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Posts Tagged ‘training’

08.06.2009

Shrinking the Distance

Shrinking the distance between your organization and your customer is as simple as having a conversation. You can use blogs and tweets, but video, by far is the best at conveying complex concepts effortlessly. Check out Common Craft if you’re skeptical.

RSS in Plain English
Social Networking in Plain English

Video enables the assimilation of content 30% faster as compared to face-to-face interactions. Furthermore, the percentage of organizations who have incorporated video into the selling experience at both the customer and channel levels remains small. This leaves the door open for you, Mr. Marketing Executive. It leaves the door open for you to begin differentiating yourself at the service level opposed to the product level.

Video, which talks through the pertinent aspects of your product, distills it into its essence. An added benefit is it positions you as a trusted advisor. Where you take the dialogue you’ve created is up to you but it should lead down the path of improved customer satisfaction overall.

Improved customer satisfaction is a multifaceted concept. Part of it resides in the hands of your channel. They’re on the front lines, and don’t forget, they own your customer. Training them consistently, intelligently and cost effectively is essential to your personal success as a marketer and your organization as a whole. Leveraging video to reduce the cost of face-to-face trainings while providing a consistent and repeatable training experience will pay dividends in the long term.

Skeptical?

Try it for yourself. Create a 2-minute video of an intriguing or misunderstood part of your product. Post it to YouTube. Tag it appropriately so that it’s easily found. Allude to it via a blog post or Twitter tweet. Set up a Google alert. Then sit back, remain attentive and see what the uptake it is. Positive or negative, I challenge you to find a comment that you’re unable to use constructively to:

Better your product
Improve communications surrounding your product
Turn a foe into a friend

07.23.2009

The Benefits of e-Learning are…

•    Increased productivity of employees
•    Measurable ROI
•    Increased speed to competency
•    Decreased travel expenses
•    Insurable consistency of delivered material
•    Ability to communicate subject matter expertise to a broader audience
•    Obtainable usage metrics
•    Infinite life-cycle of course-ware
•    Reduction in printed material costs

06.19.2009

Learning Activity Semantics

What type of learning activity will you employ to enable your partners, sales teams and customers? Will it be some sort of E-Learning course? Maybe it will employ the tenets of distance learning. Better yet, it should be delivered via virtual classroom.

At the end of the day, it’s semantics.  There are two ways to look at learning. The first is learning that’s designed to enhance job and organizational performance. The second is learning that’s designed to satisfy a check box that communicates, “Yes, I took this training course”.  The latter of the two is not where you want to be, for a number of reasons.

One, check box training possesses a low ROI. Second, the most valuable training materials, regardless of delivery mode have second, third and fourth lives. They become points of reference and are shared, tagged and enhanced in lockstep with the evolution of the idea or product they support.

Learning materials that fall into the second category are typically the most compelling because there’s a 1:1 correlation between the information they communicate and the audience’s job related responsibilities. Additionally, they break the rules of traditional education delivery. Rather than forcing the audience to consume the information linearly, they work with how the audience thinks or needs the information.

The delivery modes are blended and use both digital and print liberally. These courses behave more like conversations between an SME and an interested disciple, opposed to a freshman chained to a desk in a 1500 person lecture hall.

Which experience sounds most appealing to you?

If you said the first, I implore you to never return to this blog. If you’re compelled by the second, stick around; we’re just getting started.