In the past few years, technology advancements have made it easy to deliver training conveniently and cost-effectively online or through blended sessions that combine both online and in-person techniques. The use of virtual classroom solutions enables you to reach more learners, more often, and extend the reach of your learning offerings to virtually anywhere in the world – while slashing travel costs. Effective use of such tools can be a significant asset to organizations as the economy improves and hiring increases, resulting in a growing demand for training. In addition, the use of virtual classrooms to deliver training to customers and partners offers a way to differentiate your products and services in an increasingly commoditized world.
External Online Training as a Revenue Generator
Delivering external online training to customers and partners offers a host of proven benefits. Training customers to use your products and services helps maximize usage, enhances their ROI and improves customer retention. Training partners on your products and services enables them to sell your offerings more effectively and delivers a direct impact to your bottom line. There is also an added benefit: the opportunity to create a new revenue stream by offering fee-based training.
While selling training services through the web is not a new concept, it’s now easier than ever to do because of new economies of scale and automated processes. Today, companies can easily offer fee-based training, adding an e-commerce component as a natural extension of their training platform. More importantly, training organizations can start driving new revenue, contribute to the bottom line and build greater value for their learning programs.
Extending Your Training Platform to Customers and Partners
The first step is to determine a clear understanding of your company’s goals for training; then, work with customers and partners to define the results they would need to gain from participating in your training sessions. These results may vary from partner to partner as the scope of work you collaborate on with each company varies. It’s important to get the perspective of not just management, but also individual employees who will be taking part in the sessions, so they can provide input on what they want and need from a training session. Work with your customers and partners to define expected training outcomes and criteria to measure success. Then provide reports showing how the training program reached those objectives.
Key Capabilities Needed to Deliver Fee-Based Training Sessions
Companies incorporating training as a new service will need to add some capabilities to deliver fee-based training. These include publishing and marketing your classes, scheduling and registration, payment processing, collection and tracking, list maintenance, content delivery, assessment, and possibly even certifications. Training managers should begin by evaluating the capabilities they need to add and consider how online training programs can help automate many of these activities.
Developing automated billing and payment processes to receive online payment from learners is perhaps one of the biggest challenges. However, recent technology advances have made collecting information and payments from learners much simpler. To make things as easy as possible, use an online training program that also has payment processing built in – that way, you don’t have to bother with manually administering registrations and taking payments. You should be able to do everything online as an automated process, from pricing to marketing to collecting payments and, of course, tracking income.
In looking at ways to grow your business in 2011, explore opportunities to expand external training and offer fee-based training sessions. By increasing your training capabilities, you can leverage new technology to save time and costs, while delivering a professional and engaging learning experience for customers and partners.
As senior product marketing manager of learning solutions at Citrix Online, Bob Lee brings more than 25 years of experience in the learning and technology industries. Bob has served in a variety of roles, including director of education for a major U.S. bank, curriculum developer and classroom instructor, software developer, consultant, and marketer.
Written for TrainingIndustry.com
