“How To Shred Bumps in 5 Easy Moves”
“12 Ways To Add More Ride Time To Your Schedule”
“How to Get Back In-Shape in 8 Weeks” (aka 8 Weeks to Super Human You)

These titles clearly articulate the steps it takes to get you from point A to point B, or from a place of unfamiliarity to mastery. The messages are clear and concise. For the most part, the opposite is the norm with training events, regardless if they are web seminars (live or recorded), multi-day training sessions or quick-hit technical overviews. Typically, a high level agenda is communicated by the instructor or organizer outlining the high-level goals of the communication and not much else.

Audiences deserve more. Moreover, your audience deserves more. Their time is precious and the more detailed map you give them the more engaged they will be. This being the case, upgrade the agenda by adding time stamps to it. For instance, rather than plainly pointing out the sections of the presentation, communicate that in (1) hour they’ll be able to hand-idly complete ‘X’ task. In (2) hours they’ll be able to complete ‘X’ and ‘Y’ task and so the story goes.

This method benefits the audience, the content deliverer and content developer. Addressing the audience first, this method breaks the task of learning into smaller, predictable chunks of data that aren’t overwhelming. If maintaining your audience’s attention is important to you, this is one of the simplest and easiest tactics to implement. As it relates to the content deliverer and developer (because they aren’t always the same person) it puts them on the hook to be mindful of communicating intelligible, cohesive thoughts in a timely fashion. Tangents are a natural and powerful part of conversation however they also have the power to derail an otherwise well organized presentation. Knowing that by a certain the time the audience needs to be able to do ‘X’, helps in reining in sidebars that often have a mind of their own.

Time stamps…use them liberally, your audience will love them.

At a high level, VARs aren’t marketers. Rather, they’re technically-minded and traditionally market-by-committee. Think of ‘marketing-by-committee’ as giving the role of the professional marketer to persons who simply have the most free time to execute brand strategy. What’s missing from this equation is an understanding or experience of managing a brand and its supporting accouterments. This lack of expertise and experience not only negatively impacts the VAR but the OEM as well. It impacts the VAR for the reasons mentioned earlier. OEMs depend on VARs to sell and implement their products and solutions. When VARs fail to build brand equity, the OEM is also adversely, if indirectly, affected.

As you might have guessed, this is a golden opportunity for the OEM to tighten its relationship with the VAR at a general business level. Most partner programs make available technical training and marketing assets to their partners, however these marketing assets are useless if the VAR doesn’t:

• Understand the role branding and marketing plays in their business
• Know how to use or when to apply the assets and selling tools
• Have basic solution selling skills
• Understand the foundational tenets of marketing and how to apply them (e.g. marketing plan development, campaign creation & management)

For example, take Ford and their new F-Series line of trucks. They’ve developed a campaign that showcases the truck’s capabilities and the capabilities’ alignment with the target audience’s typical issues. The associative content is delivered primarily via video @ fordvehicles.com/2011Superduty/. Here, the prospect can gather the obligatory head-to-head comparisons to the competition, but that’s just the beginning.

Ford has (apparently) invested a ton into making their trucks the most capable in their class. I know little to nothing about trucks, however after being walked through numerous real-world demonstrations, I’m convinced. Rather than appealing to the 5-year old in me by having the trucks jumping rings of fire (see Dodge) and racing around the desert, Ford educated me. Their message is about the alignment of their trucks’ capabilities and their practicality. Interwoven with the capability speak are reference-able case studies. Regardless if you’re selling software, trucks, or pharmaceuticals this is a winning approach.

This approach gives the audience the ability to relate their experiences and needs to a particular set of capabilities. In other words, it contextualizes the product’s capabilities. In the case of Ford, it’s these capabilities that sell F-Series trucks, but it’s Ford’s personalized and conversational presentation of them that make the difference.

Thinking about you and your products and services:

What capabilities sell or should sell you products?

How do you communicate the relevance of your product’s capabilities to the real-world challenges your end-users face?

How easy is it for your end-users to see your products solving these real-world issues without having to communicate with a sales person?

How can you leverage your website to make easy the dissemination of your message and relevance of your products?

Think about these questions when crafting your next pitch on why an end-user should buy your products or why a reseller should sell them. Jumping rings of fire is cool, but when was the last time you did so?

The question I’m most often asked by organizations who are in the process of developing a channel is, “Where should we start?”  Realistically, before you can intelligently address questions about factors like market vertical, target customers, and internal organizational structure, you need to clearly understand that in order to justify the existence of a channel…

“Business generated by the channel must exceed your current margins in order to justify the effort”

• Are the right metrics being used to evaluate the health of the sales channel?
• How many under performing partners are members of the channel?
• What do partners need to be successful?
• Are we providing this needs in an easily consumable fashion?
• Are we listening on the same frequency that our partners are speaking to us on?
• How effective are the programs associated with recruiting, onboarding and nurturing partners?
• Is the process for removing under-performing partners elegant or do we stick our heads in the sand and hope they’ll just fade away?
• If we differentiate our partners by way of verticals how does that help them help their customers?
• How can we get partners working with each other to improve their effectiveness while subversively bolstering our brand?
• Is our channel strategy sensitive to the changing needs of our customers, partners and the market overall?
• How does our channel differentiate itself from our competitors’?
• What does it mean to have ‘enabled’ a partner?
• What are the costs associated with enabling a partner?
• Is our channel sized appropriately to close the amount of business we need it to?
• Is our internal structure a help or hindrance to our channel’s success?

A large facet of solution driven marketing is its ability to enable contextual 1:1 (or what seem like 1:1) conversations with your prospects and customers. Their challenges are the focal point of these conversations. Likewise, the most effective conversations begin with an identification of what their business issues are. Often times, this means helping the audience to articulate a problem they didn’t know they had. This is referred to as, ‘the discovery of latent pain’. It’s good practice to leverage anecdotal stories to further align your capabilities to the discovered challenges. This process leads to the proof point that you can successfully address the challenges they are facing. If you’ve executed this process correctly they’ll be enthusiastically asking you for the solution.

Being able to conduct these investigative conversations face-to-face to a receptive audience is not always possible. This is precisely where your database of customer contacts, leads and prospects comes into play. The list below is a general guideline of the refinement I’m referring to.

• Position in the buying cycle
• Industry Vertical
• Geography
• Company Size
• Revenue
• Products of yours they currently own

The aforementioned segments help in determining how to position marketing resources and collateral. Case in point, the business issues faced by a manufacturer can be quite different than those experienced by pharmaceutical organizations. In some cases the businesses’ issues align closely. In either case the marketing and communications aligned with either situation need to be articulated using the correct industry specific vernacular. Using pharmaceutical language or case studies with manufacturers or vice versa, regardless of how close their issues are, is a sure fire recipe for failure.

The opportunity to communicate your subject matter expertise via this type of marketing is boundless, or at least more so than in traditional marketing.  Traditional marketing paints with broader strokes, whereas database, solution based marketing lives in the details. The latter of the two creates an opportunity for you to shine as a marketer, I mean educator (or do I mean marketer?). The education you’re instilling is 100% focused on the prospect and their needs. It culminates with you providing them with the tools to verify that your product and services do what you say they can do. Execution of this order requires you to build training disguised as marketing, which succinctly helps to insert your product in the prospect’s environment for the sole purpose of solving an issue they knew they had or you helped them uncover.

To keep the prospect focused and intrigued, the associated training must be delivered in bite-sized, easy to consume, multidimensional formats. In addition, topics need to be condensed into their core elements and delivered via videos, podcasts, and smart landing pages. Automated follow-up emails should be incorporated to renew interest as well as pass along contextual tips and tricks where appropriate.

Interweaving training with marketing handily aligns outbound communications with the needs of the prospect. Addressing their leads in a fashion that puts their challenges first makes you more relevant, your marketing more effective and positions you as a business consultant.

• What
• Who
• Why
• How

What:

This is the initial step in the process where the product or skill the audience needs to know is defined. Think of this as the central theme from which all else emanates. Definition of the central theme prior to commissioning development is key to building a focused and high impact training. Not doing so wastes the resources of both your development team and the target audience, not to mention damaging your professional credibility regarding your ability to conceptualize and execute on strategic initiatives.

Be sure to define your central theme with this in mind; only 25% of what you’re teaching on the first pass will be retained. The remaining 75% is retained via post activity supportive materials and activities. In short, your activity must be focused to be high impact.

Who:

Having clearly defined and articulated the learning activity’s focal point, it’s time to identity ‘who’ the target audience is. Doing so requires that you gather as much information about this group as possible, such as:

• Direct job responsibilities
• How they are compensated
• Are they disparate
• Where do they typically gather information
• What are the expectations of their managing group

The more you know about your target audience the more focused and contextual your training can be. Context yields relevance, which in turn creates ‘stickiness’. Remarkable content, be it courseware or reference documentation is what you should always strive for. Never fall into the practice of saying: “It’s just a reference manual” or “It’s only this or that”. Always think about how the consumption of the material can be made easier and how usage metrics can be extracted from them.

Why:

’Why’ speaks to justification. It’s imperative you be able to neatly articulate the benefits the audience will garner once they’ve consumed the training. Equally important is a clear message for your boss as to why and how resources will be consumed to develop this learning activity.

Tackling the audience justification first, a good place to obtain data points is in the ‘What’ section you walked through earlier. Using a new product roll out as an example, here is a sample list of proficiencies that clearly communicate what the audience will be able to articulate upon consuming the course:

• Business challenges addressed
• Market dynamics
  • Size
  • Competition
  • Trends
• Opportunity assessment
  • Good vs. Poor
• How the product works
• Up-sell opportunities
• Value to the channel

The second part of the ‘Why’ section is justifying the development time and the associated spend to your boss. Illustrate how training is aligned with delivering on his job responsibilities, how it will positively affect the audience’s job responsibilities and ultimately how it corresponds with revenue generation activities.

How:

The ‘How’ is the final step. To be effective it is tightly aligned with the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ stages. This is where the, “rubber meets the road”. The ‘Who’ stage culminated in the audience definition. This identification is instrumental in determining which tools are most useful for communicating with them. For instance, if the audience is geographically dispersed, creating face-to-face training content will miss the mark almost entirely. An audience of this type would be best served with virtual training and self-paced learning opportunities.

Possessing a deep understanding of the subject matter pays dividends when creating training accordingly. Multi-faceted complex topics are best illuminated using videos and diagrams. Effective training is partly about showmanship. Don’t force the audience to adopt and learn new technologies in order to consume your training. Doing so is similar to forcing them to learn Mandarin prior listening to or viewing your ‘awesome’ podcast.

Coincidentally, many sales trainings resemble weather reports in that they are infused with too much product specific information. The inclusion of this type of information doesn’t prepare sales people for business-related real world conversations. Consequently, where sales training should lower the execution risk associated with the act of selling, it fails by actually raises it.

This begs the question, what should sales training look like? Moreover, what type of information should it include and how should it be delivered?

From the top, think like your customer. News Flash: Customers don’t care about you or your product. They care about two things:

• How does your product or service help them fulfill their job responsibilities?
• How does your product answer a specific business challenge?

That’s it, plain as day. If your training doesn’t prepare your sales people to answer those questions (at a minimum) it’s nothing more than an exercise in futility. The natural inclination when thinking about sales training is to increase product knowledge. Enhancing product knowledge is not a bad thing, however, you can’t lead with it. The art of selling begins with uncovering the opportunity. Translated, this means, what is the real issue the customer is having? Furthermore, do they even know what their core issue is? At a higher level, what are the typical issues organizations in that market are having?

The only way to make a salesperson feel comfortable having a probing conversation is to arm them with holistic market data points. These are often referred to as market dynamics and they include:

• Market size
• Market trends
• Competitive landscape
• Typical customer pains (per vertical)

The conversation surrounding these attributes has nothing to do with your product. Of course there is a time and place to communicate how your product fits into the landscape and but this isn’t the first step by any means. The first step is 100% about mapping product/service capabilities to business challenges.

Determining the tools used to create compelling learning activities is an important task but not the first step. Standardizing the authoring tool before identifying the objectives (the what) or audience (the who) will stifle creativity and diminish your ability to innovate. The right “step one” is determining the objectives, i.e. What do you want to teach? What do you want the audience to walk away with?

Objectives frame the conversation. A conversation without an objective is a meandering mess, which equates to a waste of time. Think of these objectives as the cornerstones of the “what” conversation.

Following the “what” is the “who” which predicates the “how”. This creates a three step process: determining the “what”(step one), outlining the “who” (step two), and determining the “how” (step three). It’s only appropriate to deviate from this process if you have an endless budget, cycles to burn and believe that generating a positive ROI doesn’t pertain to your deliverables.

Placing more emphasis on one step as opposed to another is impossible because each step is predicated on the one before it. Changing the pitch or length of one of the steps will throw your audience’s balance and no one wants that.

Knowing your audience, is invaluable. Developing a deep understanding of their job related responsibilities and how they consume information will pay dividends in the future. It’s these differences that will help you to determine the best way to communicate with them. If you’re hearing marketing speak, that’s good, you get it. Frankly, if you’re unable to understand how your audience listens you’ll be unable to connect with them and therefore ultimately your learning activity will fail.

The data points you’ve gathered in steps one and two culminate with the “how”.  How are you going to communicate your points? What is the learning experience going to look like? Is the material best delivered face-to-face in an instructor-led format or should you leverage the web? Is the audience expecting materials that they can use for reference later? These are the core qualifying questions that will help you to determine which authoring tool is the right one for the job.