by Kendall Beckelhymer and Daniel Luebke
In the world of software, training directors and coordinators have a crucial job. Whether a member of a two-person training function at a fast-growing software start-up or the director a global training department with a partner network, the role plays into the success of your company and teams like sales, marketing and engineering. Too bad training often gets ignored.
We digress. The point is, training directors need to implement sound strategy to help ensure a pivotal piece of their software company's success. Here are four proven strategies that will help you grow your training business.
1 - Streamline Your Systems
In training management your work is never limited to a single system. In fact, it's likely dispersed across multiple systems and platforms. Say, for instance, you create classes and training sessions in Eventbrite, keep tabs on various course objects in Excel and manage your customer interaction and sales through a separate eCommerce platform and CRM (sound familiar). Keeping these straight requires a Herculean effort, especially as you attempt to scale your training function.
Integrate a Learning Management System with everything.....
You should choose an LMS that supports multimodal learning, eCommerce and integrates with things like Google Analytics and marketing automation systems.
If you are serious about growing your training business, integrating a platforms like Go2Training with your other systems is essential. A modern training business LMS will allow you to create a training session, track revenue and the lifecycle of all of your contacts. Better yet, you can get increased reporting functionality that comes with comprehensive training business management software.
2 - Empower Your Sales and Marketing Team
External training is a very effective, if not essential, method of growing sales for your SaaS product. A training catalog is a powerful tool in the arsenal of a sales team, empowering them with a competitive advantage and potentially dealmaking leverage. But the potential impact of synchronizing a CRM with your LMS extends further.
Integrate Your Training Catalog to Your CRM, like Salesforce.com
If your sales team works in a CRM like Salesforce.com, they will delight at the opportunity of a warm leads list provided automatically from your LMS. Make sure it easy for the sales team to get visibility into customer interactions and to sell with coupon codes, subscriptions and training credits.
Take the relationship with sales a step further by empowering them to make training an easy, priority sale.
If the sales team is tempted to throw training in for free to make a sale than to offer it as a benefit the customer should seek, your department will suffer. A system that offers training credits helps open new opportunities for sales people that are mutually attractive to your customers. The packages will allow them to redeem at their own pace in a predictable way - a must for many enterprise customers. Finally, ensure that your sales people have are equipped with thoughtful, tiered coupon codes. Not only will it save you the time of constantly updating and customizing new ones, but it will expand the toolbox your salespeople use to convert.
Training is a great method of lead generation for many software companies.
If you're having to send marketing an exported list of site visitors every week it can become cumbersome, how does your LMS, CRM and Marketing automation systems work together to give marketing the information they need to grow the business. Make it easy for marketing to pull leads and automate processes like drip campaigns.
Another benefit of the integration? You can quickly and easily share reporting insights to upper management without training them on your LMS.
3 - Automate Processes
Do you have an LMS that sends out the right message at the right time, automatically? If you're relying on Gmail templates you're engaging in a manual, repetitive and potentially error-prone method of customer contact.
Furthermore, how do your students get their course materials? Are you manually attaching files to an email?
And finally, if you service multiple timezones, how are you students getting when you're asleep?
Automate and Templatize
Templatizing your daily work within your LMS is one of the most time-saving processes a training coordinator can enable. Set up registration blasts, set up triggered reminders, automate course material processes, and share useful resources on a predictable set timeline.
4 - Enable Self-Service for Customers
Administrative tasks such as registering for a class or private session shouldn't eat up your time. Your registration system should be as straightforward and flexible as possible to prevent a steady stream of questions and change requests.
Implement a modern LMS with eCommerce capabilities, training credits, multimodality
If your students are logging in to your "training center" to view PDF-versions of your course descriptions you've forfeited enormous opportunity to retain and convert your audience. Not to mention, a gated structure as described is poison to your marketing team and their search engine strategy.
Find an LMS that has a native, simple and intuitive eCommerce function. It should have the ability to manage training credits and an effective system for coupon creation, expiration and management.
Furthermore, if students have to email you to take training than you are making it hard for them to convert to a sale. Not to mention, you're causing frustration. They want information on-demand - which is why multimodal is a good strategy for software training.
How? You offer instant gratification with a self-paced course, a teaser for the online instructor led training course they will take the following week.
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