When you’re making the decision to purchase new software for your business, you need to make sure you’re going to get an adequate Return on Investment (ROI) to make sure it’s worthwhile. You’ve got to spend money to make money as they say, but obviously, you want to make sure you’re bringing in more money than you’re spending on your new software.
If you’re considering this point when you are in the market for a training management platform, it’s important to note that not only will you get monetary returns on your investment, you can also increase efficiency and productivity within your business as well, which should eventually lead to increased revenue as well in the long run!
Let’s take a look at what training companies need to know about the ROI of a training management platform.
Obviously, the main type of ROI you will be looking for is how your training management platform is going to save you money. While purchasing some new software will be an extra expense, if you fully utilize all the functions your training management platform has to offer, you should see cost-savings across your business in the long-term.
Training management platforms are designed to help your current staff cut down on all the constant, but vital, administration tasks that your business needs to carry out every day, and give them more time to complete other tasks. This means that your current staff won’t be bogged down with lots of admin, leading to your having to hire more staff to make sure everything is covered. If you don’t have to hire even one or two extra members of staff, that would means thousands of pounds worth of savings for your business every year!
When selecting which training management platform to use, it’s important you get one that covers everything you need it to. If you can get a training management platform which also includes things like a Learning Management System (LMS), a CRM, and integrates with your website, that means you’re only paying for one product, instead of dishing out money for multiple systems, which may not even work well with each other. Spending a little extra time researching a system which covers all the points you need it to will mean less outgoings.
Hiring new staff can cost you a lot of money, not only in terms of salary, but also in terms of the time they spend getting up-to-speed on the way your business works in their first few weeks or days as an employee, as chances are they will be getting very little else done!
If all your data is stored in one place, and all your processes are run through a training management platform, imagine how much easier this will make the on-boarding process? Instead of trying to get staff up-to-speed on many different systems, and the different ways all the teams within your business work, so simply have to train them on how to use your training management platform, and they should be good to go! This could save you days of training and allow your staff to dive right into the work as quickly as possible.
If you can get a training management system that also provides the training on the product themselves, such as through their own LMS, you also won’t lose experienced staff for hours at a time who have to provide the training, as new starts should be able to work through the bulk of the training independently.
While this does tie into the issue of saving money, increased efficiency basically means you will be able to get lots more done as a business than you could before. If your staff aren’t spending a huge chunk of their day completing administration tasks, this means they can tackle other tasks, and every day will see you completing more work than you were before you purchased your training management platform.
Let’s take a look at some of the specific ways a training management platform will increase the efficiency and productivity of your business.
Automated communications have to be one of the biggest time-saving features that a training management platform can offer you. You probably don’t realize just how much time multiple people across your business are spending every day just sending those emails that need to be sent out in order to keep your business running. From student confirmation emails, supplier emails, assessment grades, internal reports, feedback surveys, etc., there is always a constant steam of communications which need to be created and sent. Depending on how many courses you run and how many students you have attending these courses, this could results in a staggering amount of emails, all of which you may be creating manually at the moment.
Even if you’re using time-saving tools such as Mail Merge, your business is definitely not being as efficient as it could be.
Automated communications allow you to set up templates for all the standard emails you send. This means no more copying and pasting whenever you have to send a templated email, or worrying about getting someone’s contact details correct, as all their information will be pulled through from your training management platform automatically. You can then set up ‘triggers’ which will determine when the emails will send, such as a sale going through, or an assessment reminder being sent three weeks before an assessment is due.
Once everything is set up, you don’t need to worry about it, and emails won’t stack up waiting to be sent if your staff members are busy elsewhere – your training management platform will simply take care of everything in the background, while your team gets on with something else.
Tasks which need to be completed on a regular basis, and need to be completely correct and up-to-date, such as reporting, can be a massive time-drain on your team. It can seem that as soon as you’ve completed this month’s reports you’re having to start on the next batch!
If the information you need to gather is stored with different people all over the company, you can spend half your time just trying to gather everything you need, never mind all the time you then need to spend analyzing it and making it easy to understand for your audience.
Your training management system isn’t just there to automate your emails, it can help with tasks like reporting as well, and something that took hours every month in the past can now be done in just a few clicks!
If all your information is stored in one central point (your training management platform), then you don’t need to worry about spending hours hunting down everything you need. You can simply decide exactly what information you need your report to display, and how you want to view it, and your report is done! The best part is, because all the information is pulled from your training management platform, it means your reports are always updated in real-time, so they are always as up-to-date as possible when you view them within the software. This basically means once you’ve set up a report to run once, every time you need to refresh it in the future, it’s pretty much done for you. You can even set it up so the report is emailed to exactly the people who need to see it, when they need to see it, such as the first of the month, so you don’t even need to worry about forgetting to email the report out!
If you’re currently taking your course bookings over the phone or via email, that means a lot of your staff are spending most of their day talking with customers and closing those deals. Obviously, you still want to keep those sales rolling in, but you don’t have to have your staff tied up all day to achieve this!
If you purchase a training management platform which includes an online course booking feature which you can integrate with your website, you can let that handle most of the sales and allow your staff to tackle other tasks instead. This move could actually improve your sales as well, as don’t have to rely on there always being staff in the office to answer the phone for a sale to actually go through. Online sales will let your customers purchase from you outside of office hours, as well as offering a purchase option when all your sales staff are already engaged.
So, what is the big Return on Investment your business is going to get from making the move to a training management platform? Put quite simply, it’s going to save you lots of money and lots of time, as you can see from the points we’ve raised above!
Now it’s important to spend some time researching the perfect training management platform for you, to make sure it meets all your business’s needs, and provides you with the biggest ROI possible!
