There’s other things where you can kind of cut across. That’s something we actually realized with our Looking Forward series, and I think we’re always trying to calibrate to see how much needs to be industry-first versus what can be horizontal. And oftentimes—especially if it’s a customer success story—if they’re tackling a tricky thing and they’ve really figured it out (because we always like to say how they did it, not just what they used), that’s more interesting. We would draw customers across multiple industries. So I think it’s just trying to understand and really talking to your sales teams, your customer success teams, your industry and product marketing experts to understand: Where do I really need to go narrow with this industry?

And then same with persona. Sometimes it’s going to be super specific, but in B2B, you have buying committees. So sometimes you’re going to address something and you’re going to have to look at it through the lens of multiple buyers. So I think it’s just really getting tight with your audience. But something else I do want to mention—and we’re getting tight on time—but if you’re building out an adoption/retention marketing program, to the points that I made earlier, not all of that has to come out of your team. You should be really working with your other marketing teams. We take in content from our thought leadership team—even maybe from our demand team—and sometimes they’ll take our content. So really think about what’s the story you’re trying to tell, and then where can you source all of that so you’re not duplicating effort.

Now, I’m gonna take this—and I think I’ll round it out here. I think we may run out of time with this question. We’ll see if we get one more in. Let’s take it—you really did a good job helping us understand how this is really well-suited for marketing to lead, right? As opposed to, say, customer success or the product team. I’m gonna take this now to sales, right? What is your relationship like with sales? What’s your working relationship like with sales? What are you delivering to them, Stephanie? Are you delivering, like in the normal demand side, leads and opportunities? Or are you delivering customer report cards?What do you give them—and then what do they do with it?

Yeah, so we’re actually working with a new sales team that is focused on account management. So they’re really leaning into this. We are all in this together—building things out and understanding what “good” should look like going forward. So again, I would say come back to me in a few months, and I can share some more insights. But yeah, because it’s not traditional leads. I mean, right now we’re looking at what are broad areas of need. Where do we see broad areas where we’re like, well, customers could use some more support with adoption. How do we best think about and prepare customers for renewals. Look at account health. Do some really targeted programs where we see cohorts that need support. But then also those broader programs where we’re like, okay, there’s a lot of customers who need help with AI. There’s a lot of customers who need to understand how to adopt our releases. And then it’s also internal education. I think it’s also making sales aware of like, what do we have for you to help your customers. What tools do we have. If you’re in a conversation about tax, what do we have to give you to support that.

Yep, thank you. This will be our last question. I’m gonna take one extra minute of your time—thank you for being patient with us. But it’s a really good one. It actually comes from a friend of mine, so they’re also a very seasoned marketer. So help us understand how you track the personas or the buyers within, say, an enterprise account—because often the largest decision-maker or buyer, dollar-wise, isn’t the loudest voice or biggest evangelist, right? So how does that work? Who do you partner with on a customer-to-customer basis?

Yeah, so I think that’s such a good point. And like, a few years ago, I would say when I was focusing more on HR, I heard a lot like, “Oh, HRIT, I don’t know if we need to do a program for that,” and I was like, “I think they’re pretty influential.” But I’m hearing from people around the company that they’re really critical buyers. We have a huge focus on them now. So I think you have to look at your statistics. You make assumptions of, well, we know the C-level signs the check, so we need to increase that engagement. But when we actually look at the makeup of the deal, and you look at who’s engaged and who’s really attached to the opportunity, you know that that kind of middle layer is really, really critical.

So I think it’s looking at the data, it’s talking—I mean, I’m just a big fan of getting in a room and talking with my sales partner, or now learning a lot more from customer success. I mean, these are the people who talk to the customers every day and who will tell you the reality. And I think—I know this is not just specific to adoption and retention—but marketers have to look at the qualitative and the quantitative together. Your dashboards can be perfect, but if you’re not also having contextual conversations with your customer-facing teams, you are missing so much. And also, of course, your product teams. I mean, there’s so many—it’s an ecosystem. So I think my big piece of advice to marketers is: get out in the business and make friends with so many teams because they’re just going to bring a depth of knowledge that you’re not going to necessarily get just in a dashboard.

Yep, and I’ll bring this home, Stephanie, with a point from our friends at Forrester, right?

We’re at their event every year and it’s a great event. We bring our customers like yourself to their stage. And there’s a huge emphasis right now on buying networks, buying groups, collections of buyers—where you wouldn’t normally market, you need to show up there, because they’re asking for recommendations. And the funny thing is—in our conversation—I want to bring this point home for the audience: that is still probably about 20% of this and next year’s revenue.

The other 80% is what Stephanie’s doing. It’s the customer journey. It’s the customer group, right? It’s the customer collection of the people that are already working with you. What do they need? And focusing on that is probably the fastest route to revenue.

Absolutely, and then they’re your ambassadors, right?

If you have happy, successful customers who are delivering on your brand promise, when other companies are looking to come with you, they’re looking for that. They want to see what their peers are doing. They want to see that their peers are successful and that they’re taken care of by your company—because they’re investing. A customer is not just buying software from you. They’re investing in a relationship—and rightfully so, they expect a lot out of that.

Thank you so much, Stephanie. I will try to get you back. We will have a part two to this story. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I know. Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks everybody. See you next time.