Marketing Training Services

Ian Linton

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351919692
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Gestione

Ian Linton's book is designed to help both corporate training departments and specialist training organizations. It shows how to use modern marketing and communication techniques to increase current course uptake, win support for future activity and build long-term relationships with customers and trainees. The author first analyses the marketplace for training services. He goes on to review the main marketing methods, including advertising, direct mail and seminars, and explains how to determine and apply the most appropriate mix as part of an integrated approach. He then deals with developing and maintaining productive relationships with the parties involved and finally advises on managing the marketing process. The emphasis throughout is on the practical, with checklists, worked examples and case histories from a wide range of market sectors.

Part I
The training marketplace

1 The role of marketing

You can't sell training like soap powder. Marketing is fine for consumer products ... we don't need marketing here. We've been delivering courses for years; the company needs us.

Does this sound familiar? It's a protest that is repeated throughout the service sector. 'Training is a service - a profession that can't be marketed/ say the sceptics. If you think that marketing is not important, ask yourself some questions.

• Are all your courses fully subscribed?
• If you are running an internal training department, how easy is it to obtain funding?
• What would happen if your board decided to cut the training budget to reduce costs?
• If you are running an external training organization, how successful and profitable is your business?
• Could you obtain more business from your existing customers?
• If you want to move into new markets, where will you start?
• Are you attracting and retaining the right calibre of people?

All these issues fall within the scope of marketing. Not the type of marketing that professionals shy away from - the consumer commercials - but the highly targeted marketing communications that successful organizations in the business-to-business sector use. We are talking about effective presentations, clear course information, informative newsletters, customized course material and quality customer service.

Product and service marketing

Training falls into the 'service market' sector which is an increasingly important aspect of marketing activity. Marketing theorists have long recognized that there are important differences between consumer mar keting and business-to-business marketing.

Business-to-business marketing as the name suggests, is concerned with marketing and selling products and services to businesses. The products and services help the businesses to carry out their own oper ations more effectively, or improve the way they run their business. Training is a service that can help a business improve its performance and therefore falls into this category. However, like many other services, it faces a number of problems.

Problems in Marketing Services

• Services, unlike products, are intangible. Customers do not always recognize the benefits or the value of a service.
• Services, unlike products, may not be vital to the success of a business. A factory can operate without training, but it could not operate without raw materials, machinery or power.
• A factory manager can easily assess the benefits of an extra machine by measuring the increase in output, but can the benefit of additional training be measured so easily?
• How does a manager compare what different training offers and what is the 'best training buy?

Other organizations in the service sector face similar problems - management consultancies, accountancy practices, maintenance companies, car dealership service departments, financial advisers. They are all marketing non-essential, intangible services. Yet this is one of the fastest growing sectors of marketing. Many of the professions for example, have only been allowed to advertise their services within the last ten years and now they operate sophisticated marketing programmes. One of the leading management consultancies, for example, regularly advertises in the national press and on television, while another employs a team of marketing advisers to work alongside partners to develop business and improve the quality of internal and external communications.

Training itself has become a key element in a service marketing strategy. As the following example shows, manufacturing companies realize that there is more value in selling services, such as training, to their customers than basic products.

A computer manufacturer set up a separate service division when its basic hardware division sales started declining. Turnover in services quickly reached around 30 per cent of the company's turnover and contributed more than 50 per cent of the total profit. Within that service strategy, training services played a vital role. The company's internal training department became a crucial part of the 'customer package'. Customers were offered a wide range of traditional product knowledge and skills development courses, but the training department also developed a wide range of new customer courses - how to select the right IT system, how to manage IT within a department, how to build new work practices.

To succeed, it had to undertake a number of marketing initiatives:

• raise customer awareness of the benefits of the programme
• convince decision makers in the customer company that investment in training was a sound investment
• convince customers that its training package was the best on the market.

This process is repeated throughout industry as training departments or training suppliers seek to win a fair share of a corporate budget that is often severely reduced. The problem is that training providers do not recognize this process as marketing.

Training customers have a choice

Training, like any other discipline, has to bid for resources - companies do not fund training without question. They compare the cost benefits with other investments and commit resources in line with corporate objectives. You therefore have to position training as a valuable corporate resource that will prove to be a worthwhile investment.

Training is marketed to a number of different audiences, including:

• fund holders who allocate budgets to training and other activities
• departmental managers who use training services to develop the skills of their staff
• staff who will benefit personally from training
• training professionals who may buy in external skills or resources to supplement their own resources.

Although training appears to be a key business activity, particularly to training specialists, this view may not be shared by those who use training services. Take departmental managers, for example. Their objectives are to run their departments efficiently to meet business and financial objectives. To improve performance, they may need to improve productivity and, to achieve that, there are a number of possible solutions:

• hire more staff
• train existing staff to do their job more efficiently
• invest in new equipment or support services to speed up the handling of different tasks
• increase the hours and workload of existing staff.

The departmental manager's task is to compare training with the other options. Which will provide the best return on investment and deliver the optimum business benefits?

The same process is repeated on a larger scale at corporate level. How can the company improve its competitive performance?

• relocate and hire a new workforce
• invest in information systems
• recruit skilled staff
• retrain existing staff
• re-organize the company
• develop new products.

You must understand the business context in which you offer and deliver training services. This process is known as analysing the marketing environment, and it recognizes that training customers have a choice. The marketing process ensures that you understand that environment and develop a service to meet the real needs.

Match training products to customer needs

Marketing also makes certain that training services are aligned to customer needs. As the earlier example shows, the departmental manager who wants to improve departmental productivity has a range of options and training is just one. You not only have to demonstrate that training is the most effective option for improving productivity, you also have to match your training 'products' precisely to your customers' needs.

A standard training programme, for example, may be completely unsuitable for departmental staff. The courses may not match the staff profile and it may not be delivered in a form that is suited to the department's working practices. Marketing focuses attention on key questions such as:

• What form should training take?
• How many people require training?
• What are their training needs?
• What price is the department willing to pay for a training service?
• How important are aspects such as timing, convenience, follow-up, location and form of training?

Take as an example a department with 30 staff including six supervisors. Most of them work in clerical/administrative positions and around half of them are in direct contact with customers. The department has not enjoyed a high level of automation and productivity therefore depends on personal effectiveness. A training need has been identified, but the department's workload makes it difficult to organize regular formal training sessions.

In marketing a training service to this department, you would have to recognize the conflicting requirements and develop a tailored service that meets those needs. The training service might include elements such as distance learning or on-site training to minimize the time spent away from the job. The programme would be flexible enough to meet the skills requirements of individual trainees, yet meet overall departmental objectives.

Without marketing, the training department might have offered the department a standard training package that was a poor match to the department's needs. To find out more about matching products and services to customer needs, see Chapter 14, 'Developing new products'.

Do not supplement training by other resources

Marketing operates at a number of different levels, matching the product to customer requirements and ensuring that the training service is not supplemented by other internal or external resources. Although an organization may have its own internal training department, the department may not necessarily be the preferred supplier of training resources.

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