If you’re running a training business, whether it’s brand new or an established brand, you may be wondering how you can further grow your business, attract new clients and find the right training software to boost your economic performance. With thousands of training businesses vying for the attention of organizations worldwide, it can seem daunting on know where to stand out.
Training Orchestra has over 20 years of experience helping organizations optimize their entire business cycle from order to invoice, so we’ve learned many lessons along the way that will help you grow your training business.
Running a Training Company
Building a Strong Foundation
For both well-established training companies and those just starting a training business, the competition is fierce, and it’s not always easy to find a way to carve out your niche in the market.
There are two key factors that lay a solid foundation for successfully running a training business:
- The knowledge, skills, and personality of the business executives. It is their leadership and guidance that will make or break the training business, so getting the executive team right is crucial.
- Their ability to transform their potential into results. No matter the skills or expertise of your executive team, the capacity to turn this into real ROI and make smart decisions is what will ultimately lead to your success as a training business.
Identifying your unique selling propositions (USPs) will also play a key role in your success. Will you focus on a specific region? Will you specialize in a certain industry? What unique problem does your training business solve that others don’t? Or can you solve a common problem better than your competition? These are the questions you must consider when starting a training business.
Marketing Your Training Business
One of the hardest things about managing a training business is developing business activity and attracting leads. Marketing will be crucial for this stage of running a training business, as you will need to establish your brand, authority, and expertise in your area. How can you market your training business?
Utilize Your Employees to Be Ambassadors
Your executives should be highly visible and present online, and your employees should be committed to sharing your marketing content from day one. This might include blogs, press releases, social media posts, guides, eBooks, resources, and more. Work closely with your marketing team to get your messaging right and ensure it resonates with the right audience.
Collaborate with Your Clients for Customer Reviews and Testimonials
Word-of-mouth marketing should never be underestimated. Be sure to solicit testimonials and case studies from early adopters of your products and services to act as “social proof” for your offering. Many training professionals a part of learning and development departments and training companies usually work with software review sites to be the loudspeaker for their training company’s services. While this has proven to drive positive traffic to the company’s site it could take a good amount out of your marketing budget.
A better alternative? Work with previous and current clients on developing customer reviews, case studies, and testimonials. We’re not talking about a simple review of your favorite meal at a café. Your training company should work with your client in discussing certain key aspects of your partnership that drove results.
Topics you can ask to discuss in potential case studies and testimonials could revolve around the following topics:
- How your training company deployed a fast and efficient training program for the client’s employees.
- How you organized an easy-to-follow schedule that showed when courses were available based on the qualified instructors’ schedules.
- How you solved a training and learning gap for the client’s talent base. How fast was the training program deployed? How many of the employees were able to complete their training on time?
- Explain how your training company streamlined and skyrocketed the training processes of the client (more than what their L&D department couldn’t do!)
Let Your Website Be Your Talking Point
You could have the latest and greatest service offerings as a training company but all of that means nothing if you’re not displaying that on your website. Like other businesses online, a training company should use utilize their website as their “digital storefront”.
Training company websites should primarily discuss three things:
- Expertise as a training company providing training solutions, management solutions, and employee training and re-training programs for clients.
- Training company services based on specific factors to the client. These can include the industry the client is in, the size of the company, and the company’s goals.
- Proof and research that discusses how their training company has provided value to companies in starting, streamlining, or improving their client’s training management processes.
These three pillars should be the guiding talking points in crafting content for your website’s SEO strategy, media – including video, eBooks, and guides – as well as any affiliate marketing or paid media you may be doing.
Delivering Training Programs to Clients at Scale
For PMC Training, efficiently managing both public and private training sessions required extensive administrative hours.
Discover how Training Orchestra scaled its scheduling processes so they could deliver more training for less!
Measuring the success of your training business
Three main economic factors indicate the success of your training business:
Profitability
Are profits exceeding that of operational costs? Is utilization of training resources optimal? Is time utilized towards delivering training to the client and not doing back-office administrative tasks?
Positive Feedback
- Is the client giving a positive reception about how your company is rolling out the training program for them?
- Is the training program feasible for them about employees’ time and availability?
- Are you addressing the training gap within their current employees or lack thereof?
- Does your training company deploy a process that gets the job done? Do you utilize an efficient course management system that allows for easy enrollment? Does your course scheduling system show which qualified instructors are available?
Opportunities
After your clients are taken care of, does your training business present itself with new opportunities with current clients or potential clients to provide training management services?
In addition, innovation will always be crucial to running a training business.
Consider the COVID-19 pandemic: those training businesses that adapted to the times, switching to hybrid learning and pivoting to address the needs of a remote workforce, are the ones who benefited the most from these unprecedented times.
Proving that you have the knowledge and expertise to adapt to evolving challenges will help you improve your economic performance, both in the short and long term.
This means keeping existing customers happy (after all, it is 5x cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one) and attracting new customers by delivering consistently exceptional customer service, unique products and services, and getting real bottom-line results.
How Training Management Software Improves Training Company Efficiency
As a training company delivering training programs for multiple clients, it’s no surprise that you’ll need to make sure everything is running smoothly on the operational end as well as on the client side. We’re talking about all the functions that keep your training operation running: finance, scheduling, course management, and resource management. Keeping track of all these details can prove to be cumbersome for your back-office admin team so it’s critical that you make managing these aspects of your training business as easy and efficient as possible.
For training companies, it is best advised to integrate all processes into a training management system (TMS) software like Training Orchestra. We want to note that TMS software is not the same as an LMS or LXP.
A TMS like Training Orchestra differs from other training software like a learning management system (LMS) or learning experience platform (LXP) as it is a platform dedicated to solving all managerial aspects of delivering a training program to your clients.
TMS software systems can vary from vendor to vendor but it’s important to inspect how well the software makes back-office admin work easy.
As a training company administrator, ask yourself:
- Is the TMS user-friendly? Is it easy to use?
- Does it make visualization of calendars and schedules simple?
- Is it able to handle complex training scheduling? Does it have graphical course scheduling?
- Are there tools to track budgeting and financing?
- Does it give transparency into financial performance or into your sales cycles?
- Are there reporting tools? Can I measure standard training company KPIs in addition to custom KPIs?
- If you’re running a blended learning strategy is your ILT scalable by being able to connect to the TMS using the right LMS without any issues?
When you deploy a training management software that serves the financial, resource, and management needs of your back-office team, not only do you make their jobs easier but you create an opportunity for your training company to grow your book of business with current clients and your prospective ones.
What happens when training company software is integrated?
It allows you to focus on delivering quality training
Better processes from implementing a training management system allow an easy opportunity to improve performance and profitability. The more smoothly you can deliver a training program without error – that is under budget, on time, and with quality instruction – you’ll soon find customers and clients wanting to continue doing business with you.
Upsell and cross-sell your services
With course management systems in place, thanks to training management software, you’ll be able to focus on offering better training services to your customers.
Upselling and cross-selling will be crucial for any training business looking to boost its profitability. Leveraging the satisfaction of an existing customer will be vital for this stage of running a training business, as these customers will trust you to make solid recommendations that will help them achieve their goals. For example, after realizing how well you were able to roll out a public training course for one particular client, the same client may be interested in continuing to use your services for private course training, thus increasing profitability.
Incentivize for customer referrals
Additionally, make it easy for happy customers to refer other organizations to you. Many training businesses incentivize customer referrals with discounts, added services or upgrades, which helps you reward loyal customers at the same time as growing your pipeline of qualified, high-quality leads.
The chance to create successful and long-lasting partnerships
Partnerships can also be vitally important for training businesses. Creating these partnerships will expose your training business to a whole new audience and will give customers a better experience, with a more robust, all-in-one solution that fully meets their needs.
For instance, don’t just become the training company they used for one particular course for their compliance or regulation training, but rather become a trusted source for all of their training needs.
