I've been responsible for numerous training events through the years. The people who attend these sessions rate them highly, and I am frequently asked back to deliver additional sessions.
Sales Training
Sales training is an ongoing activity. Covering everything from introductory concepts and market overview to product features, competition and selling strategies, these sessions are geared toward making sales people more effective.
For technical markets, the goal is not to make the sales people experts. Instead, the intent is to teach them the basic concepts, what to look for -- and who to call!
Technical selling is a team effort. Knowing what help is available, who to call, and how the sales cycle should go (for example, HPTC sales virtually always include a benchmark) are keys to effective sales.
Sales training varies from full day sessions to one or two hour slots in larger training programs. For the past several years, I have been delivering 1-2 hour updates in quarterly sales meetings.
Technical Training
As a former engineer who retains a technical bias, I understand technical people, how they think, and what they are looking for.
This comes across in technical training, where I help them master the concepts, products, and applications.
A personal highlight was the technical training program for graphics. This consisted of three day in-depth technical seminars. These typically included a day of combined sales/technical training and two days of in-depth technical information. We delivered these sessions in the US, Europe and the Far East. We were asked by the people who attended these sessions to provide further training, and ultimately delivered three rounds of seminars.
Developing these seminars proved to be some of the most intense learning sessions I have ever experienced. For me, the highlight occurred during the second series of seminars in Germany where, two hours into a highly technical topic, one of the engineers asked "aren't you missing a term in the illumination equation?" As a matter of fact, I was... The highlight was that the people were following the material, understanding it, learning, and applying the information!
The graphics sessions are the richest training sessions I've delivered. Much more common are one or two hour or half-day sessions.
WebCast
While face to face training has many advantages, it is expensive. WebCasting is a recent development that combines presentations delivered over the internet with voice. The visual content makes it dramatically more effective than a conference call.
WebCasts can reach a broad, geographically dispersed audience. They allow use of the same visuals that you would use in a live presentation, and are interactive -- the audience can ask questions and get immediate feedback. in addition, WebCasts are quite inexpensive.
I have delivered numerous WebCasts, and have combined Webcasting with other approaches. One presentation was delivered to a live audience at a University in California, and was simultaneously Webcast. On another occasion, we delivered a presentation from Massachusetts to an audience of 100 people in auditorium in California -- the technical experts were in Massachusetts, and field and sales people were live in California. This allowed us to use the best technical experts to deliver the presentation, get live questions, and not incur the expense or loss of time that travel would have required.
WebCasting does take some practice. Graphics need to be simplified to accommodate people using modems, you need to be aware of the delay when introducing new slides, and it can be a challenge to present without seeing your audience.
When you understand the characteristics of WebCasting, it can be effective and affordable.