Overview
This six-session live cohort course helps people learn foundational processes and methods to advance their career in revenue operations, a growing field that integrates sales, marketing, and customer success operations.
Responsibilities: Instructional design, development, educational template/workbook creation, live instructing/training, communicating with students. Collaborating with a co-creator and co-instructor.
Target Audience: Agency service delivery teams and revenue operations professionals at all job levels
Tools Used: Google Slides, Google Sheets, Zoom, Bevy, Airtable, Slack
Client: HubSpot Academy
Year: Creation in 2022-2023, ongoing teaching
Problem
From a company standpoint, RevOps is of growing interest to HubSpot's partner agencies and customers, who are offering it as a service to clients or using it within their own companies. HubSpot Academy released an on-demand course in basic RevOps knowledge the previous year, which I contributed to. The Academy was looking to expand its RevOps content into its bootcamp program of live cohort courses offered quarterly. These courses are offered free of charge as the Academy is part of HubSpot's marketing department.
The problem from the learner's standpoint is that most RevOps professionals are not formally trained in operational work. They learned parts of these skills and knowledge on the job, but not the full picture or full process of how to be successful in their work.
Another problem is that RevOps is a new combination of fields, so each company still has its own definition of it. This leads to more difficulty for the learner in knowing how to be successful in the roles and knowing what they need to learn.
Only learning bits and pieces of the job skills, in no specific order, means the learner may have missing knowledge of the larger processes that span the company. This gap creates roadblocks to successfully completing the role or the department's work.
The lack of formal training also means learners are not currently equipped with tactics for handling each step in the project process, including specific struggles many RevOps professionals face since they communicate with more departments than most roles.
Solution
The curriculum and workbook templates were designed for each week's topic to build on the previous week until the end of class. The students leave the bootcamp with completed plans and other real work to share with their manager or company.
- Week 1: RevOps Basics
- Week 2: RevOps Process Mapping -- Current State
- Week 3: Improving RevOps Processes -- Future State Mapping
- Week 4: Prioritizing Your RevOps Processes
- Week 5: Getting Buy-in & Proving Success
- Week 6: Growing Your Career with RevOps
The students use a workbook with eight templates to:
- Assess their company's current state of RevOps
- Map the current and future ideal state of a process
- Create and prioritize a RevOps plan/roadmap for a company's strategic projects
- Make plans for hiring for missing team skills or for individually learning specific skills
Curriculum Details:
The curriculum topics were chosen as the co-creator and I both worked at RevOps agencies where we saw common gaps and struggles of people working in this field. I also incorporated 'factors for success' found in my book research from interviewing 35+ experts on this topic.
Though it is possible to find or receive 1-1 internal training for the technical work for solving specific problems in these jobs, the general process for being successful in this department was not usually taught, and public training was not available.
People new to these roles often just start working on the tasks given to them and don't think about the bigger picture and planning for success. We wanted to help with that larger problem. As one student survey response said, "The class pointed out many things that should be obvious, but my team wasn't doing... I'm taking this knowledge and bringing it to the manager to apply across the team."
Delivery:
Six 60-minute classes.
Each class also has a 15-30 minute question and answer "After Hours" session for more in-depth, personalized questions and discussion.
Each class alternates between two instructors to ensure the classes stay engaging. The bootcamps are assigned one or two producers for each class, who ensure all student questions are answered in the Zoom chat, out loud, and in Slack between sessions.
There is a breakout group session for each class, where assignments are often started, and the students meet other professionals from around the world.
Assignments are shared and discussed in Slack between classes and at the beginning of the next class.
Examples:
Process
Initial course creation:
As A HubSpot Certified Trainer, I answered the call to help create this course while I was assisting a HubSpot sales bootcamp. I had been doing expert research interviews for a RevOps book, so I had content to use, in addition to knowledge from working in operations at a RevOps agency and being in the relevant communities for years.
Since these courses require two teachers, I found a more technical co-creator and instructor from a larger agency to fill in the gaps in my skills and knowledge (Connor Jeffers from Aptitude8). This co-creator helped create a more well-rounded curriculum by contributing their experience of completing a larger number of RevOps projects with their team. This choice of co-instructor also gave the students an expert at answering technical and other types of questions on the spot during class.
ADDIE stages:
Analysis:
Informal analysis was completed during meetings facilitated by the HubSpot Academy bootcamp leader to combine knowledge from:
- Our teams' struggles and successes due to the lack of formal training available on this topic
- Observing questions and successes seen in several years of engaging in communities
- Discussions and networking with other RevOps leaders in general
- Book research on how to be successful in this topic, from 35+ expert interviews.
The bootcamp program leader also contributed their guidance from 20+ years in various parts of these industries.
Design:
During the meetings that the HubSpot Academy bootcamp program leader facilitated, we:
- Identified essential education needed for RevOps professionals
- Created learning objectives
- Created goals
- Designed class lesson plan outlines
- Decided the topics for workbook exercises and templates
- Drafted the breakout partner discussion topics
The format of the course was already decided by the current HubSpot Academy bootcamp program format.
The tools for delivery were also already in place from HubSpot Academy.
Development:
I created the learning content, including creating and testing:
- Slides
- Scripts
- Producer notes for direction, such as adding links to the Zoom chat
- Timing cues for six one-hour sessions
- Eight workbook templates for student individual work
We reviewed and edited this content during our meetings and asynchronously.
I ensured all materials were in the instructor guide, the template of which was provided by HubSpot Academy.
Implementation:
We completed teaching and overall delivery of the first cohort of the bootcamp, then adjusted the following sessions as feedback arrived after each of the sessions.
I also kept track of my own ideas for improvement in real-time, during the breakouts when I wasn't speaking, and made updates before the next cohort. I created processes for running and making improvements to the course, within the limits of the tools and specific processes of HubSpot Academy.
The producer and I interacted with students outside of class in the Slack workspace, email, and other communication methods.
Evaluation:
An informal 1-10 rating was performed in the chat after each session, and a formal survey was sent by HubSpot Academy after the final session.
Ongoing responsibilities:
- Deliver live training courses to 100-200 students per cohort
- Evaluate assignments and engage with students in the class Slack channel and on social media
- Collect and study student feedback to improve effectiveness
- Make the feasible improvements before the next cohort
Results & Takeaways
After the final session, a Net Promotor Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey was sent to the students.
HubSpot Academy was in charge of the survey creation.
The NPS questions were:
- I found the course valuable overall
- I feel confident to apply the knowledge gained from the course
The NPS score was 62 for the first cohort, where a score above 50 is considered "amazing."
After the first cohort, Hubspot switched to using a CSAT survey with numerous questions.
CSAT scores are considered good when they are between 75-85%.
The head of the bootcamp program told our instructor team that this bootcamp had some of the highest feedback scores of all the programs.
CSAT scores in order from oldest to newest cohort:
- 91.1%
- 89.6%
- 88.4%
Some of the decline in the score can be attributed to fewer respondents for each cohort, so the same number of slightly negative scores more heavily influenced the overall score.
One question asked if the workbook was helpful for the learning experience.
'Yes' responses in order of the first cohort to the most recent cohort:
- 97%
- 91%
- 85%
- 87%
Examples of some of the changes/improvements I completed as a result of the learner feedback:
- Created a walk-through video to explain how to use the workbook, which was shared with students before and after the first class
- Created more clarity for what to do in the breakouts, directing people to the instructions in the workbook since they could not see shared slides in breakout rooms
- Made the first assignment, the company RevOps assessment, more accurate in the score interpretation guidance
- Performed better expectation setting about the knowledge level of the first session of the bootcamp compared to the rest of the sessions, to reduce student drop-off and negative feedback from the more advanced students
- Instructed students several times, in several communication formats, to reserve time for the "after hours" Q&A sessions to accommodate more specific use cases and more in-depth questions, since the class is fast-paced for 60 minutes. This is especially helpful for the more advanced students working on RevOps projects in their job.
