Jennifer Brick
Nov 2, 20172 min
If you operate a training profit & loss center, you are going to expend a lot of effort to ensure you are the former and not the latter for your organization. In my experience, while training is generally expected from customers in the SaaS world, there are a few obstacles in selling TaaS or Training Services. Here are a few strategies to consider to establish and grow your training revenue:
Auto-attach to other services or product sales. By collaborating with other stakeholders you can deploy auto-attach which can help lift revenue. If you sell seats or subscriptions you can explore "baking it in" a number to a product SKU, or establish criteria where training should automatically be included as a line item.
Utilize the freemium model. Having select classes or modules available is a fantastic marketing tool. It will give you direct access to learners, familiarize them with what their experience would be in a larger session, and help set the framework to efficient learning.
Develop sales enablement and marketing materials. Case studies, quotes, and videos help show prospective learners decide that your learning solution is a valuable investment. Getting time on sales team meetings is challenging when training is often a low priority, so exploring alternative ways to get them the information such as participating in a slack channel or Chatter group.
Be awesome. This is my general philosophy, and has been my most effective in growing training service organizations. By ensuring learners have a superior experience, they tend to give that feedback to their sales and customer success team on the training they attended which helps viral growth within the organization. If in the learning experience the learner identifies additional use cases and presents an upsell opportunity, they’ll view you as a must have for their customers to realize the full value of the product.
Is there anything that you’ve done that has helped grow your team really quickly? Let us know in the comments!