Training as an Art Form

In November 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote the famous words: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes” but I would also extend this to include another certainty in life - “learning”.

For as long as humanity has existed, we have continued to evolve as a species by learning from our experiences, environment and elders. Learning is a key part of our development and whether it takes place informally at home or more formally in the classroom, workplace or even watching a safety presentation on board an airliner, we are continually being trained to learn and develop new skills.

From a corporate perspective, I have been part of hundreds of training sessions as both as a participant and as the trainer. The skill of the trainer plays an absolutely pivotal role in ensuring that the key learning messages are expressed in a way that leaves the audience enthused and engaged.

If I look back at the common traits of the best training sessions that I have attended or led, there are five key components that have made the biggest difference.

Be a Subject Matter Expert

Simply put, if you are going to educate others you must be an expert in the subject matter that you are presenting. Without this, you will have limited credibility and your audience will quickly lose confidence in both yourself and your product.

There is always a direct correlation between your knowledge levels and your confidence in presenting a training session. It is an extremely uncomfortable feeling to be stood at the front of a packed room knowing that you could trip up at any moment. Getting to “expert” levels takes time, dedication and constructive feedback from those around you. Here are my key tips to help you get there:

• Practice Makes Perfect: Although a very old fashioned concept it absolutely rings true. Although practicing by yourself is always useful I would highly recommend using a “safe” audience (i.e. friends and family) to start with and then expand to your colleagues in the office.

• Shadow your colleagues: Watching and learning from your peers while they present is an excellent way to develop your skills. Although you can learn a lot of product knowledge and positioning from your colleagues it is vital that you keep your own style and bring your own personal flair to each session. Bring true to your own style will not only make you feel more comfortable and relaxed, it will help set you apart as a trainer and help keep the audience engaged.

• Nothing beats “live” presenting: There are a few common characteristics that are typical when you deliver a training session for the first time to a non-“safe” audience - insomnia, stress and fear to name but a few! As a learning experience however it is hugely beneficial to deliver a training session for the first time in front of a “live” audience. Not only will it give you vital experience but you will be asked questions you had never thought of previously and helps you see things from a customer perspective.

• Don’t be discouraged by early setbacks: It is absolutely natural to make mistakes or not know the answer to every question that comes up. Using technology to deliver training (e.g. web meeting, projector, internet access) is often fraught with issues and can throw-off even an experienced trainer.   The key is to learn from each issue and think how you could have overcome it and how you can stop it from happening again. Don’t feel pressurised to guess answers to questions; you will get more kudos and credibility by following up at a later date then giving an immediate incorrect answer.

• Keep learning: Being a subject matter expert doesn’t last long! Your customers and your products are continually evolving and training them on out-dated information is clearly not going to help. Stay close to the teams in your company who develop your products to ensure that you are always aware of the latest information.

Preparation is key

To use yet another Benjamin Franklin quote, “failing to prepare is preparing to fail” and this is especially true when it comes to successfully delivering training. Although time is a precious commodity, every minute you spend preparing to deliver a training session will be worth it (many times over).

Preparing your training will ensure that the content will be a lot more relevant to the attendees. Your credibility will also increase significantly as it will be clear that you have done your “homework” prior to the session and that you value the importance of the time that they are giving you. Here are some further tips to help ensure that you prepare in the best way:

• Think like one of your attendees: Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think about what they would like to get out of your training session. What examples could you use that would really resonate? What could you show them that will solve a problem and help them be more successful?

• Know your audience and think about your examples: You cannot take a “one size fits all” approach to your audience. You need to bear in mind a number of factors that will alter the key messages that you present (e.g. cultural, role/department, time available). Use examples that are going to bring your subject matter to life for your audience rather than rely on something purely because it worked well in previous session (for a completely different group).

• Agree on your success criteria: How do you know if your training session was a success? Simply getting from beginning to end is not enough to consider it a success. Speak to your primary customer contact beforehand and work out what the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely) training goals should be so that you can truly work out whether the time spent was well spent for both you and your attendees.

• Prepare great training materials: If you want to leave some training materials with your audience then make sure you prepare it in good time and ensure that it is relevant, interesting, easy to read and does not require reams and reams of paper (which will never be read and leaves a bigger carbon footprint). By all means point to online resources but the days of printing out and leaving a huge training/user guide are well and truly over.

• Decide on your key points: No matter how great your training session, it is highly unlikely that your attendees will remember any more than 3-4 key points (and possibly less!). Prior to your session you should give serious thought to what these key points should be and continually reinforce these messages throughout your training. 

Make the most of your delivery method

Modern technology has enabled us to be able to deliver training beyond the confines of a single room. The number of organisations that offer web meeting and conference call services has grown massively throughout the last decade and will certainly increase into the future. Multi-channel training has both positive and negative points that need to be taken into account to ensure success.

In my view, in-person training is the most powerful way of delivering training but comes at a high cost (e.g. travel expense, journey time, limits your audience by those who can physically attend). However, when you consider that it is generally thought that 55% of communication is body language alone, you consider how much is lost when you deliver your training via online services. Here are my tips to ensure that you get the most out of your chosen training delivery method:

• Use Technology to your advantage: If you are using online tools to deliver your training make sure that you have a dry-run first (preferably with someone on the client side) to ensure that there will be no technological glitches. If you are new to delivering on-line training ask one of your more experienced colleagues to join you so you don’t spend the first 30 minutes just trying to get people connected!

• Make your personality be the differentiator: Robots don’t deliver training (at least at the time of writing!) so inject your personality into your delivery whatever your method. No matter how dry the subject matter use humour, empathy and your listening skills to interact and engage with your audience. Enthusiasm is critical – if you are not enthusiastic about your subject matter why should anybody else be?

• Manage your audience: Clearly a limiting factor in the amount of interactivity you can have in your training is the number of people you are presenting to. A group of five participants in a small meeting room is a very different proposition to hundreds in a formal “lecture” style theatre. If you are presenting to a large group either in-person or over the web/phone, take the time to set the house keeping rules at the beginning so that everyone is clear on how you will be running the session and keep background noise to a minimum. Let your audience know when you are happy to take questions (e.g. at the end of a section) so that you can stay on track.

• It will go wrong! Embrace it: As the numerous “blooper” videos on YouTube demonstrate, presenting to a live audience always carries the risk that something will go wrong (especially when relying on technology!). As noted above, preparation will often help minimise these pit-falls but when something does go wrong - and eventually it will - do not panic! Use your personality (especially humour) to engage with your audience. On many occasions, it actually breaks the ice and you can turn a disadvantage into a positive. 

It’s all about Benefits (Not Features)

Don’t fall into the trap of believing that you have to memorise a whole ream of product features in the hope that some of them will “hook” your audience. Even if some of the features are useful it will be ultimately lost in a maze of irrelevant material that will turn your audience off and severely limit the overall impact of your training. There is no value in training anybody on something which is not valuable or relevant to them and this should be a continual reference point throughout your session.

As previously mentioned, preparation is vital in getting this right. If you believe that specific aspects of your product or service are useful, ask yourself “why”? As you go through each stage of your training keep challenging yourself “is this a feature or a benefit?” Benefits are what your attendees will care about and knowing your audience will play a key part in understanding what they should be.

For example, Marketers want quality leads to pass onto Sales, Business Development want to do everything possible to hit their bonus plan, Procurement professionals want to mitigate risk and understand their supply chain. Knowing what keeps your audience up at night and then matching your product specifically on these points is vital in piquing interest during your training. Once you have focussed on these benefits you can demonstrate the product features to accomplish the end-goal. A key element of typical adult learning styles is what’s in it for me as a reason to engage – establish this at the beginning of your session.

Turning Training into Opportunity

Too often a training session marks the beginning and end of your relationship with the participants. This is a significant wasted opportunity when you consider that you have a captive audience listening to your every word. If you are going to invest your (and your company’s) valuable time in preparing and delivering a training session then you should always be open to the opportunities that come with it.

These are several types of opportunities that arise from training; for example, uncovering a major new opportunity that leads to more revenue, finding new user “champions” or simply expanding your customer network. The key differentiator in turning training into an opportunity is whether you can effectively listen to what they are telling you. Here are some further tips to help you discover opportunities from your training sessions:

• Know who you are training: You can’t follow up if you don’t know who you are training. Make sure that you have up-to-date contact information (e.g. name, job role, location, contact details, etc) on the participants who attend your session. One of the best methods of doing this is to have the participants enter this information on a form during an on-site training or by building a registration page for on-line sessions.

• Follow Up: Contact the attendees’ after your session to get their feedback on whether the training is actually making a difference in their day-to-day work. The feedback will be critical in helping you craft your message for future sessions, become a more accomplished trainer and understand the audience. Formal surveys are also extremely useful vehicles to collect feedback but picking up the phone and speaking to the participants is extremely valuable and helps build rapport.

• Build allies from within: Getting support from within your customer is vital if the key messages from your training are going to be successfully adopted. During your training (and subsequent follow-up) identify who your user champions are and then demonstrate to the rest of the group how they have been successful. Creating short Case Studies are a great way of doing this (especially if a senior executive from within your customer is sending it out). Having this type of customer sponsorship will pay huge long-term dividends in helping increasing adoption, awareness and usage of your product.

• Turn your customer into a Product Manager: Your customers’ feedback during a training session will be vital in improving your products in the future. Many customers are happy to provide this feedback and seeing these ideas being adopted really helps foster partnership and collaboration.

• Identifying new business opportunities: By effective listening and adopting a commercially “savvy” approach, a training session can be a fantastic opportunity to understand how your company can better serve your customer by offering additional products or services. I should stress that a training session should never be mistaken for a sales pitch (that is a sure fire way to lose credibility with your audience) but any opportunities that arise should be noted and qualified afterwards. Some Client Training professionals express a degree of uneasiness is using training as a vehicle for additional business growth but it should be seen as a “win-win”. The client is going to get better value from having access to additional services that better suit their business and your company’s profits will also increase.

 And Finally….

Like any art, you need to keep honing your skills to develop as a trainer to ensure that you continually improve. No matter how experienced you are, keep learning from those around you and continually ask for constructive feedback from your customers and colleagues.

The areas that I outline in this article are not designed to be an exhaustive list and there are many other aspects that go into preparing and delivering great training. I certainly welcome your comments and feedback on your experiences that you have found on your journey delivering training so that I can continue to learn and develop my skills.