Every SaaS company hits the same three training walls: new-admin onboarding, customer-success enablement, and revenue acceleration. Here's how we'd design each one end-to-end — the steps, the challenges, the solutions, and what good looks like at the end.
The brief: a B2B SaaS platform with a powerful — and intimidating — admin console. New customer admins were taking 9 days to send their first campaign. Most never came back. Mission: drop time-to-first-value to under one working day.
Three new admins screen-shared their first hour. We watched where they got stuck — not what they said.
One-screen course map. Four interactive moments tied to the four "aha" features that drive activation.
A read-only mirror of the admin console, pre-loaded with sample data, embedded inside the course.
Hotspot tour + try-it sandboxes + branching scenario on a real-world setup decision. Storyline 360.
Tested against the customer's SuccessFactors profile. Per-step xAPI statements wired for activation tracking.
Cohort A vs. B. Iteration log running weekly for the first month based on drop-off heatmaps.
The CEO wants visibility on opens. The DPO is worried about consent. Engineering wants Webhook events. Pick the option that gets you furthest, fastest.
Hard-coding screenshots would mean a stale course within a sprint. Maintenance would eat the savings.
The course pulls a frozen sandbox URL — the real UI, but isolated. Eng updates the sandbox; course stays current automatically.
"I've used five SaaS tools, I'll figure it out." Result: 47% bounce, 9-day activation drag.
The course unlocks the live console only after the four critical actions are completed inside the sandbox. Skipping isn't an option — completing the actions is.
The brief: 18 CSMs across three regions, wildly different renewal rates, no shared playbook. The top performer was producing 3× the bottom. Mission: transfer the top performer's instincts to the team without a 12-week bootcamp.
Three real renewal calls recorded with consent. Decision points logged in a shared doc with our IDs.
Found 11 recurring decision points — what to say when the buyer goes quiet, when they raise price, when they hint at churn.
Wrote three full renewal scenarios (cautious renewer, expansion candidate, at-risk account) with consequence trees.
Real CSM voice for the customer side, AI avatar for "the CFO joining the call." Synthesia for variation.
Top CSM scored the scenarios herself. The course benchmarks learner choices against her decisions.
Weekly: managers see a dashboard of where each CSM differs from the benchmark. Coaching becomes specific, not generic.
You have 30 seconds before the conversation pivots away from renewal. Your answer sets the rest of the call.
The team didn't believe instinct transferred. Top performer agreed.
We extracted her 11 decision points and turned each into a binary choice. Suddenly the "feel" had structure CSMs could practise against.
Renewal season is bedlam. A long course would sit in the backlog forever.
Modular 6-minute scenarios. Watch one. Apply on a live account that day. Coach reviews tomorrow. Done.
The brief: a SaaS platform launching a new AI module. 60 AEs needed to position, demo, and close it within two weeks of GA. Marketing had a 90-page deck; nobody had read it. Mission: AE-ready in 14 days, no week-long offsite.
90-page launch deck → 4 sentences an AE could say on a discovery call. Product, marketing, sales agreed.
Five real customer personas. Each gets one 6-minute microlearning module: positioning + demo cue + objection handling.
Interactive sandbox of the new AI module. AEs rehearse the 4-minute "wow" path before they ever do it live.
Eight common objections. Drag-and-drop matching to the right rebuttal. AEs run it twice with shuffled order.
3-minute video upload — each AE records their pitch. Managers review against a rubric we built into the LMS.
Pipeline tagged by AE certification. Marketing sees what's working in week 1, iterates the sim by week 2.
The CIO has already heard ten pitches this quarter. You have one sentence to differentiate before they tune out.
The deck was technically correct and emotionally useless. AEs were not going to memorise it.
Together with product, we boiled the deck to four sentences. Anything longer was a follow-up email, not a pitch.
Felt like a hoop. Wouldn't get done.
Only certified AEs got their deals tagged "AI Module Qualified" on the leaderboard. Certification rate hit 100% inside a week.
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