Learn What’s Out There
As we discussed earlier, there’s no shortage of training vendors that want your business. So how do we narrow them down? Well, it depends on the scope of the need. Keep in mind, not every vendor can meet every training need.
In the case of John Smith and his pivot tables, a public course will probably do the job. In fact, chances are you already have a go-to vendor for this type of thing, and it’s a matter of selecting the scheduled course or e-learning module that meets John’s need.
For the IT department adopting a new methodology, it’s a little more in depth. A need this comprehensive deserves a little research. You may already have a go-to vendor, but that doesn’t mean they are the most qualified. Do your homework - get the curriculum, and set up interviews with instructors, if possible. Your ultimate goal here is to narrow down the field to three vendors with whom you’ll set up a final selection process.
In our third scenario, your process is quite a bit different. You probably won’t be working off of standard curriculum; you’ll more likely need to develop a unique curriculum for the custom upgrade. In this case, there may not be a slew of vendors for you to interview; you may be talking with one or two specialized firms, or the training department for the software manufacturer (for which you will likely pay a lot more). References are critical here, as well as samples of previous work. The vendor will be getting deep into your business processes. If your company requires a background check in order for a contractor to touch your systems, identify the people and perform the background check before they start.
In Part III of this series, "Matching the Product", we'll discuss pairing the correct product for your need, and whether or not an RFP is the appropriate procurement method.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Best Practices in Training Procurement, Part I - Defining the Need
This is the first of a 4-part series on Best Practices in Training Procurement.
Overview
Classroom training. E-learning. Blended learning. Synchronous vs. asynchronous distance learning. Self-study. The training world is becoming increasingly complex, with new products & services being created every day. How do we know we’re making the right purchase to meet our training need? In today’s economy, we need to be certain that our limited training budgets are being utilized with maximum benefit to the organization.
Every training organization in the world wants your money. Many will do whatever they have to do, and promise whatever they need to promise, in order to get your business, and some will claim capabilities that they do not yet have in order to win your business. Training vendors likely mail you catalogs every day, and send regular emails featuring the special of the week, or the latest and greatest curriculum. The trainer that deserves your business is the one that fully understands your need, and is interested in maximizing the benefit that your organization is looking for. How do you as the training buyer make sure that happens? Well, that’s a complicated question with a more complicated answer.
When you buy a physical product, you can take it out of the box right away, follow the instructions, and verify that it works. If it’s defective, you can return it for a new product or your money back. Training is much more ambiguous, since ROI won’t be fully realized until long after the training is completed and your dollars have been spent. If you follow a defined procurement plan, you will have much better odds of getting the training that exactly meets your organization’s needs.
Define the Need
How extensive is the training need? To what extent does it impact the organization as a whole? It’s critical to your success as a training manager to diagnose before you prescribe. In other words, you need to fully understand the problem before you implement a solution.
If John Smith in Finance needs to learn more effective pivot tables in Excel 2007 to produce a particular report, then your need is very well defined the moment you learn of it.
Say your IT department is adopting a formal Project Management methodology as a new practice. A little more exploration will ensure the correct training solution is implemented. What type of process are they moving over from? Why are they adopting a new methodology? Who in the IT department already has project management experience? To what extent does the entire department need training, and does anyone need to be certified? Is there a timeline for everyone to be trained? More exploration is required before you can fully understand the need.
However, if the entire Finance department is performing a major systems upgrade with customization to meet new government regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, then you have quite a bit of homework to do. You’ll want to be involved with the people performing the upgrade. You’ll want to interview as many people as possible do determine the impact on their daily tasks. It’s important to understand the desired result from management, but it is equally important to understand the impact on the end-user, and what they would like to achieve as well. You’ll also want to understand the output of the changed processes, and how that may impact other parts of the company. What resources internal to the company already exist that could serve as training resources?
By fully defining the training need, you will be better equipped to begin searching for the proper solution.
In the next segment, "Learn What's Out There", we'll begin to explore the available resources, and how to qualify them.
Overview
Classroom training. E-learning. Blended learning. Synchronous vs. asynchronous distance learning. Self-study. The training world is becoming increasingly complex, with new products & services being created every day. How do we know we’re making the right purchase to meet our training need? In today’s economy, we need to be certain that our limited training budgets are being utilized with maximum benefit to the organization.
Every training organization in the world wants your money. Many will do whatever they have to do, and promise whatever they need to promise, in order to get your business, and some will claim capabilities that they do not yet have in order to win your business. Training vendors likely mail you catalogs every day, and send regular emails featuring the special of the week, or the latest and greatest curriculum. The trainer that deserves your business is the one that fully understands your need, and is interested in maximizing the benefit that your organization is looking for. How do you as the training buyer make sure that happens? Well, that’s a complicated question with a more complicated answer.
When you buy a physical product, you can take it out of the box right away, follow the instructions, and verify that it works. If it’s defective, you can return it for a new product or your money back. Training is much more ambiguous, since ROI won’t be fully realized until long after the training is completed and your dollars have been spent. If you follow a defined procurement plan, you will have much better odds of getting the training that exactly meets your organization’s needs.
Define the Need
How extensive is the training need? To what extent does it impact the organization as a whole? It’s critical to your success as a training manager to diagnose before you prescribe. In other words, you need to fully understand the problem before you implement a solution.
If John Smith in Finance needs to learn more effective pivot tables in Excel 2007 to produce a particular report, then your need is very well defined the moment you learn of it.
Say your IT department is adopting a formal Project Management methodology as a new practice. A little more exploration will ensure the correct training solution is implemented. What type of process are they moving over from? Why are they adopting a new methodology? Who in the IT department already has project management experience? To what extent does the entire department need training, and does anyone need to be certified? Is there a timeline for everyone to be trained? More exploration is required before you can fully understand the need.
However, if the entire Finance department is performing a major systems upgrade with customization to meet new government regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley, then you have quite a bit of homework to do. You’ll want to be involved with the people performing the upgrade. You’ll want to interview as many people as possible do determine the impact on their daily tasks. It’s important to understand the desired result from management, but it is equally important to understand the impact on the end-user, and what they would like to achieve as well. You’ll also want to understand the output of the changed processes, and how that may impact other parts of the company. What resources internal to the company already exist that could serve as training resources?
By fully defining the training need, you will be better equipped to begin searching for the proper solution.
In the next segment, "Learn What's Out There", we'll begin to explore the available resources, and how to qualify them.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Car Sales Tactics with Terry Bradshaw
Today’s post is a bit of a departure from the usual posts about technology training and best practices, to tell a story of an experience I had last week with a producer for a TV show called “Profile with Terry Bradshaw”.
I’ve been in the business of selling training for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve seen many different methodologies and sales tactics. There are two practices in particular that I feel are unethical, and should never be used by any legitimate salesperson: the Bait and Switch, and the Takeaway Close.
The Bait and Switch a tactic where the salesperson offers a particular product at a discount (or free) to get the prospect’s interest, and after assessing their level of interest, pulls the discount to offer a higher priced product. Personally, I also consider a salesperson to be pulling a “Bait and Switch” when they fail to disclose fees for goods or services up front. I’ve seen this personally with vacuum cleaner sales people when they send a college kid door to door offering a “free room cleaning” to demonstrate the features of a vacuum, only to have the salesperson walk into your home and try to intimidate you into buying a vacuum cleaner or they won’t leave. Oh, and they don’t clean an entire room, either.
The Takeaway Close is used when a prospect is not completely committed to the sale, and the act of “taking away” the product or service instills a fear of loss in the prospect, forcing them to make a decision. I’ve seen this at car dealerships when negotiating the price of a car, and in order to “meet your price” the salesperson removes a feature that you indicated you wanted.
More on these tactics later.
We were contacted last week by a representative from the TV show “Profiles With Terry Bradshaw”. I took a look at the website for the show, and found that it is a program that considers small business success to be vital to our nation’s growth, and that Terry Bradshaw profiles “Fascinating business stories to hear first-hand candid insights from entrepreneurs of various industries.” According to the person who contacted us, Terry Bradshaw was running a series on the importance of business training in the current economy, and their research team had thought that our company’s story would be interesting to profile on the show.
As a small business, that level of exposure certainly appealed to us. After all we have just launched the world’s most comprehensive and user-friendly training search engine, boasting over 140,000 scheduled courses across the U.S. and Canada, and it levels the playing field, portraying small local training companies side-by-side with technical training giants such as Global Knowledge and New Horizons. Our story certainly seemed compelling to us, and we were thrilled that Terry Bradshaw might want to interview us on TV!
We set up an appointment with an associate producer, who called me the next business day to interview, and gain more insight into our story to make sure we were a good fit. During this interview, he did quite a bit to pump up my ego with congratulatory statements, and we set an appointment with a “senior producer” to flesh out the details and make sure all of their questions were answered.
Then, after all of that was set up, the associate producer told me that there would be some fees involved. “OK”, I said guardedly, “What kinds of fees are we talking about?” This was news to me, as we hadn’t had ANY discussion of fees up to this point.
Turns out, the costs involved are for production and editing, to get the clip ready for airtime. The fee for this “service” would be $24,800. I asked how much air time the final interview would be, and he said it would be about 5 minutes.
Um, excuse me? You build up this experience, play off of our emotions and hopes as a small business looking for exposure, and then whack us with a $25k price tag? I said that there was no way we have that kind of budget for a single 5-minute TV spot with limited visibility, and thanks but no thanks. He asked if we should cancel the appointment with the senior producer, and I said “absolutely, please cancel.”
Now, after talking with our PR person, it turns out that this sort of TV arrangement is very common. The TV shows aren’t owned by a particular network, so to float the cost of the show, they charge the people appearing, and the show is shopped out to different networks, who are looking to fill airtime. They don’t make much money from the networks, so they need to charge the people appearing.
Fine, but disclose that up front! This is where the bait and switch comes in: offering a televised interview with a major media icon and sports figure, where he will voice over our story and tell it in a really compelling way, and the team will even shoot on location. We’re not in the TV business – we don’t know how the business works, so failing to disclose those fees up front DEFINITELY qualifies as a bait and switch in my mind.
As a last ditch effort, the associate producer used the “Takeaway Close”, asking if he should cancel the meeting with the executive producer. Sir, when I said “there’s no way we have the budget” I meant it.
Terry Bradshaw, by all accounts, is ridiculously successful and charismatic. He’s one of those people where everything he touches turns to gold. He’s had an incredible career as a sports figure, motivational speaker, TV analyst and announcer, actor, and author. We found it more than a little disappointing to find that a media organization with this amazing person at the front would use these kinds of sales tactics on the small businesses that are critical to our economy, and our nation’s growth. It’s a betrayal of the very reason the program exists.
Terry, you may want to reconsider your choice of business model and organizational structure.
I’ve been in the business of selling training for over 10 years. In that time, I’ve seen many different methodologies and sales tactics. There are two practices in particular that I feel are unethical, and should never be used by any legitimate salesperson: the Bait and Switch, and the Takeaway Close.
The Bait and Switch a tactic where the salesperson offers a particular product at a discount (or free) to get the prospect’s interest, and after assessing their level of interest, pulls the discount to offer a higher priced product. Personally, I also consider a salesperson to be pulling a “Bait and Switch” when they fail to disclose fees for goods or services up front. I’ve seen this personally with vacuum cleaner sales people when they send a college kid door to door offering a “free room cleaning” to demonstrate the features of a vacuum, only to have the salesperson walk into your home and try to intimidate you into buying a vacuum cleaner or they won’t leave. Oh, and they don’t clean an entire room, either.
The Takeaway Close is used when a prospect is not completely committed to the sale, and the act of “taking away” the product or service instills a fear of loss in the prospect, forcing them to make a decision. I’ve seen this at car dealerships when negotiating the price of a car, and in order to “meet your price” the salesperson removes a feature that you indicated you wanted.
More on these tactics later.
We were contacted last week by a representative from the TV show “Profiles With Terry Bradshaw”. I took a look at the website for the show, and found that it is a program that considers small business success to be vital to our nation’s growth, and that Terry Bradshaw profiles “Fascinating business stories to hear first-hand candid insights from entrepreneurs of various industries.” According to the person who contacted us, Terry Bradshaw was running a series on the importance of business training in the current economy, and their research team had thought that our company’s story would be interesting to profile on the show.
As a small business, that level of exposure certainly appealed to us. After all we have just launched the world’s most comprehensive and user-friendly training search engine, boasting over 140,000 scheduled courses across the U.S. and Canada, and it levels the playing field, portraying small local training companies side-by-side with technical training giants such as Global Knowledge and New Horizons. Our story certainly seemed compelling to us, and we were thrilled that Terry Bradshaw might want to interview us on TV!
We set up an appointment with an associate producer, who called me the next business day to interview, and gain more insight into our story to make sure we were a good fit. During this interview, he did quite a bit to pump up my ego with congratulatory statements, and we set an appointment with a “senior producer” to flesh out the details and make sure all of their questions were answered.
Then, after all of that was set up, the associate producer told me that there would be some fees involved. “OK”, I said guardedly, “What kinds of fees are we talking about?” This was news to me, as we hadn’t had ANY discussion of fees up to this point.
Turns out, the costs involved are for production and editing, to get the clip ready for airtime. The fee for this “service” would be $24,800. I asked how much air time the final interview would be, and he said it would be about 5 minutes.
Um, excuse me? You build up this experience, play off of our emotions and hopes as a small business looking for exposure, and then whack us with a $25k price tag? I said that there was no way we have that kind of budget for a single 5-minute TV spot with limited visibility, and thanks but no thanks. He asked if we should cancel the appointment with the senior producer, and I said “absolutely, please cancel.”
Now, after talking with our PR person, it turns out that this sort of TV arrangement is very common. The TV shows aren’t owned by a particular network, so to float the cost of the show, they charge the people appearing, and the show is shopped out to different networks, who are looking to fill airtime. They don’t make much money from the networks, so they need to charge the people appearing.
Fine, but disclose that up front! This is where the bait and switch comes in: offering a televised interview with a major media icon and sports figure, where he will voice over our story and tell it in a really compelling way, and the team will even shoot on location. We’re not in the TV business – we don’t know how the business works, so failing to disclose those fees up front DEFINITELY qualifies as a bait and switch in my mind.
As a last ditch effort, the associate producer used the “Takeaway Close”, asking if he should cancel the meeting with the executive producer. Sir, when I said “there’s no way we have the budget” I meant it.
Terry Bradshaw, by all accounts, is ridiculously successful and charismatic. He’s one of those people where everything he touches turns to gold. He’s had an incredible career as a sports figure, motivational speaker, TV analyst and announcer, actor, and author. We found it more than a little disappointing to find that a media organization with this amazing person at the front would use these kinds of sales tactics on the small businesses that are critical to our economy, and our nation’s growth. It’s a betrayal of the very reason the program exists.
Terry, you may want to reconsider your choice of business model and organizational structure.
Friday, January 14, 2011
Customization, De-Customization, and Training Requirements for a New Technology
In today’s more-with-less economy, it makes sense to leverage your existing technologies to automate processes as much as possible. With layoffs running rampant and vacated positions going unfilled, organizations that make the most of their technology investment will win out over those who do not.
However, this can be taken too far. Many organizations invest vast sums of money in a newer, more efficient system, only to hire an army of consultants to make it look and function just like the system they just replaced. Don’t get me wrong, a degree of customization for your unique business is absolutely appropriate, and necessary. However, if you made the decision to purchase the new system, presumably you did so because it could do something (hopefully, many things) that your old system couldn’t. Be sure that you’re not neglecting that new functionality for the sake of a little comfort. For example, if your organization has a unique customer reporting requirement, then it makes sense to automate that requirement. However, you shouldn’t have to redesign your entire interface around that requirement.
I’ve got news for you – when you implement new technology, you’re going to have to re-write work instructions. People are going to need training. You’re going to have to re-think some of your current processes and evaluate whether they still make sense. This is all part of the change management process.
Many organizations book custom training with us years after they’ve implemented a technology. Oftentimes, we find that after the course, students leave the class saying things like, “Wow, I had no idea it could do that”, and, ”we spent a fortune to do that very same thing a different way.” This often leads to “de-customization” projects, returning the environment to its intended state. De-customization efforts come with their own pain, however; habits that have become ingrained over the course of 2 generations of technology must now be un-learned. Expectations need to be managed so that users understand the full reasons for redoing something that was just redone. Again, it’s all part of the change management process.
The bottom line is that customization should be carefully tailored to suit your business need, and should maximize the company’s intent for implementing the technology in the first place. Training will be required either way, and can be adapted to any situation. Just make sure that you’re training on the right features, that have been implemented for the right reasons.
Comments posted on this blog are read and responded to; please feel free to share your thoughts!
However, this can be taken too far. Many organizations invest vast sums of money in a newer, more efficient system, only to hire an army of consultants to make it look and function just like the system they just replaced. Don’t get me wrong, a degree of customization for your unique business is absolutely appropriate, and necessary. However, if you made the decision to purchase the new system, presumably you did so because it could do something (hopefully, many things) that your old system couldn’t. Be sure that you’re not neglecting that new functionality for the sake of a little comfort. For example, if your organization has a unique customer reporting requirement, then it makes sense to automate that requirement. However, you shouldn’t have to redesign your entire interface around that requirement.
I’ve got news for you – when you implement new technology, you’re going to have to re-write work instructions. People are going to need training. You’re going to have to re-think some of your current processes and evaluate whether they still make sense. This is all part of the change management process.
Many organizations book custom training with us years after they’ve implemented a technology. Oftentimes, we find that after the course, students leave the class saying things like, “Wow, I had no idea it could do that”, and, ”we spent a fortune to do that very same thing a different way.” This often leads to “de-customization” projects, returning the environment to its intended state. De-customization efforts come with their own pain, however; habits that have become ingrained over the course of 2 generations of technology must now be un-learned. Expectations need to be managed so that users understand the full reasons for redoing something that was just redone. Again, it’s all part of the change management process.
The bottom line is that customization should be carefully tailored to suit your business need, and should maximize the company’s intent for implementing the technology in the first place. Training will be required either way, and can be adapted to any situation. Just make sure that you’re training on the right features, that have been implemented for the right reasons.
Comments posted on this blog are read and responded to; please feel free to share your thoughts!
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