I often find myself in the precarious position of being both a salesman and an educator when going on a sales call. I was wondering if this is a norm in the eLearning industry or whether I am just in a unique position, as I deal with both the sales and marketing side as well as the development side. This may put me in a position where I am more familiar with the nuts and bolts of the industry, unlike your ‘typical’ sales person. I said precarious because I sometimes feel like I am the first person who educates the customer on the development cycle of an eLearning project and the amount of work that is involved from both the vendor as well as the customer’s side. In addition, some potential customers seem shocked by the average price of developing eLearning programs.I sometimes wonder whether this realization scares the customer off, but at the same time you want to be as honest and upfront as possible. I would love to year from other people in the field to see whether my experience resonates with them. Have you had a similar experience? Is the duality of sales and educating necessarily a bad thing? Is this duality unique to eLearning or does it translate to other industries? Is this duality the result of the relative ‘youth’ of the eLearning industry? Your thoughts would be appreciated.
6 comments:
Hi Quintus -
I think your situation is pretty common. A lot of people don't really understand what's involved, but it's better to educate them on what's involved in order to have reasonable expectations than to ignore it and suffer the consequences later.
This happens in a lot of different sales situations. And, yes, it's partly because eLearning is new to who you are selling to.
Hope this helps a bit, not sure what you were really going for here.
Hi Tony,
Thanks for the comment. Firstly, I wanted to see how common this experience is (as I wear both a sales and a development hat) and secondly I am interested in seeing if folks have strategies to mitigate the 'shock' (not sure if this is the right word) that goes with the education process e.g. the price of eLearning projects, time and effort involved etc.
Hi, Quintus,
I, too, have experienced this sticker-shock effect while working with the company I am currently contracting for. This company is relatively new and is still struggling to come up with a workable course development pricing strategy. On top of that, its target market is the electrical industry--not an industry that has much of a history with eLearning. So several of the company's clients are shocked when we tell them how much it'll cost them to have us develop their eLearning courses for them.
The best way we've come up with to deal with this is to educate the customer on the time and money they'll actually save in the long run by educating their sales force/customers online (versus traveling to train). We're also constantly on the look-out for ways to minimize development cost through use of rapid instructional design software, such as Articulate, which allows us to offer the customer a low-cost alternative to higher customization courses. Other than that, I guess we'll just have to wait for collective customer expectation to catch up to actual cost. Hopefully, that'll be sooner rather than later.
~Mary Elizabeth
The shock factor of the price and time for eLearning is prevalent for now, but I think the price sting will rapidly wear off as more companies turn to WBT. Making the switch from synchronous (or worse, paper manuals) to asynchronous training programs gives companies a competitive edge over those who have yet to embrace technology.
Thanks for your thoughtful comments Mary and Jennifer
The position that you are in is quite accurate for most. To thoroughly inform the customer, it works in your favor that you know the "in's and out's" of what you are selling. Especially, as one blogger mentioned, since more and more companies are transitioning to web based training. Organizations want to know what they purchasing and how it works. And in most cases, they want a one-stop-shop.
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