Don’t Overlook Content Component While Developing Product Trainings – Why?

The profile of the target audience for whom the product training is imparted may be diverse. It may be for newly recruited sales people, existing sales force or for customer service representatives. Often, organizations fail to customize the content during the development of product training according to the target audience. Product training material may be same for all audience, but you need to ensure that the content is customized based on the target segment. For example, a specific feature of the product needs to be explained to the sales people in such a way that it helps them to sell the product. In the same manner, when explaining the same feature to a customer service representative it might have to be told in a way that will be useful to him from a customer service perspective.

Let us see why the organizations shouldn’t overlook the content while developing product training:

• Simply imparting product knowledge will not be beneficial to the learners if it does not have relevance in the day to day job context. When developing content for product training, instead of having a standard curriculum, tailor it depending on what the target audience uses the knowledge for.
• If the training is for sales people, the training should help them understand the 3Cs – Company, Customer and Competition in the context of product features and how they bring value to potential customers.
• If the training is for a new product that is being launched, it is important that the learner understand how the product fits into the product portfolio of the company. This becomes an essential component of the product training.
• A sales person needs to have a good overview of all the products in the product line. Therefore, while explaining the differentiating features of products, training content should focus on how their product fares in comparison to the existing products in the market. This information is an essential tool for a sales person, particularly when facing a well-informed customer.
• Training should enable sales people to find solutions to users’ problems. Therefore, features, Attributes and Benefits need to be part of the product training curriculum.
• Training design should enable the learners to promote right features to right customers. Scenarios are helpful to educated sales people on the right strategy to adopt based on the profile of the customers. For example consider a car. If the customer requirement is to use it for commercial purpose stress more on mileage feature of the car. If he uses it for individual purpose stress more on seating features, comfort features and then come to mileage.

During the development of product training content should be tailored to meet the learning objective of the training. Merely giving the information of product without touching upon how it is applicable on field proves to be a futile.