Podcast: Why Online Training Gives You the Edge

I caught up with Lisa Bordeaux from BlueVolt recently to talk about the importance of using online training. Everyone is looking for ROI. 

BlueVolt provides online training centers for manufacturers, distributors, buying groups and trade associations. They have delivered more than 1 million courses to date. They have been a strategic partner of ours for over 5 years and have helped several of our clients in this area.

Lisa explains the differences of why Manufacturers and Distributors use it and why their reasons are different. She also talks about the different ways to learn – Observations, Conferences, Classroom and Self-Study.

Here are a few highlights:

Training – It’s not on fire (easy to push out) – but in our customers’ experience – it’s one of the most significant things you can do for the bottom line. We have customers telling us certified people are outpacing their industry averages by 16-24% YOY. Not sure what other efforts have that impact.

Training – get it as close to the guy as possible – usually folks have 10 minutes in the afternoon to learn something – our buying group customers – say their member employees spent the ten minutes surfing a supplier site for product information – but by bringing it all in one place and putting the incentives on it, like we do – they spend the 10 minutes becoming better sellers – and that’s time well spent.

Enjoy. Listen here.

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Free Online Training Webinar: Learn How You Can Launch a Course in Under a Week

Are you looking for a repeatable way to provide training to your customers so your sales people can focus on selling?

Explore options for online training, best practices, what not to do and how you can launch a course in under a week. The presenter, Lisa Bordeaux from Bluevolt, a leading online training source for suppliers, distributors and end users, will be our presenter.

Join us to learn more about how manufacturers are developing product training courses that educate people on their products and building product experts in the field.

Our research shows that Distributor sales people recommend products to customers 2-5 times per day. They recommend what they know and most of the products they sell they have never seen in application. Learn how others are bringing those products to life online and making it easier to educate and market to the channel with partners, buying groups, customers and others.

Details:

Tuesday, December 7th, 2-3 PM EST. Registration is closed.

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Use Online Training to Educate Tradesmen – Part 2

Training Tradesmen – do you use a carrot or a stick?

This is the second part of a two-part series (Part 1) by Lisa Bordeaux from BlueVolt, an online marketing and learning platform that focuses on the professional tradesman.

Whether you are using the carrot or the stick to drive training participation, providing contractors resources for their folks to take advantage of can be a very real benefit to the tradesman in the field.

From a contractor’s perspective, having a manufacturer that’s committed to training is an obvious win. These guys are in the field and it’s a real challenge to corral folks into the office for formalized training. At the same time, the guys in the field need training to stay safe on the job, learn about new products, maintain their licensure or certification.

One of the reasons we started in the business was because we recognized there was a need for people in the field to have better access to information. When you sit at a desk, it’s different then when you work in the field. So early on – we thought it would be best to provide bite size information to folks that they could take on the fly.

Training with the Carrot –

The idea of incentivized training is not new. Tying a carrot to something that you want to deliver to the market is a very effective way to build an audience of learners who are open to the information. In fact, when we launch courses that have incentives, we see a 10X greater usage pattern then courses that don’t have incentives. If the information is not all product based and serves some more general purpose, manufacturers may actually charge for their courses and then offset the charge with a reward of equal or greater value.

Training with the Stick –

Individuals in the trade in many cases are training as a requirement of their job. This may be something like forklift safety which is regularly required or code related if the state requires code updates for license renewal. In this case, we see different usage trends – the majority of the training gets taken just at the point of need. So for instance, when we started our code change course in 2002, in Oregon there were 26,000 licensed electrical workers that were required to take 8 CEUs of code update. The deadline was October 1, and as of July 15, 17,000 of the license holders had yet to complete their code training. http://go.bluevolt.com/CoBrandTemplate/CourseCatalog.aspx?CategoryID=884

This becomes a real problem and the companies offering the code training in-person are flooded with calls they can’t satisfy. Online training really makes sense.  The timeline creates a sense of urgency which can be a great driver of participation.

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Use Online Training to Educate Tradesmen – Part 1

Training – both product training and safety training – are important to  professional tradesmen. That’s why several years ago we formed a strategic alliance with BlueVolt to help educate and inform our client’s customers (the professional tradesman). BlueVolt creates online marketing and learning platforms that are focused on the professional tradesmen. They have delivered over 535,000 courses to 50,000-plus registered users. We have the privilege of having Lisa Bordeaux, director of sales and partner development, here to share with you a two-part series on the benefits of online training. Enjoy her insights!

The most successful companies are the ones that not only offer training to individuals but they support them with online tools and resources, a community. In many cases, suppliers may or may not tie this to their website, they may work with associations or we may collaborate to syndicate their content. If done right, training can make it easier to engage with customers and develop a relationship that supports and fosters sales for years to come.

Training can be a great way to go to market. It’s a softer sell than advertising and it provides value to the customer while building brand affinity. BlueVolt works with a number of manufacturers, some have a strong history of training. In fact, one of them is so committed to training, they have one person in the marketing department, 7 people in the training department. Training is done both online and in-person and their training staff is teamed with sales people by territories. This fosters a tight relationship between sales opportunities and education.

Over the years I have come to think that in many cases, training is a Trojan horse for Marketing. I have seen this done to great effect in a number of cases. Here are three examples of efforts we have supported:

  1. Using education to generate sales. We have a number of examples in this case. Many manufacturers have fairly complex products either to operate or install. Providing training on a specific product can ensure that people prefer it over other products. We find offering training can provide a market of excited advocates and experts, doing it online provides an easy way to communicate and follow up with folks. The individual may pay for this training and the supplier most typically gives either a product or incentive to the individual to offset the cost of the training. http://www.bluevolt.com/case-studies/wright-tools
  2. Just in time training on new products. This is a big one for taking training online and we do it daily. When done right we significantly shorten the return on development for a new product. By delivering information to people online about new products either live, archived or even a simple PDF cut sheet that individuals many manufacturers leverage provide training just in time. This training is most often incentivized. That is, the individual receives some sort of reward for proving their knowledge.  http://www.bluevolt.com/case-studies/uei

Building a market through education – this is an expensive proposition, but can be very effective. We undertook this with a large switch manufacturer who built a course to train home integrators so they could network devices in residential. They didn’t make any products in the space, but believed they would sell more switches and routers, if there were more integrated homes needing bandwidth. Through a series of partnerships, we built a community of training centers and hosted and tracked all the training online. This is typically a scenario where the individual would pay to participate in the training. As a manufacturer, you really need a long view and high level of commitment to improve the industry.

Next, you’ll learn which has more impact, a carrot or a stick?

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