I teach. A lot. I teach people that are very interested in what I have to say. And I teach people that don't care at all. I teach people who are highly motivated to apply the information that I present. And I teach people who like what they hear but can't find the time to get around it actually applying it. I teach big groups and individuals. I give lectures and I lead discussions. And I have to do it multiple times each week. Here are just a few principles that I have learned over time. 1. You cannot teach someone who is not ready to learn.

I have what we like to call our $40,000 fridge problem. Whoever designed our kitchen (long before we purchased our current house) put the oven so close to the wall that you can only fit a small fridge next to it. The oven is situated such that in order to get a larger fridge we would have to redo the entire kitchen.

We are happy to announce that starting on Thursday, August 31, 2017 you will now be able to set article viewing permissions on a per article basis.

If you are building a knowledge base for customer support or for internal training, then it is important to keep in mind what you want the article to accomplish. In a perfect world you could write one article and use it for training, onboarding and support. And this is the approach that many people take. But it is a big mistake. When someone needs to be trained, their needs are very different from when she need to be reminded. The person who is being trained needs to understand concepts, definitions and workflows. The person who just needs a quick reminder only needs a quick step-by-step guide.

Oh, the all powerful PowerPoint Deck. PowerPoint is a part of almost every training event you will deliver or participate in. Whether it be live, a webinar or an e-learning module PowerPoint will probably be involved in some part of the process.

About a year ago, we started grappling with the problem of long articles. Sometimes, a short article just wouldn't cut it--you need a lengthy onboarding guide or a long procedure that has a lot of content. The question became, "how can one best present lengthy content to the end user?" Because if articles are too long, they force the reader to endlessly scroll down the page. All of that scrolling can be confusing, and readers can quickly lose track of what they are even looking at. So we wanted to fix that. One option was to split the article up into multiple articles in a manual. This approach would let a reader finish an article, and then hit next. The problem we saw was that, often times, readers would either land in the middle of a lengthy process (from searching a keyword the knowledge base and clicking on an article), or they would get lost somewhere in the process and lose track of where they were.

A step by step guide that gives your customers a clear path to success can really boost your customer onboarding and success efforts. Here are a few tips for providing that clear path.

We will often see customers sign up for a trial without a clear idea of what their goals are. They know they have a general problem and they know that they need to do something but they have a tough time defining exactly what the problem or explains exactly how they plan on solving it.

A Clear Goal You cannot help your customers be successful unless they understand what their goals are. You probably didn't expect me to say that. You probably expected me to say that you can't help your customers be successful unless you know what their goals are. But that isn't totally true. If you have a low touch sales process and provide a lot for self-service information, a customer who has a clear goal in mind can be successful with your product without ever contacting you. But if they don't know what their goals are then the chances of them being successful with your product aren't very good.

1. Customer Onboarding Most enterprise software companies do one-on-one onboardings by either going onto the client site or by hosting a training via a web meeting. When I talk to our enterprise customers about using documentation in their onboarding they think that I am talking about replacing their current onboarding practices.