Debbie Ung, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Blanchard
-A member conversation with Shannon Minifie, Box of Crayons
I grabbed some time with Debbie Ung, President and Chief Revenue Officer for Blanchard, to talk about the changes she’s seeing in her customer’s needs, and how Blanchard creates champions out of their biggest fans.
SM: Deborah, I have to say: it’s hard to explore Blanchard’s website and not feel envious of just how much there is on offer: from sustainment and reinforcement that uses VR and AI to custom learning journeys with digital first design and options for licensing that I’d bet big enterprise learning teams love. You have every tool in the shed, it seems.
DU: Ah, thank you. It does reflect our journey of transformation over the past 4 years. And we are not done yet. It might seem surprising, but there are still gaps – customers are always looking for the “next thing” that will address developing their leaders. We continue to prepare for the imminent change that’s happening, to stay at pace with what our customers are thinking and wanting.
SM: So what are your buyers after these days? What are the most significant trends you’re seeing in terms of how people are wanting to approach learning—for leaders but also for whole enterprises?
DU: Well, Blanchard is known for our flagship SLII – manager development & management essentials work. And, we have built content and programs that build on the foundation of SLII. This continues to be in high demand. But how the content is consumed is changing. There is higher demand for more digital assets, more “in the flow of work” assets—even with the “spaced” learning journeys and the peer and social learning. It’s proving out that even the spaced, learning journey design can be a bit disruptive for leaders and managers in certain settings—to have them come back (in) for a formal “event,” no matter how spaced or chunked up the learning is. The question we’re grappling with is: how to get assets into the flow of work?
It’s been an interesting year – we started with a lot of optimism talking to customers and budgeting … then in January the conversations with customers were different than the typical start of the year. A lot of reorganizations and reprioritizations. And two wars and an election year, are not really helping us. Coming out of that in H1, things seem to be settling down more for our clients, and new needs are emerging. We’re seeing a need for innovation (innovative mindset, innovative leaders), as well as development of the Senior Leader as a whole person—that’s been a big trend across the marketplace.
I’m also seeing that we’re all so subscription-saturated. And I think customers who are engaging with subscriptions, they’re wondering how to ensure that those subscriptions are generating an ROI—that they’re creating behaviour change, generating impact and outcomes.
SM: Oh, interesting. I saw quite a bit about licensing on your website – do you also sell a subscription offer?
DU: Well, we have not gone out to market to say “here is our generic subscription offering”—we think it’s more important to solution flexibly, guide our customers to select the right content for the business issue at hand to ensure relevancy and create impact.
SM: When you’re looking at serving the whole enterprise, how important is contextualization and when it comes to each end learner?
DU: We are positioning ourselves as a concierge service that allows customers to work with a solution architect/learning experience designer to understand the key challenges and desired outcomes, by role, within the organization and then identify the content across the Blanchard library to address those business challenges and the unique needs of the role(s). We start at the outermost layer: What’s unique about the company? and then work inwards: And what’s unique about the senior manager role?
Personalization will be next: getting even more granular about the individual needs. Moving there next is necessary, and AI will be one way, but not the only answer to it.
SM: What impact is generative AI having at Blanchard now?
DU: Oh, lots. We’re looking at how to build in AI into our tools for customers as they select the most appropriate assets for leadership development. We have multiple pilots under way right now on using GenAI to gain operational efficiencies internally. We have developed a number of use cases across the Blanchard enterprise and teams are working to create GPTs. For instance we are creating a GPT for creating proposals, we’ve created a GPT for assist our sales efforts, and also have one underway to easily locate internal Blanchard assets
One thing is that we’ve really cautioned our colleagues when using our enterprise version of ChatGPT, is that it is a great starting point. They must apply a filter to the output and contextualize the output, particularly if we are using it to message to the market or customers. We certainly do not want purely AI-generated messages going out to the market.
SM: Agreed. “Generative” AI is very misleading: generative means creating something new, and almost definitionally that’s not the case with AI. Instead, what you get is generic and recycled. And that’s okay depending on what you’re using it for. Except in some tactical, first-draft instances, I’m pretty skeptical of the ability of AI to “write” better than humans can, mostly because I think that the act of writing is also the act of thinking—of working out ideas—and also a form of communication with another human being. And so to use a tool to write for you, is, effectively, to shortcut the thinking (and the relating) process. And, like, maybe you just need GenAI to make you a grocery list – I mean, sure. That’s a good use case. I use AI for those kinds of things all the time. But if you’re using GenAI to write something of consequence, I think it bears asking if the writing is meant to reflect thinking, or if it’s meant to connect with someone on the other side of that communication – and why you think you can skip that process, delegate that work of thinking or relating.
DU: That’s such a good point. I’ve been working on a board report and it was taking me awhile and I realized that I was articulating my thoughts as I was writing my notes and my slides. The work of sitting down to write the report was actually an act of me sitting down and doing some real reflection and thinking about the business—and then shaping that thinking into communication.
SM: Sort of a new topic here, but connecting to customers made me think of this. I was at a presentation last week where the speaker was talking about the power of having your customers do your marketing for you—that the smaller businesses of the world just simply don’t have the resources to compete for attention, so we need our customers to love us so much that they do the work of drawing attention to us, and bringing us more business. Have you had success with this kind of customer advocacy? And what did you do to drive that?
DU: Oh, SO MUCH of our new logo customers are often from our raving fans. When I joined, a standout observation was the number of RAVING FANS Blanchard creates. And we were not proactive in following and cultivating those fans. Many times those raving fans would bring us along and we would be surprised that they were in a new role at a new organization. We starting asking ourselves how are we following them, engaging them, being active around them?
SM: How do we make those referrals less of an accident, and instead shape and ensure it happens?
DU: Yes, exactly. So we actually created a role – they’re called Loyalty Liaisons – and these are folks whose job it is to create loyalty on the buyer and participant side – so that when those people move on and up to other organisations, they’ll bring us in. That’s why we created the Blanchard Community: to be proactive and top of mind, to create community with and around buyers and participants.
SM: What’s the value proposition for people joining that Community?
DU: It’s a good question, and we thought about this carefully: how do we ensure there’s value here for them? If you look at the lineup we have in the community, we have great speakers and thought leaders, we pulse the community members for topics that are top of mind for them and run moderated discussions. We have private channels for select individuals, like those certified to train on SLII. In these private channels, they can collaborate with other members on best practices, usage of the different tools available to them, etc. And the community is not just about Blanchard content and products. It’s also about highlighting important social elements – like diversity heritage months. Last month we highlighted Pride Month and discussed the impact that the LGBTQ community has had on organizations they work in and the world.
SM: Speaking of community, I’ll close with one more question: how has it been helpful to you to be a member of the ISA community?
DU: So first of all, the ISA just has a great reputation within Blanchard. But really it is so helpful to get into conversations with peers in your industry facing similar challenges. Every year we refer back to the ISA benchmarking study and use it as an element of change. We’ve been around for 45 years, we have very tenured people, and change is difficult to introduce sometimes. But we can use the ISA benchmark and conversations to show that things are changing, and that’s always really helped us manage changes in our business as it evolves.
SM: The community helps Blanchard avoid that same navel-gazing …
DU: That’s right. You can often get stuck in your own groove, and you need to look up and out.
