A Guide To Choosing The Right LMS Platform For Your SaaS Business.
Pipedrive is a customer relationship management platform. What that also means is that they have to go up against giants like Salesforce and Zoho to prove their mettle.
For this they decided to focus on experience, priding themselves on being built by salespeople for salespeople.
An important part of this experience is the Pipedrive academy. A customer education platform that contributes to the company’s efforts to build a community around the product.
The academy has no sign-up wall whatsoever.
While this removes friction it also removes the utility of what could have been an excellent lead-magnet.
This is a clear signal that the sole purpose of the academy is retention through education.
But look at it from our lens,
If someone is studying or trying to study at Pipedrive Academy there is a high chance they are interested in Pipedrive.
Why leave the chance of getting their contact info?
If Hubspot has taught us anything it will be that your academy can serve more than one purpose without interfering with one another.
Also, we understand by now that brands have a strong affinity to maintain their color palette across the board and Pipedrive is no different.
Let’s delve into the nitty-gritty.
We find the academy along with Knowledgebase and Community tab under Pipedrive’s Help Centre.
The Pipedrive Academy course is 8 classes long and can be easily finished in under 3 hours.
But apart from courses, they have webinars and full demos which are separated by pricing plans.
You can see the different features you would get in different plans visually represented in form of video courses.
They also do monthly updates titled “In case you missed it” to communicate new developments and features.
James Campbell, Sr Product Marketing Manager, is the ever-present presenter across all the courses.
This comforts the audience, which has gotten familiarised with the same voice and the same face video after video.
Pipedrive also chose to use Vidyard instead of Wistia (the industry darling) to host their videos.
Now we don’t know the decision to go with Vidyard but this gave them access to features like “Skip to topic” which navigates to specific sections of the videos.
Also acting as an outline for the video.
Pipedrive academy offers no quizzes, no assignments, no certification.
Yes, they have linked the appropriate knowledge base article in the video description. But logically thinking why would I read a long article if I’m watching a video about the exact same topic.
It is more of a playlist than an academy in that sense.
The videos were also screen records with a pointer guiding you around.
Though just hearing the voice of presenter all the while in the background puts more focus on the demo being shown, it also reduces interaction and in turn interest of the viewer over time.
While there was a course introduction video, the course video themselves didn’t have an intro or outro which makes you wonder when one starts and the other ends if you are on autoplay.
Pipedrive Academy features CRM training videos and tutorials to help you level up your CRM and sales skills, from quick CRM courses to in-depth tutorials on specific features.
That’s how Pipedrive defines its academy and it is important to understand the deeper meaning of it.
Pipedrive doesn’t promise to teach you the craft of CRM under the garb of its courses.
It teaches you how to just use Pipedrive effectively and efficiently, getting better at CRM might be a byproduct.
Having 17 subtitles isn’t just overkill, it tells you that Pipedrive is aware of their audience.
…..See you on the other side
Content Beta is a video production agency for Software Startups. We’ve helped around 72 B2B Software companies create engaging product marketing videos and how-to videos that generate more MQLs and get faster product adoption.
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