Blended training, the combination of traditional on-site classroom with online self-paced training, has become very popular in the last 10 years and it can be found in very different forms and industries.

Today, we see a significant shift from on-site training to online solutions that already incorporate social features and interactive tools that are characteristic of the face-to-face approach.

Below, we share with you the 4 main reasons to opt for this type of training. Feel free to add your comments below and tell us what approach you prefer the most!

Scalability

The number of participants that you can reach only with on-site training is very limited. The blended option allows you to involve participants from across the globe and also keep up-to-date, those that did attend a live classroom but cannot do it on a regular basis.

Engagement

The live classroom is a great way to build a personal relationship with your clients, specially with the most relevant ones. Having on top of that a direct channel of communication through an online platform is essential to keep the bridge between your organization and your trainees alive.

Flexibility

On-site training as well as live-webinars have a big constrain: trainees need to commit to be present at a specific point in time. Specially when you have clients all over the world, this limitation becomes relevant. On-demand training gives them the flexibility to take the training when it is most convenient for them.

Cost Efficiency

      There has been a trend over the last 3 years for companies to organize regularly (weekly, bi-weekly or monthly) webinars in order to interact with clients and potential customers.

Web-based seminars usually form part of a marketing strategy, and helps companies position themselves as experts or leaders in specific topics, re-connect with current customers, establish the first link to prospects and also give training on the solutions they offer.

In theory, it sounds simple and brilliant. The reality is that after discussing with more than hundred companies, most of them SaaS, I haven’t come across one team that manages to get regularly more than 5 people in a session, and often webinars need to get canceled because no one shows up.

                    There are a few things that we should consider here, like the cost of a webinar, strategies to increase the number of participants and alternatives to webinars.

The cost involved in a webinar is mainly driven by the resources allocated to prepare it. The cost of the tools used, such a GoToMeeting and Webex, which are among the most popular, is insignificant considering the hours of work that a team needs to spend putting together the materials, storyline and marketing. If we consider that a webinar takes place at a specific point in time and that potentially not many participants attend, then we should re-think if we are allocating our efforts in the right strategy.

Some companies are offering webinars without stating specifically the topic that will be discussed. This strategy has shown some sort of efficacy as it increases the number of people registering to the webinar, intrigued by the surprise effect. 

Another strategy is to invite current customers to attend a webinar like if they were going to attend a conference call. In a conference call, the communication usually tends to be balanced instead of being a monologue, which makes participants commit to a higher level.

One of the main barriers that webinars present, is that the participants need to commit to be online at a specific time, which makes it difficult, specially when these participants could be anywhere around the globe. Another thing to consider is that having people attending, it does not really mean that they are participating, as often attendees just mute the microphone and do several things at the same time.

        Offering “canned” content, or pre-recorded sessions, is a win-win situation for the companies, that only need to allocate the right resources once and then offer scalable content, and also for the participants, as they have the flexibility to determine when is best for them to attend.

It is, however, extremely important that these on-demand sessions offer some kind of interaction in order to avoid high drop out rates and keep the participants engaged. These interactions can be from quizzes and assessments to live communication with instructors or other participants.

        It is not always simple to quantify the valuable impact that training - in this case training to the sales team - has on an organization.

The 5 areas that should always be analyzed are:

Type of Sale

Certain sales cannot be achieved without the right expertise. Practice makes perfect, and training can accelerate that process. Keep track of the sales that can only be done with preparation and knowledge.

Sales Cycle

The costs of sales depend directly of the time that takes an organization to close a deal. The faster, the more efficient; and efficiency can be reached with training.

Sales Size

The bigger the size of a sale, the higher the revenue. Measure the development on the size of the deals closed based on the training that your team receives.

Sales Margin

Negotiating better terms on the same deal is the main characteristic of a good sales person. Some people are born great negotiators, but certain skills can also be acquired with training.

No Sale

        There are 5 stages involved in the process of adopting a product, which ranges from discovering it to either becoming a loyal customer or rejecting it.

Awareness - Prospects discover a new product, but lack sufficient information

Interest - The new product seems to solve a pain, making prospects investigate more

Evaluation - Once the relevant information is acquired, prospects analyze its real benefits

Trial - The suitability of a product can be best determined by using it

Adoption/Rejection - The prospects either becomes a real customer or looks further

When defining the strategy for the development of a new product, it is essential to consider the elements that can positively influence these stages, in order to successfully make the customer base grow.

Identifying prospects and directing the right message through marketing campaigns help to increase the awareness and interest of the potential customers. Prospects should immediately identify the value proposition.

Offering limited free trials accelerate the evaluation process and the real suitability of the product.

                      Online learning has always shown a 10% to 20% higher drop out rate than face to face training. However, it is clear that online learning offers characteristics, such as flexibility, scalability and cost-efficiency, that makes it extremely attractive.

When it comes to online learning, the first question that rises is which method should be applied: live sessions or on-demand content. Lets take a closer look to the pros and cons of each alternative.

Live Sessions

- Engage users immediately,

- Interact with them in real time and get feedback,

- Commit users to be online at a specific time,

- Limited number of participants.

On-demand Sessions

- Flexible solution to train users anytime

- Scalable to unlimited number of participants

- Not engaging if there is no channel for interaction with instructor or other participants

Live sessions are becoming a trend again. Most companies are organizing weekly or monthly live webinars to engage their customers. But live sessions can be extremely time consuming for the instructor or organizer of the webinar and not cost-efficient.

On-demand sessions, on the other hand, allow for scalability but are often lacking on interactivity, which is crucial for the engagement of the users and successful completion of the courses.

A study performed by Sun Microsystems Inc. showed that the drop out rate in on-demand sessions decreased from 75% to 25% when users had the ability to interact, ask questions and engage in discussions.

One alternative to enhance on-demand sessions is by giving participants the option of sending questions by email to the instructor, but usually this is not enough, since the respond rate tends to be low and slow. Users need to have access to a knowledge base in order to overcome the waiting time for questions that are frequently asked.

        Not everyone is aware of the relevance of customer training. In the corporate domain, people tend to relate the subject of "training" to staff development, but not many acknowledge the importance of customer training.

Training can be applied internally as well as externally. As a matter of fact, 50% of the training expenses relate to customer training, which is often absorbed by the marketing and sales divisions.

Here are 5 reason why you should start training your clients today!

1) Interact with Customers

Nothing should be more important to you than knowing your customers and being in contact with them. Training is a conversation and not a one-way process. Your customers learn about your solutions and you learn about them, so you can deliver even better services and products for them.

2) Engage Customers

You need to make sure that your clients are active players, and they can only be active if they know how to use the systems and/or tools that they buy, subscribe or license from you. Engaged customers will not only make you improve your services but will also act as ambassadors to bring you in new customers.

3) Deliver Superior Client Experiences

Offering training to your customers is a way of expressing that you care about them. Maintaining a blog or engaging them with social media can be pretty annoying and it does not always generate a value added to your customers. Training them in a regular basis though, specially if you give on-demand online training, allows you on one side to educate your customers in a scalable and flexible way, and on the other side to improve your marketing with the content you create for them.

4) Reduce Customer Support Efforts

It is clear that having educated users saves you significantly amounts of money in the long term. Preparing thoughtful "Getting Started Guides" and always explaining the newest features and updates, saves your support team the burden of answering the same questions again and again. Reduce significantly future costs of support by making a small investment in training today.

5) Build Brand Loyalty

        Are you thinking of introducing a new version or an important change to your current system? Then you should make sure that your users will be ready for the new implementation so they don't run away! Remember that even though in the long term people adapt to changes, we are usually difficult when we have to deal with things that are unfamiliar. If your users cannot adapt quickly to your changes, then you are inviting them to try your competitors: If in any case, they need to get used to a new system, this would be their right opportunity to change.

You have been working hard on this new version and your company has probably spent a significant amount in the development. So the question here is how to make your users comfortable with your changes as soon as they are implemented. The answer is clearly: Start training them in advance!

In order to implement an efficient training program, which can also form part of your marketing campaign, you need to define clear goals. The main goal in this situation should be a smooth transition for your users from the old version to the new one.

You will need to assess your end-users needs (i.e., popular features, basic actions) to offer effective and target-oriented training. It is important to highlight the advantages of the new version with respect to the old one and how this new version will make, in the long term, the life of your users easier.

Once you have the training program in mind, the next step would be to think of the different delivery solutions. The most scalable and flexible way of offering this training is through on-demand video tutorials that you can host directly in your website. You should also be able to track the progress of your users to make sure that everyone is getting ready for the new release.

        Training users implies improving their skills and knowledge for utilizing your solutions. You might think that you have the most intuitive product, specially if you designed it, but the truth is that your users have very different skill sets and they might understand or misunderstand the capabilities of your solution if they don't have a proper training.

Preparing a training is not free, but for sure it will be money well invested. Depending on the size of your organization and the complexity of your product, you should consider having a specific person or team in charge of creating and delivering your tutorials.

The most flexible and economic way of educating your users nowadays is through video tutorials that you can host on your website: Your users will be able to access the content whenever they consider it required and you won't need to have a person repeating himself in a weekly or monthly basis, making it scalable and efficient.

If you are dealing with big clients and your product offers special customization, you should also consider offering on-site training for them, which will also help you to build a closer relathionship. Nonetheless, you should not replace video tutorials with on-site training, but make it complementary. The participants of a classroom training would be extremely thankful, if they could get access to the customized training again in the future, so you should think of setting up a camera on a tripod and recording your training sessions in order to also make them available on your website (maybe under password protection if you want to control who gets access to it).

Offering training to your clients will show them that you care about them. This will not only improve your branding, but creating content that can be indexed by the different search engines will also improve your marketing.

          During the last year, we have learned the power of imagination. "Imagine" is a great word to be used in presentations, decks, marketing and sales. It makes us think of something extraordinary, something positive. Not everyone imagines the exact same thing, depending on their context and creativity, which makes ideas even bigger and brighter.

Selling a dream relates directly to that - letting investors imagine the solution and the outcome; hence, making fundraising at the dreaming-stage not that hard. If you talk to other entrepreneurs, they will probably confirm that it was easier for them to raise money before they started developing their product that once it was ready.

Once you have a tangible product, there is no more space for imagination. It is time to prove your dream and start bringing the traction anticipated on all your financial plans, that were probably adapted millions of times.

If you have a product, but no traction, you will have a hard time convincing investors of your solution. Only facts will help you at this stage.

                                                       Source: Scriberia

Research has shown that helping others and demonstrating our skills and expertise is motivating and generates satisfaction. This, however, can be different in large organizations where many employees use their knowledge as an insurance for keeping their positions: Keeping all their wisdom to themselves "guarantees" them their employment.

Having a knowledge hoarding culture within an institution, does not only slower processes and lowers efficiency, which of course generates higher costs, but also damages innovation.

So how can we create the right climate to avoid these situations and encourage the entire organization to share knowledge and expertise? 

After discussing with different institutions, there are 2 key factors to consider. First, experts within a company should be regarded as such and have a moral and a formal incentive in their performances to share what they know and train new members when they join. New members are still "not infected" by the standard processes and formalities of the organization, hence, they are the ones who can rapidily bring innovation and new ideas into a business. Second, knowledge sharing should be as simple and smooth as possible and not a hurdle. To achieve this, the right technology needs to be in place. This technology should have the standards of social media conventions that have become popular in the last years and that we are familiar with. The content should be as vivid and human as possible, hence, incorporating video and Q&As for the interaction between participants.

This is exactly where brainpickin comes into the scene, offering a simple and interactive solution to improve and motivate knowledge transfer.

By switching from a knowledge hoarding culture to a knowledge sharing culture, the benefit of the organization is substantial. This change can be easily done by focusing on those 2 key factors: Implement a framework for the modification of the behaviors and a simple inexpensive resolution of the technical needs.

       We always listen to you, dear customer, and take your feedback and requests very seriously. We want to show you that we are a young and dynamic business willing to satisfy you, and able to execute your needs fast and efficiently. 

This time we are excited to introduce Single-Sign-On (SSO). SSO is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.

What does it exactly mean? SSO allows your users to learn from your online academy powered by brainpickin without the necessity of creating a new account in brainpickin or even login in, if they are already logged in in your system.

Imagine replacing all the keys by one master key that opens all the doors to your services and makes the life of your users much easier.

The main benefits of using SSO are: (i) reducing password fatigue from different user name and password combinations, (ii) reducing time spent re-entering passwords for the same identity, and (iii) allowing your users a natural flow from your main site to your online academy and vice-versa.

        Starting a new venture is full of excitement and passion for that new idea. It requires risk takers willing to execute that vision, entrepreneurs that can act in a timely manner and are determined to do anything to see the project realized.

There are several characteristics that a team of entrepreneurs should have if they want to see success at some point; for example, discipline, social skills and speed to act (check out Tanya Prive's article on Forbes for more characteristics).

One characteristic that is often not mentioned and that can be observed in all successfull ventures is the ability to pivot - the ability to recognize the need of a change from the original idea, interiorize that change, adapt the vision and execute.

All big startups that we know today went through that process: Yelp started as an automated system for emailing recommendation requests to friends until they became the "Friendster Yellow Pages", Instagram was a location-based social network called Burbn that switched into an iPhone app focused solely on photo-sharing, and even Youtube started as a video dating site called "Tune In Hook Up".

      This post is very special to us. One of the first world renowned authorities to use our system was Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall is the Winner of the Thinkers50 Leadership Award (sponsored by Harvard Business Review) as the World's Most-Influential Leadership Thinker and a best-selling author or editor of more than 30 books.

Connecting with Marshall Goldsmith was no easy task, specially because he spends more time on airplanes traveling the world than on planet Earth. We connected with him first through LinkedIn, which has helped us a lot to reach specific people, and then we connected by email with him and his assistant. Thankfully, he and his team believe in our project from the beginning.

After some planning, we found the perfect dates to meet in a beautiful studio in Downtown LA. The studio from the inside was great, but the area outside did not look so promising. When Marshall arrived, he called us 2 times to make sure he was in the right place before the driver would leave him alone!

Marshall is extremely friendly and has many stories to share! He has coached many successful CEOs, traveled the world and experienced amazing things. When he arrived the cameras were set and we were ready to start rolling. He knows how to work efficiently and execute on time, so we could move forward very quickly. The only thing that started to become annoying was when we had to pause because of planes flying above our heads and making too much noise.

During our lunch break, he delighted us with the difference on how men and women percieve guilt (apparently men don't even know what that means, while women suffer from it) and his story of doing the military training to become a pilot (the same that Tom Cruise did before filming Top Gun).

We invite you to learn the same Leadership technique that Marshall Goldsmith teaches top CEOs, now available through his online academy: marshallgoldsmith.brainpickin.com.

In the meantime, we want to share with you some non-traditional questions we asked Marshall during our shooting day. Enjoy!

What was your first big achievement?

Getting listed as one of the world’s top ten executive educators in the mid 90’s in the Wall Street Journal.

What are your hobbies?

Studying religion and philosophy and spending time with my family.

What is your favorite book?

Old Path, White Clouds – by Thich Nhat Hanh.

What is your favorite song?

Over the Rainbow

What is your favorite dish?

Burritos

If you would be an animal, which one would you be and why?

A dog – dogs both give and receive lots of love.

Where would you like to spend one month of vacation and why?

In Tibet and India – to study Buddhism.

If you would only say one sentence, what would you say? 

Be happy now.

Who inspires you? 

Buddha

Do you have a routine?

Yes - I ask myself a list of questions every day.

What do you like about brainpickin?

        As we wrote on our last blog post, being at Launch Festival was a unique experience, specially because during the 3 weeks of being in the Bay area we totally felt the energy of the startup scene, which is not comparable to anywhere else in the world.

The second day after we arrived, we had our first rehearsals for Launch, which took place in Menlo Park at Sequoia Capital's offices. We took the train early in the morning from SF and while sitting in the train we literary realised that 80% if not more of the news published on TechCrunch are about startups located on the one-hour train distance between SF and SunnyVale. This train connects the dots where the magic happens!

Being at Sequoia's main office and meeting all these other startups was surreal. We were thinking of all the important deals that were closed there, like Airbnb, Youtube, PayPal, Instagram, Yahoo!, Kayak, just to mention a few...

Just after our first rehearsal, we started a marathon of meetings with entrepreneurs and investors. We realized then how important it is to know your elevator pitch - you can forget your name but not your pitch - and how important it is to have enough business cards to exchange contacts with everyone.

What surprised us the most while being there, was how much easier is to schedule a meeting with a potential client or investor than a Skype call. From our experience this last year, Skype calls are often re-scheduled or even cancelled and following up is always much more difficult. In the Bay area we were reaching out to people and getting invitations for drinks, dinners and meetings immediately.

                      Two weeks ago you could feel the excitement in the startup scene of the bay area: Jason Calacanis and his incredible team were opening the doors of the San Francisco Concourse Exhibition Center to a 3-day festival with approximately 5,800 attendees.

            Teachers are a critical factor (according to certain research, THE critical factor) in a student's academic life and learning experience. Much has been written, said and researched about teaching in the new millenia – which has brought about new sets of tools as well as difficulties to the classroom. However, teaching may happen outside a structured classroom – at home, within friends, or even online. So, the question remains: How can you become a better teacher?

A recent survey conducted online reached the conclusion that there are five characteristics which make for a good and effective teacher:

1. Anticipating for the future: A teacher should be able to understand the changes, which are happening in our world and prepare students for the future they will live in, not only for the present.

2. Being a lifelong learner: Be it by learning from colleagues, from students, or from a good blog, teachers should be flexible and embrace learning and change, and be willing to make mistakes. After all, we do want to teach by example.

3. Fostering peer relationships: Relationships between children today are greatly affected by technology. A teacher should look to helping students create, improve and keep relationships with one another, not only over Facebook.  

4. Can teach all levels and types of learners: Each child has their own learning style and needs, and a teacher's ability to adapt their teaching accordingly is key. 

5. Implementing new technology effectively in the teaching process: The main difficulty would be judging, which technologies may be used in the most relevant and educational way, and which tools are harmful to the teaching process (as they may waste time and resources, for example).

       All of you that follow the Olympic Games should be excited about our course on Motivation. Nikki Stone, American Olympic Gold Medalist from the Nagano Winter Olympics 1998, Best-Selling Author and Award Winning Motivational Speaker, came all the way from Salt Lake City to LA to share with us her experience and insight from her book When Turtles Fly.

If you have not watched the jump that won her a Gold medal yet, you should check the intro to her course. There is no way you won't get goose bumps. And if you hear it directly from her, it is even more touching.

Meeting Nikki was a great experience and producing the course was another success story since we managed to do everything in a very short period of time.

Nikki is a very determined woman with clear goals, that manages her professional career as well as a family with 2 children. She does not only know how to define her goals but also how to achieve them, no matter what, and Nagano is a clear example of that (she won her Gold medal after having a spine injury!).