When your customers are happy, there’s a greater chance they’ll continue to do business with you over the long term. But what exactly can you do to make them happy? In our world of overwhelming competition, with multiple companies running neck-and-neck with almost identical products, it is the perception of your company and its services that becomes crucial. That’s why it’s important that everyone in your company has enough knowledge and skills to make communication comfortable and wholesome for your clients.
That becomes possible only when your employees are well trained and are truly experts on your product. And that’s when product knowledge training comes in.
Product knowledge training is a learning program that includes all the information about your goods or services that learners need to know in order to perform their work effectively. Depending on the learners’ roles and responsibilities, product training can focus on different aspects, have different learning goals, and bring different benefits to your business.
Let’s look closer at product knowledge and ways it can contribute to your company’s success.
When it comes to product training, we usually conjure up the training geared for the sales reps. There’s no doubt that knowing the product well is important for the sales department, but aside from sales staff, there are a lot of people inside and outside your company you need to train on your product to make your business thrive.
Let’s list some benefits of product knowledge training.
An employee who knows the product inside and out, and believes that it can bring great values to lots of customers and the world on the whole, is not just a “desk jockey” from a sales, support, or marketing department, but a dedicated and inspired enthusiast. This type of staff member can form dedicated teams with great motivation and amazing results.
By the time prospects enter your territory (an office or online marketplace), they have probably looked through your website, read a number of reviews on your product, and consider themselves to be experts in your field. And they are not going to forgive your sales rep for being insecure about your product’s options, characteristics, and benefits.
Product training will help your sales team present your product convincingly, combat prospects’ objections, and gain their trust more easily.
Giving your customers detailed information about your products will help you create a comfortable customer journey from the point where prospects choose your solution to the final destination where they utilize and get the most out of it.
For example, you can provide your prospects with product overviews, specifications, and customer reviews to help them make their choice more easily. And your clients will appreciate online videos or screencasts, e.g., how to install your washing machine or adjust a new CRM for the customer’s needs.
To get a better understanding of how it works, read the iPerformance ApS case study. This Danish software company used to spend a great deal of money and employees’ time visiting new customers’ offices to train them how to use their applications. Now that iPerformance ApS moved the training online, they’re able to work with many more customers simultaneously and overcome any geographical restrictions.
This will have two beneficial effects: the number of requests to your support department will decrease and some of your customers will turn into your product’s experts and promoters. That’s how word-of-mouth works.
If you want to increase partner sales, you have to provide your partners with product knowledge training as well. This will evidence that you are the right person to start doing business with, as you’re ready to invest in their expertise, development, and success. And you will help them to get better results and generate more revenues.
Product knowledge training demonstrates your product’s features and benefits, so that the trainees achieve greater results when they promote, sell, and use it.
To help each group get the most out of the product training, you will have to create different learning programs.
Objective: to train the sales team to present your product, overcome prospects’ objections, and close deals faster.
The more your salespersons know about the benefits and advantages of your product, the more professional and convincing their communication with prospects will be.
Objective: teach the support team to provide customers with high-level assistance.
Imagine that you bought a new washing machine and it now needs a warranty repair. If customer service staff present themselves as supportive professionals trying their best to make this process less of a headache for the client, they will likely return to this company when they need another household appliance.
This scenario is applicable to any business and product: your reputation is a solid base for long-lasting relations with your customers and repeat sales.
Objective: provide updated information regularly, and help create an effective positioning and promotion strategy.
Most often, marketers don’t need to dive deep into technical aspects; it’s much more important for them to understand what customer pains can be solved with your product.
Objective: teach customers how to use the product and achieve great results with it.
Product training for customers can take the form of an online knowledge base with instructions, how-to videos, and webinars.
If your product is complex, requires special skills to use it, or has lots of features and options, your customers will need more information when they start using it.
Objective: increase sales, minimize reputation risks, and grow the number of partners.
With partners, the same rule as the one pertaining to your internal sales reps applies: a well-informed partner will bring you a lot of new customers, but if the partner lacks product knowledge, they will most probably become a source of reputation risks and an endless flow of angry customers. That’s why you need to provide your partner’s sales team with the same information as your own sales department.
Still, those two teams have one crucial difference – you are able to track and improve your company’s sales department performance anytime, even in real-time, (by listening to their phone conversations with customers, for example), while your partners’ sales activities are not accessible. Thus, you might want to make their results more predictable by assessing their sales readiness before they start presenting your product to prospects. For this, you can add a knowledge assessment at the end of the product training and set a minimal passing score for it. You can make an agreement with your partners that only sales reps who passed your “product exam” and received a certificate will be allowed to present your company and product to prospective clients.
Objective: provide a basic understanding of the product, its value, and why it’s appreciated by users.
It’s a good idea to include basic product knowledge training in your onboarding program for new hires of all departments, as this will help them understand the company they have joined and form their loyalty starting from their first days at work.
We’ve found out why product knowledge training is a must have for the companies that are striving for growth and success. Let’s now explore how it can be conducted in different companies, and the pros and cons of each approach.
For years, classroom instructor-led training (ILT) was the most popular way to inform employees about the product and its updates. The direct contact between the instructor and the audience helps participants digest information more easily and allows the trainer to monitor learners’ reactions, adjust the session program to their needs, and keep them engaged.
On the other hand, offline product training has disadvantages:
Thanks to modern technologies, we have a solution that helps us to overcome all those restrictions – and that is online training. Online product training makes information accessible anytime, anywhere. Besides, as soon as you upload learning materials to the Web, they become available for everyone simultaneously, without any time gaps for remote offices.
To provide your employees with regular online training, you can use a learning management system (LMS), which is an online platform for storing and distributing learning materials via the Internet. In an LMS, employees have personal accounts where they can see courses assigned to them, a schedule of upcoming training activities, and track the results they’ve achieved. The right LMS can save learning and development managers hours spent on a daily basis organizing and supporting the training process. For example, iSpring Learn LMS puts most of the training routine processes on autopilot: it can automatically assign courses, send notifications and reminders about deadlines, and track trainees’ results in a number of insightful reports.
Synchronous training assumes that all learners take the program at the same time. For this purpose, you can gather them in a brick-and-mortar classroom or connect online via a video conferencing platform.
Or, you can give your employees learning materials (printed or published online) and set the deadline for their studies, so they’ll be able to choose the time for studying and progress at their own pace. That is how asynchronous learning works.
Blended learning for product knowledge training is usually a mix of ILT sessions and self-paced learning activities. Nowadays, many companies prefer using a combination of both modalities, as they see that it works much better compared to only using traditional face-to-face sessions or eLearning.
There are endless ways you can blend it. For example, you can start in your showrooms to demonstrate the product (an offline synchronous part of the training), and can then ask participants to take online courses to deepen their knowledge and complete the final tests to check their knowledge (an online asynchronous product training.)
If you use this approach in your company, when choosing an LMS, you’ll need to make sure that the solution you pick allows combining different types of activities in one training program, e.g., online courses and assessments for self-study and online webinars, as is the case with iSpring Learn LMS.
Now, it’s time to take a close look at different formats you can wrap your online product training in and show how you can develop them fast, with minimal effort.
An online, or eLearning, course is a basic format of online learning materials. Courses can be enhanced with interactive elements, videos, and quizzes that keep learners engaged and help them retain information better.
Nowadays, there is an overwhelming number of eLearning authoring tools available and it seems to be a real challenge to find the one that meets your needs (check out our free guide on how to choose the authoring tool that is right for you.)
If you haven’t used authoring tools before (or if your experience wasn’t as easy and delightful as you expected it to be), you might be concerned that mastering some new software is a challenge that will consume a significant amount of your time. But that’s not necessarily true.
With the iSpring Suite authoring tool, with a few clicks, you can turn existing PPT slides into a real online course with all PowerPoint effects, transitions, and animations kept intact. Or you can create professional-looking interactive courses from scratch. iSpring Suite has everything you need for that: a content library with 68,000+ images (characters, locations, and slide templates), easy-to-use quiz and role-play makers, and a handy video and audio studio (yes, all of that is right inside your PowerPoint).
As children, we all learned new through games and play. It was highly effective, as it involved our imagination and engaged us. For the same reasons, a game-based approach remains effective when learners grow up; it still helps retain information better when it comes to learning quite “unchildlike” topics (see this report from the University of Regensburg).
For example, Coca-Cola HBC created an online business simulation game called Revenuepoly. It’s full of challenges that can help sales staff understand how to reach the company’s strategic objectives and grow its revenue. While evaluating customers’ performance and analyzing the market, players get comprehensive knowledge about Coca-Cola products.
Obviously, such a game is quite expensive and time-consuming to develop, and if your budget is not as impressive as Coca-Cola’s, you can opt for another game-based learning format – quizzes.
Online quizzes help you estimate the effectiveness of your product knowledge training in a funny and engaging way.
With iSpring Suite, you can create graded or ungraded quizzes and surveys. You can make them more captivating by adding video, audio, customized feedback for each question, and even branching where the scenario changes, depending on the user’s answers.
You can engage your learners and help them boost their knowledge with drag-and-drop activities. For example, ask them to put the objects in the right order or place them in a certain area. To check out iSpring Suite’s capabilities, take this course for merchandisers.
With iSpring, you can also create more formal assessments when you need to evaluate employee enablement or conduct a certification of your partners.
In this case, you will appreciate the options iSpring provides to prevent cheating, like shuffling slides, customized scoring rules, and time limits.
If you want runaway success for your sales team, you need to not only provide them with the necessary information, but also give them an opportunity to polish their communication skills in a safe-to-fail environment. This can be done in role-plays with virtual customers, where your sales reps have an opportunity to try different sales techniques and sharpen their persuasion skills.
Try the iSpring Suite authoring tool to create dialogue simulations with branching scenarios, where characters change their mood and behavior depending on the sales rep’s actions and choices.
Have a look at this car sale dialogue to see how it works.
Videos are an effective way to deliver new information, as they are engaging and can easily hold viewers’ attention.
Here is an example of a product video about a new Hard Rock energy drink for the brand ambassador street team, recorded by the Enterprise Beverage Group LLC. From the 8-minute video, street ambassadors cannot just get all the info about the new drink, but also learn about the dress code, the sampling setup, and the company’s customer approach.
The video was produced by experts equipped with professional tools and armed with a considerable budget. But even if you don’t have such resources, don’t write videos off, as you can record them on your own with just your computer, PowerPoint, and the iSpring Suite authoring tool.
iSpring Suite allows you to record videos with your webcam, shoot screencasts, and even combine them on the same slide. You can create and edit engaging videos right in familiar PowerPoint, without additional equipment, special technical skills, or the need to master any new sophisticated software.
You may prefer not to leave your audience to face the new information on their own and prefer to involve an instructor to help them master it (the attentive reader will readily perceive that, in this case, you will be switching to a synchronous training format).
To host a virtual classroom or webinar, you will need a special web conferencing or webinar platform that allows remote participants to connect with each other, chat, and share files. Read our article if you want to dive deeper into the differences between these online activities and learn the details on how to create a virtual classroom.
One of the most widely used tools for both these types of online meetings is Zoom, the leading video communications solution, used in 58% of Fortune 500 companies. The platform has a lot of handy features, like recording your online meeting as a full-length video, support for up to 1,000 video participants, sharing screens and files, and online chats, as well as reactions, polls, and a hand raising option.
It’s much easier to include virtual training sessions in your product knowledge training program with a solution that helps combine them with other learning activities, like online courses or assessments. That’s why iSpring Learn LMS is integrated with Zoom, allowing you to create a unified training schedule, track how many employees attended the online event, and how long they attended it.
It might seem quite easy to tell employees or partners about the product if you’re familiar with that process. However, if you want the training to bring real positive results, we advise you not to ignore these tipsю
Knowledge training is king. If planned and organized correctly, it can bring your business to a new level, make your employees more confident and effective in their tasks, and your customers happier and more satisfied. Why not take your first step towards this now?