What To Look For In A Training Management Platform
With any business purchase, it’s really important to make sure you do your research before you commit to something, and investing in a training management platform is no different.
If you’re looking to make the move to a training management platform, you’re clearly looking for something that is going to make your day-to-day life easier, as well as saving you lots of administration time and keeping your whole business really organised. This is not a decision you want to take lightly, so take a little extra time to do your research and pick the perfect system for your particular training business.
We’ve picked the 7 main features we think are essential in a training management platform to ensure it will take care of all the main tasks you need tackled.
1. Online Course Booking
Having the ability to sell your courses online is great because it not only makes your life a lot easier, but it also makes your customer happier! While some customers may still wish to make bookings over the phone, the ease and convenience of booking online means that in this day and age you really have to offer online booking to ensure you don’t lose out to a competitor who is only one click away on Google.
Selling your courses online is so important these days for a number of reasons:
- It means you don’t have to have additional staff to cover putting sales through manually, either via email or over the telephone. This means the staff you do have can focus on the more important aspects of their jobs, and you don’t have to use additional money to hire more people.
- Sales can be done at any time, not just during office hours. Students can book on to your courses at any time, on any day, and have their purchase completed, instead of having to wait for a member of staff to be in the office and put the sale through.
- All the information from your sales can be automatically stored within your training management platform, meaning you never need to worry about losing a lead.
- All your course details are always kept up-to-date, as the information will always pull through from what you’ve entered in your training management platform, so you never need to worry about updating the information in two places.
- You can take secure payment online, so customers don’t have to stress about giving their payments details out over the phone or via email.
All these points we’ve mentioned above will be present in a course booking system which integrates with your website, so make sure this it’s the option you go for, as it will make your job faster and easier. That way your training management platform and your website are always working together and displaying the same up-to-date information as each other. Not only does that mean no duplicate data entry, which will save you time and effort, but it also ensures there will be no errors on your website.
2. Excellent Reporting
One thing that is massively important to training companies is reporting. Your training management platform is going to hold lots of lovely data, and you want to make sure you’re able to report on any of that data at any given time.
Make sure you can customize the reports you need to create, because the last thing you want is to have to try and build a useful report using the pre-fills that a training management platform company think you want to see. Every training company is different, and depending on your audience, your reports will be wildly different and focus on different data points. Ideally you want to be able to pick exactly the data you want to report on, as well as the relevant timeframe for you.
Once you’ve created your reports, you want to be able to save them for future reference, download them, and also email them to anyone else who needs to see them.
You want to look for a training reporting system that’s going to make reporting a breeze and not a job you dread and end up putting off. Pulling together those numbers and comparing them is extremely important and can help you make huge business decisions, so pick a tool that it going to enable you to do this as effectively as possible.
3. Financial Integrations
Chances are you already have financial integrations that you work with and are happy with. Whether this is accounting packages or payment providers, you’ll probably want to continue working with what you’re comfortable with, as you make the move to be more organised in other areas.
Look for a training management platform that integrates with the top accounting packages or payment providers. This means you can continue working with the tools and websites you’re used to, meaning you won’t disrupt any processes you already have in place, and your staff won’t have to waste valuable time so they can train on a new way of working.
4. Sales System
As we mentioned above, it’s really important for your Sales team to make sure they never lose a lead during the sales process, but keeping track of all that information can prove difficult sometimes, and it can be hard to find a system that works exactly the way you need it to.
Find a training management platform that also contains a sales system to keep all your customers details and lead details organised and in one place! A system like this is built specifically for training companies, so it more able to match the exact needs you will have compared to another type of business who may also need a sales system. This is not a one size fits all product, and you need to look specifically for a training company sales system to ensure you’re getting the best fit for your business.
Not only will details be automatically pulled across from sales on your website, but your Sales team will also be able to manually enter details for potential leads they come across. This means you’ll never have to worry about misplacing an email address of someone you wanted to follow-up with, as it’s all safely stored in your sales system.
A good sales system will also allow you to set up a sales pipeline which works for your specific business, so everyone knows the process of how to work through a potential lead and hopefully close the deal with them. This is another way you can help your business stay super organised!
Finally, this also allows you to get a clear overview of predicated, historical and current performance for your whole business, allowing you to get a clearer picture of your future revenue and profit, and make better business decisions based on this data.
5. Automated Communications
You probably don’t think about how much time per day you and your team spend sending emails, but it can really add up quite quickly!
Automated communications such as emails and SMS are so important because not only do they make sure you never accidentally miss sending an important communication to your students, but it also means you can focus your time on other tasks that you might not have time for otherwise.
Simply set up the templates for the emails you want to send, and decide what the triggers are going to be to send those emails, such as a student signing up for a course getting a confirmation email, or a student getting a feedback survey the day after their course finishes, and that’s your work done! The training management platform will pull all the relevant information such as name, email address, and which course they have signed up to into the emails, so they always contain the right information, and will simply send them whenever they are triggered.
Just think how much time you could save if you didn’t have to send all those student and tutor emails every day?
6. Learning Management System
If you offer eLearning, or you’re looking to make the move to eLearning in the near future, why try and find two separate system to do what you need? Find a training management platform which also has a Learning Management System (LMS), and not only does it mean you only need to spend time looking for one system, it’s also likely to be cheaper than purchasing two separate systems.
As we mentioned above with course booking, it will again mean all your systems are integrated, so all the information can be used across all the systems, without you having to enter the data multiple times. This could be particularly handy for pulling all your LMS data into your reporting tool!
7. Quick And Easy Course Scheduling
Much like emails, you probably don’t realize how much time you spend setting up all your courses in a training management platform or on your website. As we’ve said, integrating these two means no more duplicate data entry, but you can’t get around the fact that you will still have to enter all the information at least once.
Pick a training management platform that makes this necessary job as easy and as quick as possible. Through the use of things like course templates, you can set up a templated version of your course, with all the main information you need, and then duplicate it whenever you need to set up that course again, or if you have multiple versions of the same course running at the same time.
Pick a tool that is going to cut out as much of your administration time as possible, but still ensure your business is running smoothly and successfully.
Get Looking!
Obviously there are plenty of options on the market, but those are the main features we think you need to be looking for when you are considering purchasing a training management platform.
As well as these needs, you may have some business specific needs that you’ll want to address as well, so it’s important to take those into consideration.
Why not take this list of things above, add anything other features you specifically want to suit your business needs, and then get researching! Taking that little bit of extra time to make sure you get exactly the system your business needs will be well worth it in the long run!
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- 6 Tell-Tale Signs That Your Organization Is Ready For A Training Management Platform
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- 7 Features To Look For In A Training Management Platform
