by Bill Cushard (@BillCush)

The problem with training is image. Innovators and visionaries who develop software didn't need training and cannot understand why anyone else would. User experience designers think their products are so well-designed that training is not necessary. To them I say, "Wait until you sell your product to an enterprise with 10,000 employees." Though enterprise software training is often seen as unnecessary, the worst reputation that it has is as a dreaded expense that should be kept to a minimum.

It is true that training is expensive. Developing content is time consuming, and when it comes to keeping up in a world of short sprints and rapid release cycles, constant content updates are required. But training does not have to be viewed as a cost center. In fact, training can play a direct and indirect role in growing your enterprise software business.

There are five ways enterprise software companies can leverage customer training to help grow the business. Each reason is strategic and can be used depending on your particular needs.

1. Educate the market

Training can help grow a business even without directly contributing revenues and profits. The opportunity is for training to add to the top of the funnel in your marketing cycle, which is especially important for companies commercializing open source software. We have had discussions with customers who tell us that their sales team frequently hears from prospects that they do not understand the underlying technology, and therefore would not consider buying at this time. In such a circumstance, there is an opportunity to educate the market on the underlying technology.

Whether training is offered for free or at an appropriate price, the goal is to generate a market awareness through an education campaign which is surrounded by other communication channels including PR, conferences, and content marketing. People who attend training sessions and find value are more likely to consider buying your product when it comes time to implementing this type of product.

2. Generate leads and move people along the sales cycle

As the top of the funnel increases, more leads begin to trickle down to your sales team. As people become educated about your technology, they become interested in learning more. As your sales team engages with these prospects, they can be equipped with coupon codes that allow high probability prospects to attend training courses that cost anywhere from $99 to $5000. Most prospects want to see your product in action before they buy. Pilot programs are good, but they still cost money and a lot of time to set up, no matter how easy you think it is. However, by sending a high probability prospect to one of your training courses for free, you give this person a chance to get closer to your product, an opportunity for another high-value touch with your organization, and goodwill because you gave them free training.

3. Speed up customer on-boarding

On-boarding new customers takes time and resources. No matter how easy your software is to setup, if you sell to large enterprises, the process can take weeks or months. Services and support team are often charged with on-boarding new customers and end up reinventing the wheel with each new customer, showing them how to use your software. Any amount of time that can be removed from this process reduces expenses and frees up your team to get to the next customer. Increasing this velocity increases revenue velocity. A formalized training program can reduce most of this "fire-drill" activity and allow your support team to focus on solve customers problems rather than showing new customers the same tasks over and over.

4. Increase and maintain adoption

After a customer has been using your product, they get comfortable and everyone is happy...until Jill leaves and now no one knows how to run reports. So what do your customers do? They call you up for help. This is fine when it happens intermittently, but when you have hundreds of customers, each with turnover and unique needs, you will not be able to keep up. Suffering from low adoption, some customers will eventually not renew because the product is too difficult to use, and they do not want to pay to use 10% of your product. Your churn increases and revenues fall. This is the nightmare scenario. Look, customers will have turnover. New employees will join and need to learn how to use your product. If you have a training program in place, you can simply make your customers aware that any new employees can register for classes on your website. Not only is this great customer service, but it is an act of showing how much you care about your customers' success. You can keep customer churn low by proactively providing on-going training for your customers.

5. Sell training and run a profitable training business

All of the reasons above contribute to growing your enterprise software business indirectly. Training can also directly help you grow your business by operating as a profit center. There are many software companies that run profitable training businesses. For example, Redhat built a $60 million a year Linux training organization, and that is for an open source technology. You can imagine how large the training businesses are at Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. I understand, you are not Microsoft. There are plenty of enterprise software companies not in the Fortune 100 running training businesses that contribute directly to company growth. These include JBoss, SpringSource, and Cloudera to name only a few.

But How? As usual, the answer is, 'It depends'

So you may be asking yourself, "How do I know which path to take?" As usual, the answer is, "It depends." It depends on where you are in the technology product adoption lifecycle, what your customers keep telling you, and what your core belief is about customer success and training. You must figure this out. But whether your training strategy lives at the top of the funnel or the bottom line of the income statement, there is a place in your enterprise software business strategy for training. It all depends on your priorities.

17 Signs Your Software Needs Training