Developing employee skills, a critical challenge against rising costs

The global market is changing fast. The marketers are really getting a tough time to keep up the learning pace. It’s not like the old days anymore, while you train your employees once a quarter and sit back for evaluating progress. Now the competition is quite high in every sector. If your competitor picks up a trick faster than you, you’ll only come to realise it, after losing quite a bit of market share!

Conventional training approaches are becoming a costly affair. It is limiting the process to be in ongoing mode. Training consultation fees, logistics & technical supports make it very expensive. Above these, conventional training is time consuming and restricts the speed of roll out. Attrition among the ‘learned’ sales force adds woes to the organisation. Conventional training expenses remain more or less same in case of training the newly joined replaced sales force. 

The marketers have already started to address this unique situation through Online Sales Training methods.  For example: Ernst & Young condensed 2,900 hours of classroom training into 700 hours web, 200 hours distance and 500 hours classroom– a 35% cost and 52% time saving (Hall 2000). 

BT delivered e-business training to 23,000 employees in 3 months at a cost of £5.9m, compared to £17.8m over 5 years for classroom training – a 67% cost saving and a 95% elapsed time saving! (Taylor 2002).

Consumer insight suggests that many people find e-learning rather dull, boring and a lonely experience.  Others see it as tedious and unexciting.  There is a general lack of community feeling – each learner learns on their own. While e-learning offerings may succeed in educating and informing, most fail to engage participants and don’t help them develop practical – and practised – skills.  This is particularly true in the sales training arena.

Online training reduces the roll out time quite fast. It’s anywhere anytime approach provides flexibility to the trainees.  SAAS training charges are on per user basis. So it reduces the complexities of attrition. It provides an opportunity of integration with the ERP, LMS or CRM platform and hence brings measurability on the effectiveness of the training. 

Customised online/SAAS training, providing inclusive and compelling, well delivered skills and workshops will definitely fit the demand of this new trend!