5
It is Never Just Product Training: Why You Should Offer the Training
There are many reasons and ways to educate adults. Corporate training programs come in many shapes and sizes. They don’t all have the same approach, nor do they all have the same expected outcomes. Some educational programs exist to improve or build on a student’s soft skills, while others seek to teach new proficiencies in a technical or precise environment. Some require extensive proof, not only of comprehension but also of the ability to perform the required task correctly and consistently. Some training programs require only comprehension testing or no testing at all. Others exist purely to avoid a lawsuit. I am sure you’ve had to sit through a few of those or at least click through the online compliance modules while you tried to do something more “meaningful.”
Applying the adult learning principles that were covered in the first few chapters will make you more effective as a product instructor. What it will not do is ensure that the training helps your business—and training that doesn’t help your business isn’t worth delivering. Offering training for the right reasons is essential. Otherwise, your most effective delivery will have ineffective results.
Product Solution Training Versus Talent Development
It is critical to the success of your product that you be effective as an instructor. Unlike some of the training mentioned earlier, you are teaching about a product or solution that you produce. Without competent users, your product has no purpose. Creating competent users is not just important or helpful; it is essential.
Unfortunately, many companies do not put a strong enough emphasis on product training. It’s not that they think product training is unimportant. It is more likely that they are caught in a risk–reward cycle that prohibits them from investing too much in product education. Corporations are reluctant to spend money measuring the results of a program they have little investment in to begin with. Those that do find the investment in their customers’ talent development to be similar to the investment in their employees’ development: extremely beneficial.
Whether it’s because it is the right thing to do, because they realize it works, or because it is trendy, most companies invest significant amounts of money each year in developing the talent of their own workforce. Associations and magazines, conferences, and seminars all join to make talent development a multibillion‐dollar industry.1 The more companies invest in talent development, the more important and valuable the results are to them. As they invest more, they realize how effective the development can be. They build intricate metric models to fine‐tune their offerings. They don’t just offer training classes; they want to make sure that the training they are offering changes (or develops) the talent of the student. Developing talent is a significant part of the strategy of most successful business models.
The sad reality is, however, that many of them do this so that they can offer a product that is superior and more efficiently produced than their competition but then neglect to spend that same energy to develop the talent of those actually using their product. According to most studies, only a small percentage of money spent on training goes toward product training, and the great majority of that is dedicated to employee product training.
Employee Product Training
The result of putting such a small emphasis on product training is that corporate product trainers are at a significant disadvantage. Proven, effective training courses are not readily available on your products. Employees are expected to get most of their product training on the job. This makes the learning less consistent and makes metrics or proof of success virtually nonexistent.
When formal training on the product does exist, it is often delivered by you, the subject matter expert. You may have even had to develop the curriculum, which likely meant you or another subject matter expert put together content that contained everything about the product that you thought was necessary for the student to learn.
By making product training the responsibility of those who know the most about the product, the company is recognizing the importance of getting the subject matter experts involved. It could be dangerous, and potentially even irresponsible, to put the training in the hands of those who don’t know enough about the product. What most people are missing, however, is that transferring that knowledge requires a completely different skillset. Ignoring that may be equally irresponsible.
I regularly hear statements from corporate leaders that confirm a gap between product training and talent development. In a recent project, I asked if there was any intention of tracking the requested training within the human resources talent development program. The reply was simple: “No, this is just product training.”
Except that it isn’t. It’s never just product training. Even when the target audience is internal employees, the product training they get should be the best in the industry. If you make a unique product, and you are the only source for that training, don’t let that become an excuse for subpar training. Your company will only benefit from training that changes behavior, and that should be the foundation of your business strategy.
Customer Product Training
When you are asked to put that same training together for customers, your challenge is even greater. Now, your students are from outside of the company. You don’t have a captive audience, nor do you have access to the students’ employment or previous training records. It is more difficult to follow up after a training event to verify that the training is, in fact, changing behavior. Even if you wanted to tie it in with their talent development requirements, it would likely be impossible.
The good news is that greater challenges bring greater rewards. You now get to change what customers do with your product or solution, which can bring greater returns to your company and product. You should do so using many of the same metrics, the same learning principles, and the same management philosophies that your counterparts in talent development are using.
Because the talent development field is large and profitable, there is a lot of competition ready to help your company develop that type of training. Competition can help to breed excellence. Unfortunately, as an expert that trains on your own product, you likely do not have much competition, if any at all. You may have put together the content yourself or relied heavily on another subject matter expert to provide the training content for you. This is especially true if yours is a start‐up company or one that produces proprietary products. Everyone that takes your training thinks it is great. They have to. No one else offers it, so it is the best there is! It is easy to get flattered by great student evaluations, but difficult to improve and know for sure that you are offering great education on your product or solution.
Good training, when paired with a good business strategy, can be the lifeblood of a product or an entire company. Good training that isn’t backed by an effective strategy, however, can be nearly as bad as bad training, which is catastrophic to a product, process, or program.
As a technical expert, you probably have, or have had, other job responsibilities in the company. You are aware of all the work required to develop and produce your particular product. It stands to reason, then, that you, as much as anyone, do not want the training on your product to be developed with any less care or importance.
Business Plan
Creating a solid business plan is the first pillar of effective learning. It is your strategy. The first element to understand in your strategy is the business reason for offering the training. Usually, businesses take one of two approaches. Either training is viewed as a necessary service—a cost of doing business, or it is seen as a profit center that must make money, based on the intrinsic value of the training courses themselves. There are pros and cons to both of these approaches, but I will suggest a third, more business‐friendly view.
Training as a Cost of Doing Business
When companies develop product training as a cost of doing business, there is usually no initiative to sell the training or even an attempt to recuperate costs. Most salespeople prefer to see training as a cost of doing business, and chances are, if your training department sits in your sales organization, this is the preferred approach. Many salespeople are afraid of anything interfering with a potential sale. All trainers are part salesperson and don’t want a lack of knowledge to hinder the purchase of a product.
This approach can be effective. When a product is new to the marketplace or there is little demand for it, offering training as a free perk is often a necessary way to create a demand for training. Ease‐of‐use issues or quality misperceptions due to lack of knowledge about the product might also force you to offer your training free of charge. Salespeople can be the training program’s best advocate in these situations, and training leaders do well to listen to them. Salespeople are right to insist on simplifying the purchase and use of your products. While I have had more than one executive telling me emphatically that they are not going to charge their customers to learn how to use their product, the reality is that they do. They charge the customer to own the product in the first place. So they are willing to charge them to use it, but not to learn how to use it.
In the cost of doing business model, training is no different from the packaging in which the product is delivered. The idea is that the cost of educating the customer is built into the cost of the product. The reason for not charging makes sense. If you don’t charge for telling them about the product before they buy it, why should you charge to tell them about the product after they buy it?
There is always some opportunity to offer training as a cost of doing business. Sometimes it is the only way to get training to the customer and must remain an option to training leaders. However, it should rarely be the only business model for your training department.
Training as a Profit Center
Another favored approach to customer education is turning the training into a profit center. Most often, those companies taking this approach sell more than just a simple gadget or stand‐alone product. They often sell a solution that must be integrated into a larger system, where training is as important for the success of the buyer as for the seller. This creates an opportunity to treat training as another product that can increase profits.
Running a training department as a profit center is not an easy task. It must be a very lean department and often the delivery method trumps the quality of the training. The first question asked is rarely “what is the best way to educate my customer?” but is usually “what is the least costly way to educate my customer?”
The increased availability of eLearning has certainly helped to make training more profitable. There are many positives about good eLearning beyond the cost savings. Making training available for students when they need it most is a real possibility with eLearning and is even more accessible through mLearning (mobile learning). It is not always the most effective approach, however, and many product trainers are afraid to voice their concerns about using these methods exclusively. This is especially true if their executives have put pressure on them to use technology to save money.
Two issues are very common. First, executives tend to see eLearning as the cure‐all approach. Second, success is driven by the wrong metrics—a word on both of these issues.
- Caution 1: Technology is not a cure‐all. eLearning, as wonderful as it is, is not the best way to teach everything. When the modality of the education becomes more important than actual learning, your training may cease to be effective. Just as content is not king, neither is the delivery method. You must start with the desired business and behavioral outcomes in mind before determining the modality of the training.
In order to develop effective eLearning, corporate leaders must make a significant investment. The natural desire to get the most out of that investment forces some executives to emphasize eLearning technology over effectiveness. If they fail to understand the concept of proficiency training as opposed to product presentations, they may accept the mere delivery of content as success.
- Caution 2: Success may not be success. This leads to the second issue that can arise when tasked with running a profit center: the wrong metrics will almost always determine success or failure. Sometimes training programs are called a success when, in fact, they are not increasing sales of their company’s products. When you sell training, you need people—anybody—to take the training. It is as simple as that. It doesn’t matter that the right people are taking the training, or even that the training is successful. As long as you can get a lot of people to purchase the education you claim to provide, and you can keep the cost of producing that training to less than you are selling it for, you will be successful. Except that you won’t be. Real success only happens when you generate more product sales. Even the goal of reducing costs to deploy or use your products, or the goal of creating a valuable service for your customers, is really part of an ultimate goal to increase sales.
It is also true that some training departments that are generating sales of a product have been shut down due to failure to meet profit demands. This happens when companies don’t provide a way to link sales to product training or when product trainers are unable to demonstrate the connection.
With the exception of a few very large customer education programs, most of those that call themselves a profit center are not, in the true sense of the word, “profit centers.” Instead, charging for training is usually an attempt to cover the expenses of what they perceive to be a necessary service.
But making a profit is good! Just as it is true of running the department as a cost of doing business, so it is true that there are times when it makes sense to run the customer or product education department as a for‐profit center. If your product is first or second in the market or there is an external demand for training on your product (such as end‐user or regulatory requirements), it is reasonable to run the department as a profit center.
Charging for the training is also good. Don’t confuse putting a price on the training with a requirement to make a profit. Too much training is given away. The result is the devaluing of the education to both the company offering the training and the students taking the training.
So there are positives and negatives to this approach as well. The positives are that it builds a culture that assigns a value to the learning received. It also forces a lean and efficiently run department. The negatives are that it emphasizes the wrong thing, encouraging the wrong metrics to determine success. It often means that the training is designed out of house. Many times the trainers are not as qualified as they could be. In an effort to keep costs down, the training is spread too thinly across many product experts and the skill is never fully developed. In this model training managers are often industry experts, not adult education specialists.
Training that Sells Products
This leads to a third way—a blended approach to managing a training department. Educating users of your products is neither a cost of doing business nor is it the main focus of your business. Of course, I am not referring to companies for whom providing training is their main focus nor am I ignorant of the exceptions. Companies like Cisco have been very successful in turning the education of their products into successful business. But these are exceptions. Even the exceptions have one goal in mind—to support company profitability. If your company produces and sells a product, service, or solution, the success of your company is measured in the sales of those products, services, or solutions. What determines the success of your company should determine the success of your training department.
The first thing anyone considering developing a training program should ask is what company goal it will help to achieve. Never let your product training become an island when it comes to the goals of the department. Your reason for offering the training should support your company’s main objectives, or it will be very easy for senior management to cut funding for your department or eliminate it all together. This is true whether the training department is run as a cost of doing business or as a profit center. All costs of doing business must have a return to justify the expense. The fact that your department is covering its costs in the short term is of little consequence. Remember, most for‐profit training centers are making what amounts to a very, very small percentage of the overall profit for their company. Their real task is to justify their existence.
Technical training departments that focus on the bottom line will be less focused on things like the modality of the training. A good curriculum designer will start with what they want the student to be able to do when they have completed the training and determine the best method to make that happen. It may be online learning, instructor‐led, or a combination of both. Regardless, they will worry less about selling the training to make a profit and more about making sure that their training is increasing associated product revenues by more than the cost of doing the training. That is true profit.
It is interesting to me how willing executives can be to spend money developing learning when they have been promised that those costs will be recouped through the sale of the training itself, but are so reluctant to spend money when the increased sale of the product will recover the costs, sometimes many times over. The reason? Because getting accurate numbers for the first scenario is easy. Getting accurate numbers for the second scenario is difficult, and executives live by numbers they can prove.
Conclusion
Product education that increases the bottom line is never just product training. Trainers are salespeople. Just because the training may happen after the sale does not diminish the influence that instructors have on future sales. Even if the training content is heavily technical and the audience is not comprised of decision‐makers, effective product training will influence sales and decrease support costs. If a company is willing to invest in training their people on your products, there is a good chance they will buy again. Your customers will always want more of what they know best. Your job, then, is to make sure your customers can do more with your product than they can do with your competitors’ products.
Product education existing as a cost of doing business will only thrive when business is good and profits are high. Training that turns a small profit but does not increase the mission and value of the company as a whole will remain a training department only until the stakeholders demand increased profitability or a narrowed focus. However, successful training is training that makes your company successful. It will last even when times are difficult, if you can prove that through accurate and meaningful numbers.
Make sure your training objectives support your company’s business goals. Link every class you offer to a specific business goal. Do not let the goal of teaching about your product be to cover your expenses. Even worse, do not let training become a post‐sales necessary evil. If your courses and modules make your CEO successful, your training department is here to stay.
Making It Practical
For good training to exist in your company, it must be part of a larger strategy. Even if you are not involved in defining that strategy, it is crucial to know why your company wants your training to be effective.
- How does (or will) the next class you teach help your company increase revenue, avoid costs, or improve services?
- Describe, in your own words, how product training can become more than just training about your products.
- How does training that uses the “profit center” model tend to minimize evaluation of behavior change?
Before you read Chapter 6, “From Good to Great: Defining the Focus of Effective Product Training,” answer these two questions.
- In your own words, describe the difference between facilitating and lecturing.
- What is more valuable to your training program, individual results or number of students training?