CASE STUDY · CO-FOUNDER & LEARNING DESIGN LEAD · 2019–2023
ROLE
Part-time co-founder · learning design, facilitation, and tool adoption
CLIENTS
Companies and nonprofits; educational institutes as a second line
TIMELINE
Nov 2019 – Apr 2023
FORMAT
Hybrid: in-person and virtual sessions
7
organizations trained
10+
teams
80+
professionals
5
core modules
10+
operational playbooks
THE CHALLENGE
Sales, marketing, and customer service each kept their own records, in spreadsheets, inboxes, and people’s heads. The problem wasn’t the software. It was that teams hadn’t learned to work from shared data.
Sales
Follow-up depended on who remembered.
Marketing
Campaigns without a clear view of who the customers were.
Customer service
No history of past interactions or requests.
Leadership
Decisions made without reliable data.
WHO WAS IN THE ROOM
MAIN FOCUS
Companies
Small and mid-size teams growing past founder-led operations, with more customers to manage.
MAIN FOCUS
Nonprofits
Small teams coordinating programs and people with limited time and staff.
SECOND LINE
Educational institutes
Teachers and staff learning to run courses on Moodle and other LMS platforms.
Participants: owners and directors · managers and team leads · sales, marketing, service, and operations staff · teachers.
SOME OF THE ORGANIZATIONS WE TRAINED
Nonprofit
Dental specialty clinic
Health and telemedicine
PR, events, and marketing
Tech retail and repair
MY ROLE
A full-time managing partner ran daily operations. I led the creative, leadership, and training work: what teams needed to learn and how they’d learn it.
01
Learning strategy
Co-led the training offer and its operations.
02
Curriculum
Designed the five-module program.
03
Playbooks
Wrote 10+ step-by-step operational guides.
04
Facilitation
Led workshops and short courses.
05
Implementation
Supported CRM rollouts across 10+ teams.
CRM & support
HubSpot
Salesforce
Zendesk
Clients’ in-house CRMs
Learning platforms
Canvas
Moodle
Google Classroom
Team workflows
Project management boards
Task ownership
Sales follow-up cadences
PROGRAM DESIGN
2-hour workshops
Focused on one tool or skill.
3–4 week short courses
Progressive skill-building across modules.
Playbooks after training
So the process stayed when the trainer left.
Workshops and training sessions, 2019–2023.
CURRICULUM
1
Digital transformation foundations
Why connected systems matter, and how each department fits in.
2
CRM and customer data
One customer record: capturing, cleaning, and sharing data across teams.
3
Project management tools
Boards and task systems for coordination and accountability.
4
Sales process development
Pipeline stages, follow-up cadences, and repeatable conversion.
5
Leadership for growing teams
Communication, delegation, and operational clarity.
PROGRAM MATERIALS
Originals were lost to a hardware failure. These are recreations of three core pieces, in the original Spanish.
Connected departments map
Module 1: one customer record at the center of every team.
What each area adds to the CRM and what it uses
Before and after: separate spreadsheets vs. one record
Pair activity: find the data still living outside the CRM
Operational playbook
One of 10+ one-page guides teams kept after training.
Registering and following up a new customer
Trigger, owner, and 8 steps inside the CRM
Completion checklist and common mistakes
Sales pipeline in the CRM
Module 4: five shared stages from lead to repeat customer.
What happens, who owns it, and what gets recorded
Follow-up rules between stages
Worked example with a fictional dental clinic
Recreated from the original program · delivered in Spanish · client data kept confidential.
OUTCOME
One customer record
Sales, marketing, and service working from the same data.
Clear ownership
Tasks with names and dates on a shared board.
Structured follow-up
Defined pipeline stages replaced ad hoc reminders.
Coordination
Fewer handoffs lost between teams.
Reported by client teams; no formal metrics were kept. Next time I’d measure it: a baseline of pipeline and task data before training, then CRM usage and follow-up rates at 30 and 90 days.
REFLECTION
Teach inside real work
Practice on the team’s own clients and tasks.
Playbooks outlast training
A one-page guide keeps the habit going.
Design it together
Tool, process, and communication change at once.
Fit the format to the team
Two hours for a skill, weeks for a system.