Think Like a Marketer, Lead Like an L&D Pro: Bianca Baumann on Learner-Centric Strategy and Visibility

In this episode of Catalysts, I sit down with Bianca Baumann, award-winning strategist, international speaker, and author of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro. With over 15 years in the field, Bianca brings a rare blend of creativity, empathy, and business alignment to the way organizations approach learning.

We talk about the mindset shifts that L&D teams need to make—starting with listening more and building for behavior change, not just content delivery.

Inside the conversation:

• Why listening is the most underrated skill in L&D
• How to balance long-term workforce strategy with short-term execution
• The marketing principles every L&D leader should steal—today
• Why compelling writing is a non-negotiable for learning that sticks
• How course titles, taglines, and narrative structure can dramatically increase engagement
• The role of learner personas in driving motivation and performance
• What executives still don’t understand about learning—and how to educate them
• Why visibility and working out loud matter more than ever in L&D leadership

Bianca also shares her own evolution as a leader, what she’s learned from mentoring teams, and the small actions that can make a big impact—especially for L&D professionals doing it all on their own.

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Transcript

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welcome back to Catalysts, the leaders shaping the future of learning and growth. I'm your host, Jacob Ratliff, and this is the show where we spotlight the bold thinkers, builders, and leaders who aren't just responding to change in our industry. They're actually driving it. And today I'm joined by Bianca Bauman, who is a seasoned LND strategist with more than 15 years of experience. She's passionate about consulting on effective new solutions to serve learners' needs, and she's developed processes, methodologies, and frameworks to help organizations meet their growth targets with the help of innovative L &D approaches. She's helped dozens of organizations with their workforce transformations, as well as onboarding and reskilling programs. She's spearheaded multiple projects in the marketing, automotive, financial, and events industries, creating award-winning programs along the way. Bianca speaks at international conferences and is a facilitator at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. And to top it all off, she is the author of Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an LND Pro, Strategies to Ignite Learning. Bianca, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to dive into our conversation today. Thank you for having me, Jacob, and I'm equally excited to dive in. So as listeners know, I always like to start with the big picture, the big question, uh which is today, what do you think are the most urgent shifts organizations need to make when it comes to enabling their workforce for the future? what it's a simple one but a hard one at the same time. It's listen. Listen to your workforce, listen to your employees, listen to what's happening around you. You know, especially I think in learning and development, we have a tendency to be in our box and we don't really look left and right. And yeah, listening would definitely be on top of the list. And I know it might not be groundbreaking. But if we do more of it, then I think we could see much better results than we do today. Yeah, I'm definitely kind of hearing the subtext there. part of that is showing up as, you know, kind of more of a strategic business partner, right? Rather than, you know, on one hand being an order taker or a pair of hands, or on the other end of the spectrum being the one saying, all right, this is what you're giving you, whether you like it or not. And really partnering with those other business units. Is that kind of aligned with what you're saying? 100%. And I think it's also, you know, listening to our employees and our learners. I mean, one of the big things that I talk about and really drive is empathy and learner centric design. And I think now, especially as we also look at the, I don't know if we can still call it the rise of AI or whatever we call that, you know, that time right now, that It's so much more than learning is so much more now than just creating the training. really as L and D professionals should be looking at work processes and flows as well. And in order to design these better, I need to listen. I need to listen to what my business partners want to your point, but I also need to listen to my employees, what they need and what they want. And then in an ideal world, bring the two together to create better processes, better work environments, better training programs. Excellent, thank you. And one thing I've noticed uh as I've learned a little bit about your work is that it seems to really bridge both vision and execution. So my question is, how do you approach balancing long-term workforce strategy on one hand with, on the other hand, the day-to-day realities of what it takes to implement a program? Yes, that's an excellent question, especially working in, you know, client services. We do have great conversations where clients are interested in this big workforce transformation. And then, you know, the next question is, well, how fast can you get things done in terms of, you know, assets that you can roll out? And so to your point, Jacob, I think the, the, the, I don't want to say the trick, but the trick is, uh, to, you know, while you planned the long term, Where are the low hanging fruits at the moment? Where can you make quick changes that are not difficult to implement, but that make, you know, that can have a really, really big impact right away. And some of that often actually comes out of the initial strategy conversation. So you don't have to wait to analyze all of the information or all the interviews that you might be conducting or all the data you're looking at. Use your common sense. Look at, you know, what's right in front of you. It's like, Hey, I see one thing here that I think could make a big difference while in the background, so to say, keep on working on that longer term strategy. But yeah, it's extremely important because no organization has three to six months to sit around and wait until, you know, something comes out of the L &D department. So yeah, it's extremely crucial to focus on those low-hanging fruit. I feel like you're calling me out there because I have definitely been guilty of being the one that wants to wait and not do anything until we have the data that we're trying to gather, which right that data is important for implementing a long-term strategy, but we don't have to wait on it to do anything. so, Chris, could you give an example of kind of what some of those low-hanging fruits are that you've seen in the past with clients or either, you know, how you go about finding? those low-hating fruits. Yeah, again, I'm going back to listening actually, because you know, when clients come to us, they let us know what what they're looking for. And usually there's big ticket items. But then there is also, you know, smaller kind of like these quick wins. And so listening is really helpful. And the other thing I would just remind everyone, uh including myself, so I just want to say I also like to say, let's just wait, right. So I constantly have to remind myself to be a little bit more proactive with certain things. But I think it's also for us to change our mindsets around when I put something out there, it's not written in stone. I can always go back and iterate on it once I have more information. So um I think that that idea of being able to um educate your organization on, hey, we're working on this at the same time, we're pushing out some content. It might not be 100 % where you're usually used to seeing things, but it's at 90 % and it's exactly giving us the impact that we need. you know, for, for examples, I mean, let's just say, um, you know, you work on a big, uh, modernization of your onboarding program. Let's use that because I think a lot of people can relate to that. There is definitely. you know, little assets here and there that could easily be taken. And let's just say you update course titles within, you know, certain sections. So Mike, who I wrote the book with constantly talks about the importance of rewriting course titles to make them more exciting. So if you think about marketing, subject lines and emails are really important because they drive us to open an email. So why wouldn't we do the same in learning and have course titles that are much more exciting than um enter company name one-on-one? eh So I think those are really some small hanging fruit where you today could already make a difference or you have content, big content like lengthy content, hour, two hours long that you can actually repurpose into different pieces. So already you're doing something which is not crazy crazy because you already have the content you just find ways of repurposing it while you're actually working on a bigger strategy. So I'm glad you brought up uh marketing specifically around email subject lines. uh As it happens, my background is in both marketing and learning and development. So this is something I selfishly want to nerd out about for a second. So if you're an L &D professional, uh say trying to develop or implement a program, what are the top two or three principles from marketing that you should be considering as you're going through that process. I would say I'm going back to listening. So put your learner before your content, right? So really understand what your learner needs and what they want. And obviously it's tied in with your business goals. But yeah, learner before content. So that's coming from the idea of the buyer persona and marketing. And then, you know, the second piece would really be the writing. I mean, it is what we do every day is writing, but I've come across so many L and D professionals that aren't good writers. And you know, I'm still learning, I'm still improving. ah But I think that is just something to really think about the content strategy piece as well, not just how I write, but just get better organized with our content. I mean, we all have our LMSs or content management systems, and no one knows what lives on there, right? So start with that, but then really quickly tie in, you know, writing that click. So how can we be more engaging in our writing, not just the overall design of our training programs. Yeah, it's all about giving and maintaining attention. Yes. And I mean, it's noisy out there, right? It's really, really hard to get someone's attention and to keep someone's attention. But you know, I had this conversation with someone the other day where, you know, they asked me, it's like, you know, what is the one piece of content that, you know, keeps people entertained for hours? And, know, initially, I thought, it's probably a movie or something, but it's actually a book. if you think about it, right? If you have a really, really good book, you can't put it away. You don't want to put it away. You're just like, you know, glued to the pages and you read it for like 20 hours. How long it might take you. And I'm not suggesting we should write books for our training programs. But what I'm saying is if the writing is engaging, I'm willing to spend more time with this content. Now actually I think about a couple of the best books on business that I've read in the past few years and the writing was not only engaging, it was narrative. It actually used narrative elements to tell a story while still being informational and while still teaching me concepts and skills. So I see exactly what you're saying there. Also as someone who a degree in English and who, uh you know, teaches writing in a lot of situations, I'm a little bit biased though, so... eh but that's a good bias to have. But as we talk about the writing piece, I think the other element from marketing that they do so well is taglines, right? You think about a marketing campaign and they always have taglines. can't ask anyone in this world, it's like, what's one of your favorite commercials? And people remember these commercials and some of them are old, right? One of my go-tos is you're not you when you're hungry. Yeah. was back right with you. There you go. You remember, right? Like, it was that Snickers ad, and it was like a global campaign. And they really use that concept of hunger, which is known to everyone in the world. But then they localized the campaign in each country, because they use different actors and actresses that were uh well famous in the in those countries at the time. you know here in North America is Betty White, right? We saw the video with Betty White. So I think when you think about getting people's attention, think about what is the brand of L &D and what is the brand for your training program and can you have a tagline that people you know hopefully remember in 20 years from now. Yeah, you know, my marketing client from the past, I'm sure have heard me repeat ad nauseum that really all it comes down to is what is the big result your product is helping people to achieve and why is that important? And that's kind of what we're talking about communicating here uh because so much training that I see isn't in context. It's not put into context. And so it's just kind of there. People aren't really sure like what it's going to help them achieve, why it's important, how it relates to their day-to-day work. And so this is like what we're doing really here is connecting those dots for people in a really compelling, digestible way. Absolutely. And I go back to my learner personas, if you really understand what drives them, what motivates them, right? I mean, you might look at two people that look more or less the same on paper. But when you dig deeper, they're motivated by different things. One is possibly motivated by paying the bills, which probably we all are. don't want to say that we aren't. But then there is additional motivations around I want to make a difference to the community or to the people around me. It's a very different motivation. you know, in in learning, we're really trying to drive different behaviors, right. And so I need to look at emotions and I need to look at motivation and where those overlap. That is where I can drive real behavior change. And yeah, to your point, it's connecting all the dots. Yeah, it's, you know, people can connect the dots on their own, but more often than not, they won't. ah Because, right, like you said, it's noisy out there. They're so, everything is competing for their attention. uh So that's, you know, it's kind of our role to do that. I agree. And I think, you know, to be fair, as L &D professionals, there's a lot being thrown at us too. And sometimes it is hard to connect the dots for other people because you know, we're like, okay, I'm already busy enough. Just connect the dots yourself. But it's, you know, I do understand the challenges we face in learning and development as well. Because often I know a lot of people who are one woman, one man shows And I've been in that boat uh years of my career too. And so I think it's even more important that we work smarter, not harder and possibly join forces with marketing or internal comms, our learners, right? Crowd source content. And yeah, let's just open it up a little bit more to make our jobs a little bit easier so we can then focus. on the more strategic conversations that the business really needs us for. Absolutely. And so, you know, I you've worked closely with C-suite leaders on various strategic learning initiatives. uh What do executives need to understand about learning and development today that they maybe didn't need to understand five years ago? That's a great question. I find when I go into organizations, a lot of executives have a certain idea of how something should work. And that's probably built uh or based on on their experience or you know, whatever happened five years ago. So educating the stakeholders as part of a workforce transformation is probably one of the biggest pieces. of the workforce transformation, because if you don't have the stakeholders aligned, you you're not really going anywhere. But what I find usually is that the education around focusing on the employee instead of focusing on the content. you know, even at that high up level, I think there's still also that understanding or that thinking of Okay, we measure the success of training by bumps in seats and they completed this module and the seat time is this and the seat time is that. And to help stakeholders and executive stakeholders specifically to say, hey, we can actually do so much more. We can help you tie learning outcomes and impact to your business goals and strategic objectives. However, we need the right people at the table for that and here's what I need from you. So yeah, I think those are some of the unknowns or elements where we need to educate our stakeholders. And I also want to say I worked with C-suite executives before that just get it, right? They totally understand the importance. They totally understand that learning and development is so much more than checking a box on a course on the LMS. And it is really the work processes and the flows I was talking about. needs to be tied in with talent management, knowledge management, performance support, right? Like it's just so much more than it was five, 10, 15 years ago. Yeah, definitely changed a lot. um So let's talk about data for a second. So what role does measurement and analytics play in the strategies you build? And how do you make sure those insights actually lead to action? it plays a really, really crucial role. I always like to start with the end in mind, right? So when I start an initiative, I like to do something I call an impact and clarity workshop. And I have a survey that goes with that before the workshop, which really makes up the workshop in the end, the answers to those questions. And it's really things like, you know, why are we um embarking on redesigning or workforce transformation right now? What would happen if we don't do it? What does success look like? What are some industry changes that, you know, drove you to make this decision? you know, depending on what the organization, what they're doing and what industry they're in, but this is about five to six questions. And then I get the main stakeholders, you know, to submit the survey. And then I get them into a room for two hours. And we just talk about the responses. And this might sound kind of like, what? Everyone knows what a project is about or a workforce transformation. Why do we need to align? Well, you would be surprised how little alignment there is if you bring all the different department heads together, right? And so, A, it helps me align like the name says, uh everyone. But then we also discuss, what are measures of success? What are KPIs? What are we looking for? And so let's use, um you know, a little bit smaller program, but let's say we have to redo sales training, right? In general, when I talk about KPIs for sales training, I'm saying something along the lines of, I want to see, you know, sales increase, whatever, two, 3 % year over year. That should be my goal. And as learning and development professionals, hardly think about business goals as our goals as well. But if we do our job right, everything we do gradually feeds into this overall goal and you know hopefully we'll achieve it in the end but we can't wait until the end to measure something so you know when we create learner journeys as an example we really have to measure every day every week where we're at There's a ton of what's called leading indicators that help me understand if I can actually meet my goal. And if I already know now, I haven't met this little sub goal, how am I expected to meet the big goal, you know, a year down the road? So to answer your question, very, very important role. And it's important to have the right people in room to decide what those goals and success metrics are. Absolutely, that level of alignment is something that so many people have take for granted or assume is already there. like you said, you'd be surprised. um But when you kind of think about it, of course, your chief marketing officer and your chief financial officer are going to have different versions of success and different versions of what their priorities are. So that really, like you said, starts right. right there in that room. So we've talked about uh kind of the state and the evolution of the L &D industry for a minute, but I wanna focus a little bit more on you for a moment and ask how has your own leadership changed or evolved as the learning and development industry has evolved over the course of your career? That's a great question. um You know what, I was always someone who was pushing the envelope early on. So I don't think that changes in L &D had, I mean, they probably had a bit of an impact on my leadership style and my leadership in general. I think over time where, my leadership style really changed was because I was in the position of being a leader and I learned so much from my teams. And so I think that's where over time things have really shifted for me to, you know, obviously if first manager role was really a manager where it was like, I don't know what I'm doing. Right. Like all of a sudden I have this team that I have to manage and it felt more like you know, I was trying to check all the boxes versus now, hopefully my team would agree, being more of a leader and a coach and a mentor and, you know, really guiding my team and helping them grow versus checking boxes. Right. So I think, um yeah, that's definitely my personal growth over or throughout my career. But uh yeah, in terms of the parallels with the changes in learning and development, I'm just excited that the thoughts I had years ago are starting to finally catch up with what's happening. Absolutely. Thank you. And so I know you have, you've written this book and you've been on this podcast. So my question is, how do you think about the importance of getting your ideas out there? How do you think about your own visibility as a leader in the LND space? It's extremely important to think out loud and work out loud. was just talking so timely. I was just talking to a colleague of mine today about having more visibility on LinkedIn. And, you know, they said, if you could share any tips with me, I would really appreciate that. And, you know, one of the biggest takeaways I set is that, you know, posting on LinkedIn as an example, I know it's really scary. But you'd be surprised that, you know, how many people actually agree with what you're thinking or all of a you start this great conversation. So I think the importance of being visible out there, sharing what you're thinking. And sometimes it, you know, it will hit the mark and sometimes it doesn't. But when I first started in this industry, I wanted to blog, I wanted to share what I learned and what I was doing. And initially I focused a little bit more on customer education because that was the role I was in before customer education actually became a trend. you know, um, but I started blog and it was great. It all worked out nicely. And I had people following that blog, but it was mainly marketers because I was in a marketing world at the time. And so this blogging and this working and thinking out loud really helped me shape my messaging the way it is today. So, you know, I would. only I can only encourage everyone to, yeah, don't be shy, just put yourself out there and it is scary, but it's also extremely um valuable and and rewarding. Yeah, so I've worked with uh hundreds of marketing clients in the past and one of the most common pieces of marketing advice I see is that if you just take an hour a day and post something online, it'll change your life, change your business, which is almost entirely true because I think this is, I think we're saying something similar here, which is yes. Post every day, get your thoughts out there. But one of the beautiful things about posting on LinkedIn, Facebook, wherever, is that the feedback loop is so short. It's such a small feedback loop. You will know within 24 hours how your ideas, or how you framed your ideas, how that's landing with your audience. it's not, you don't just have to post. You have to watch for the signal. because silence is signal that something's maybe not working. Comments, that's, mm-hmm, go ahead. sorry, I just sometimes silence just means the LinkedIn uh algorithm didn't work in your favor. I got to put that out there too. You have that. But sorry, you were saying about comments there. But like everything is signal. Silence is a signal. Comments are a signal. Reactions, shares, it's all forms of signal. You have to pay attention to them. And so many people, you know, I've talked to look at their LinkedIn post impressions, you how many people have seen their posts and they say, oh, I only got like 150 impressions. And I usually say to them, Okay, but if I put you in a room full of 150 people and I said, speak, how would you feel about that? Right? That's such a great comparison. I love that. Yeah, absolutely. And you're right. But I just want to say, clearly, we have a lot to say to one another. you know, when you said signals, I thought about what marketers do is called sentiment analysis, right? They look at the sentiment of their comments. And then they do something with it. And I think that's that's the trick there. You know, or the best practice, I want to say a trick. Absolutely, and know speaking it talking about comments, you know one of the most surefire ways to build your visibility on LinkedIn and get more impressions on your posts is to actually engage and comment on other people's posts Right if we're talking about how the algorithm works the algorithm likes that and it will show your post to so so so many more people Now obviously this is something I could talk for days about so uh won't hold you hostage for that, but as we move towards closing up our conversation, what advice would you give to LND leaders who want to elevate their impact, have a greater influence, and yeah, have an impact inside their organization, but also beyond that as well? Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to everything we're talking about today. Listen, don't be afraid, put yourself out there in small ways. It doesn't have to be big, right? But find little small areas where you know you can make a big, big, big, big difference pretty quickly. And it doesn't have to be costly or timely at all. Right? I mean, we talked about updating course titles, that small, right? Creating a tagline for your training. That's something you can do tomorrow at no cost. Right. So identify those areas and yeah, work out loud, find your people. I would not be where I'm at today without my network. You know, many of the jobs I had in the past were, you know, based on referrals and you can't go it alone and you shouldn't. And I think that is just, you know, find your people inside your organization, outside the organization. If you're, you know, one woman, one man show and Yeah, fight the good fight. Have fun while you're doing it. Yeah, so thinking or speaking of finding your network, finding your people, where can people connect with you or follow your work? Yeah, so easiest is definitely linkedin. ah So easy to find me there. And then I do have a personal website, Bianca Bauman.com. And I also have Mike Taylor and I have a website around our book, which is called train like a marketer.com. So lots of ways to find me and yeah, please connect, reach out with questions, always happy to to help and and guide others as well. Excellent, and I will post those links in the show notes below so you can get to those pretty quickly and easily. Bianca, thank you so much for this conversation today. Thank you for coming on sharing your experience, insight, and some of the strategy behind your work. Yeah, thanks for the thoughtful questions, Jacob. Really appreciated this and yeah, really enjoyed it too. So thank you. Thank you. And if you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and connect with me on LinkedIn. I'll throw that link in the show notes as well. And if today's conversation got you thinking about how your own online presence could better reflect your expertise and the caliber of your work to really attract the kinds of opportunities you're ready for, that's exactly the kind of work I help LND leaders with. so you can learn more or grab a time to connect at executivebrandbuilder.com. Thank you so much for listening and I'll see you next time on Catalysts.