by Bill Cushard (@BillCush)
trainingrocket.com
If you are in the process of building an enterprise software training business, you inevitably ask yourself where you should start and how you can take the business to the next level and turn it into a great organization. This is not an easy question to answer, especially with the myriad and conflicting methods for achieving greatness. For example, in the book, Good to Great, we learn that good is the enemy of great. On the other hand, in the Lean Startup, we learn the critical importance of shipping a minimal viable product (in other words, ship the product before it is great in order to make it great). These two methods for achieving greatness seemingly oppose each other.
It may appear that way, but I would think even Jim Collins would agree that a company should not wait until it is great to start up or launch products. Great organizations build up to greatness. In other words, they start somewhere.
So, if you are building an enterprise software training business, you need to start somewhere. And if you have already started, you need to assess your current state, so you can determine where you want to go and determine the actions you will take to get you there. You can make this assessment using a maturity model.
All enterprise software training businesses go through a progression of maturity. You can learn what those maturity stages are in our eBook. In this post, I want to focus on one specific stage of that maturity model: the performing stage.
When Your Enterprise Software Training Business is Performing...
When you are in the performing stage of the enterprise software training maturity model, your training function is humming right along. You have standardized training, a published schedule, and customers who complete your training on a consistent basis. Certainly, your training could be better, but in general, your customers give you good feedback.
If you are not quite there yet, there are a few things you can do to get to the performing stage because at this stage, a training function is doing three things well. Here are those three things:
1. Automated Registration and Payment of Training
The first thing a training function does well at the performing stage is automating the registration and payment of training. Customers have a self-service way of visiting your website, viewing your course offerings and schedule. Customers can register for training, pay with a credit card or purchase order, and get notified of their payment and enrollment. At this stage of maturity you are moving beyond scheduling training by talking to a customer on the phone and scheduling a training session uniquely for each customer. You have a published schedule and customers can register on their own. This is not to say that you do not offer private training sessions. You certainly do at this stage, but you also charge a higher rate for private training, so the manual scheduling is part of the service you provide your customers. When you are performing, you have automated much of the registration and payment process.
2. Deliver Standard and Repeatable Training Courses
In the reacting stage of the Enterprise Software Training Maturity Model, you did not have a standard and repeatable training course offering. Training was almost always created from scratch each time a customer requested it. Obviously, this was not a sustainable way to work, and it caused a lot of stress on your team. As your training function matures into the performing stage, you have figured out the 80% of things all customers need to learn to get up and running on your product. You have taken this and created a course or set of courses that can be delivered, with no customization, to just about all of your customers in a standard and repeatable way. Gone are the stressful days of assembling and delivering training uniquely for each customer because you are now delivering standard courses to groups of customers who all need to learn the same thing.
There will be times when a customer will request private training. You will be ready for this with your standard content, and you will charge more for private sessions. And if a customer wants customized training, you will first make sure the standard training will not suit your customer needs before doing any custom training. If custom training is truly necessary, you will charge for that too.
The main point at the performing stage is that you have standard and repeatable training that helps your customers get up and running on your product.
3. Keep Training Content Current
In a world of shorts sprints and rapid release cycles, it is easy for training content to be outdated the moment it is finished. The last thing you want to happen is for a trainer to start a course and then be surprised with a product change that looks completely different than what is in the current training materials. Not only is the trainer caught off guard, but it make a bad impression on customers.
At the performing stage of maturity, an enterprise software training function anticipates this and takes a proactive role in staying on top of the product roadmap and release scheduled to ensure training content is current. There are many ways to approach this (which is a subject for a future blog post) but the point here is the importance of keeping training content current.
A Right of Passage
No matter where you are starting or where you want to take your enterprise software training business, the performing stage of maturity is a right of passage on the journey to greatness. Before you can achieve greatness in your organization, you must get to a point at which you have a standard and repeatable process for delivering high quality training that helps your customers adopt your product. Performing is the foundation on which you can build a scalable and optimized software training business that contributes directly to growing revenue.
Enterprise Software Training Maturity Model eBook
