Top-quality technical training is a no-brainer.
In fact, investing in customer education improves customer onboarding by up to 56% and customer lifetime value by up to 21%.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Customer training and customer success have always gone hand-in-hand. The more effectively you teach customers to use your software, the more value they get from it and the more revenue you’ll earn from them.
Delivered through the right platform, the benefits of technical training extend far beyond onboarding and adoption.
Training is also a powerful marketing tool, raising awareness and generating demand by giving prospects a firsthand look at your software. Nobody wants to simply roll the dice. They want to know exactly what they’re getting and to be able to hit the ground running.
For your sales team, technical training is an invaluable element of hands-on demos and POCs.
What’s more, customer success teams can count on technical training to accelerate time to value and deliver a wealth of upsell opportunities.
This article covers the key benefits of hands-on technical training as part of a seamless, end-to-end customer journey.
Basics: what does your software do and why should the prospect care?
Slack is obviously a messaging app. SalesForce is a customer relationship management platform. Google Workspace is for content creation and collaboration. You get the point.
These apps have a clear purpose, a straightforward feature set, and relatively focused use cases. That’s not always the case, however. It’s challenging to convey the full value of complex software through social marketing or static banner ads.
And while long-form marketing collateral like eBooks and whitepapers can certainly explain the benefits of an offering, they seldom do more than scratch the surface of the user experience.
Why not educate instead? Deliver self-paced technical training to prospects and let them experience your software’s features for themselves. This not only serves as a compelling introduction to your company and its product, but can also shorten your sales cycle and reduce onboarding friction.
Prospects who’ve already explored your software won’t need your sales engineers to explain the fundamentals, nor will they need to spend as much time learning if they decide to purchase — you’ve already given them a crash course.
As for how to get the most out of your technical training… one word: data.
Measure everything about your technical training and how prospects engage with it. Use analytics to determine which features are most valuable to each customer segment and refine your messaging. Important metrics at this stage include:
How does your software address the prospect’s unique pain points?
Consider the following scenario.
Two salespeople are demoing an AI-enabled workplace productivity solution. The first salesperson has compiled a presentation on the software’s features, benefits, and functionality, plus a video demo. The second salesperson intends to use an interactive proof of concept demo tailored to their prospect’s offering.
Which of the two experiences sounds more compelling?
Deploying your technical training platform as a sales enablement tool allows your team to create highly personalized product demos. Additionally, through self-paced training, prospects can continue exploring and learning about your software even after a demo. Compared to a more traditional, static sales demo, interactive technical product demos provide several benefits.
First, it’s easier to qualify prospects and achieve technical validation. A prospect who spends several hours exploring the lab after meeting with your sales team is much more likely to convert than one who uses the lab for only ten minutes. Examining how each prospect interacts with your demos also provides precious insights into which features are of most interest.
The bottom line is that personalized, immersive, buyer-centric experiences are considerably more effective than static, non-interactive presentations.
Training metrics to measure during your sales cycle include:
What does a new customer need to know to use your software?
The more a prospect interacts with your software once they reach the bottom of the funnel, the smoother their onboarding process will be. Your customer success team can draw on insights collected during the customer’s sales and marketing engagements to design an interactive, guided, and fully personalized lab.
Automated progress tracking, assessment, and feedback further streamline the process, while adaptive learning changes to meet the customer’s unique training needs.
Technical education has a key role to play post-onboarding, such as the deployment of virtual labs to customers during new feature launches or interactive demos that create upsell opportunities.
Your onboarding metrics are much the same as your sales and marketing metrics:
Marketing, sales, and customer success shouldn’t be siloed as separate departments. They’re not three distinct phases of a customer’s relationship with your company. They’re part of a cohesive experience, unified by customer education.
Providing hands-on, interactive learning at every stage and encouraging collaboration between stakeholders ultimately results in a shorter sales cycle, improved conversion rates, and stronger customer relationships.
Technical training techniques play a vital part in the customer journey. For a deeper dive into the metrics that matter most, check out All You Need to Know to Measure Customer Training ROI and then learn more about the importance of sales enablement tech — and the cost should you fail to adopt it.