You’re reading the first post in a series of blogs on recognizing whether and when you need to build a training function in your enterprise software business. Stay tuned to the ServiceRocket blog each week for the next post in the series.

by Bill Cushard, (@BillCush) ServiceRocket

Every enterprise software company gets to the point at which it begins to talk about the need to provide training to its customers. During the pre-internet and cloud software era, training was awful, consisting of voluminous manuals that nobody read, multi-day training sessions that no manager wanted to let his/her people attend, and computers that had never-ending compatibility problems that led to hours and hours of wasted time in these expensive and time consuming training courses. Thankfully, this straining experience could not and did not last.

"Our Software is Designed So Well, No One Needs Training"

As freemium business models and cloud computing infrastructures became prevalent in the enterprise software space, many software companies stopped offering training altogether, arguing that their software was so easy to access and use that people did not need training. If training was offered,it was in the form of a set of slides with screenshots that were emailed to the customer. If a customer was lucky, the screen shots had arrows pointing to the tab that needed to be clicked. And then there was the knowledge base that was out of date the moment it was released.

But I digress.

The consequences were vast.Further propagating the belief that software training was not needed, was an open-source community of innovators, core contributors, and early adopters who didn’t need training themselves and could not fathom why anyone else would need training.

You Know You're Different, But Your Customers Don't.

Services teams had to continuously explain to management why it could not finish implementations on time. Support teams had to continuously explain why call handle times were twice as long as forecasted. The VP of Customer Success started receiving the riot act from the executive team and the board about why renewal rates were so low.

This might not happen to you. In fact, you might be right. Your software might be so easy to use that your customers do not need training. You might be right that your software is so easy to access that all of your customers will download the free version, learn how to use it, and then purchase and adopt your premium version without your services and support offerings. Yes, you might be correct in your assumption that when your customers do all of this, your product will be so ingrained in their culture and work processes, that renewals will be a mere formality.

Dare to dream.

It’s Not About Early Adopters

Here is the problem. All of this only works with early adopters, and you do not have enough early adopters to support your lofty growth goals. If you want to cross the chasm and get to the early majority and beyond, you will need to have a training, services, and support strategy that is aligned with your goals to educate the market, generate leads, shorten the on-boarding process, increase customer adoption, and ultimately increase renewals and monthly recurring revenues (MRR).

So the question is, “How do you know if you need to build a training function in your enterprise software business?”

In a series of blog posts, I will share with you a list of reasons to help you determine whether you need to build a training function. Some will be obvious and some will not. But all can be a topic of discussion between you and your executive team in your question to improve customer success and renewal rates.

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About Bill Cushard

Bill became a training guy early in his career when a group of 20 new hires showed up and there was no trainer. When HR came looking to find someone to do the training, Bill yelled, “I’ll do it!” He has been a trainer ever since.

Bill has built and led training organizations and eLearning projects at service organizations like E*TRADE, Accenture, and TimeWarner Cable.

He is the author of a blog, The LX Designer, where he shares knowledge on enterprise learning and is active on Twitter in the learning and training space.