5 Training Management System Benefits For Small And Medium Businesses
Are you a small to medium-sized business that’s considering purchasing a training management system to help manage your training? Every time a business makes the decision to bring on a new piece of software to help their business grow, they need to think about the benefits this software will bring to them, and whether it will offset the costs, to make sure the decision is a worthwhile one.
However, if you’re a small to medium-sized business, your decision-making process is going to be different to larger companies, as you will have different things to take into consideration, and different factors will affect your business in different ways.
Today we’re going to talk about the big benefits that a small to medium-sized training company can reap from bringing a training management system on board, so you can see why investing in a training management system is a great decision, and will help your business flourish!
1. More Affordable Than Multiple Systems
One main draw of a training management system is the fact that it is one system that can do the job of a number of separate systems. Training management systems like Administrate include features such as a reporting system, a finance system, an email communications system, a CRM, and an LMS – all for the price of one piece of software!
Imagine if you had to pay for all those systems separately – the costs would soon start to pile up! Only having to pay for one system will save you money but you won’t lose any of the functionality, as you’ll still have access to all the features these systems would offer you.
It will also mean that you only need to train your staff on one piece of software, rather than multiple systems, which could get confusing really quickly!
2. Keeps Everything In One Place
If you’re a small business, you’re not going to have as many staff members in place as bigger companies would have. This could mean you have all the knowledge of one team within your business in the hands of one or two members of staff.
While things may be ticking along smoothly just now, what happens if those members of staff are off ill, or on holiday, or decide to move on to a new job? This could mean a lot of the knowledge about how your company works and a lot of the processes which keep everything running effectively just now leave when those members of staff do. This can cause massive disruption to your business, and things which just got done before could suddenly be forgotten.
You may think that leaving staff have provided a good handover for their replacement, but until they are thrown in at the deep end you won’t really be able to tell if all the knowledge has been passed over effectively.
It’s so important to make sure you don’t have knowledge gatekeepers in your business, otherwise, you’ll be over-reliant on a couple of members of staff, and then everything will fall apart if they are every absent from the business.
Administrate can help you tackle this because our training management system allows you to store all your key information in one place, which multiple people can have access to.
Here are just some of the ways you can keep everything in one place using Administrate:
- Store all your customer contacts in our CRM, so you never lose any important contact details.
- Upload all your important company documents to out DMS (Document Management System). This means nothing will get saved on one person’s computer and then be hard to access, and you won’t have to worry about keeping hard copies of vital files.
- Use our automated communications tools to send all your customer communications automatically. This means you can track all the emails that have been sent and easily send more whenever you need to, rather than risk not having access to someone’s account and not being able to see what has already been sent to a customer.
- Track all your sales using our sales system. This gives you a great overview of all the deals you have in the pipeline, instead of just knowing about the deals which have already been closed. This information may usually only be accessible to the members of the Sales team who are involved in the sale, so it’s good for visibility all over the business, and you know the exact progress of all your deals in case another member of staff needs to take over an account.
The last thing you want to do is jeopardise a potential deal, or a relationship with a customer because you couldn’t find all the important information you needed. Administrate is designed to make sure this doesn’t happen.
3. Do More With Less Staff
For a small business, where every penny counts, it’s important that you only hire new staff when you’re really sure you have the extra workload which you need them to cover. If your staff are starting to get a bit stretched thin at the moment, you may be considering hiring additional team members, but a training management system can help make sure you get everything done that you need to, without hiring additional team members. In fact, your current staff should have more capacity to do other kinds of work because a lot of the administration work they do can now be covered by your training management system.
There are lots of things which you can automate which will mean your staff have more time to complete other tasks:
- Automate communications – Setting up communications triggers means that you don’t have to worry about sending out any of the templated emails you send to students or other contacts, as your training management system can worry about that for you. Things like registration details, payment confirmation, survey requests, and student certificates can all be sent out automatically once their ‘trigger’ event happens and triggers the email to send.
- Accepting online payments – Integrating your training management system with your website means that you can sell your courses online, and take online payments as well. Additionally, once the sale is complete, all the details will be pulled through into your sales system so they are easy to keep track off. All this means less work for your staff, as they don’t have to follow-up to confirm payment with students, and they don’t have to pass the details on to another team to get them signed up for their chosen course – it’s all done automatically.
- Easy reporting – Currently reporting is probably a task that you dread. It can take a long time to pull together all the information you need, and then you need to repeat that process, again and again, every time you need a new set of data displayed on the report. With a training management system like Administrate, you can pull all your data through into the report you need within seconds. Once it’s been created once, every time you open it, it will be updated with real-time data, so you don’t need to worry about repeating your effort every time you need a new version of the report. You can then easily send it to the audience that needs to see it or export it.
4. Don’t Rely On Business Hours
If you’re not using a training management system just now, chances are you’re working within the traditional business hours of 9-5, Monday-Friday. You may want to expand your offering, but with a smaller team of staff, this can be hard to do, especially if you’re trying to save money.
Currently, this may mean that if a customer tries to buy a course from you outwith these hours, they might not be able to complete their purchase, which could lead to them going with a competitor to complete their sale.
Using a training management system means you don’t have to rely on business hours to make sales. You can use the online course sales system to sell your courses online and take payments online at the same time, which means your students can purchase from you whenever is convenient for them. As mentioned above, you can create an email trigger which will send them a confirmation email to let them know their payment has gone through. This will mean your customers receive this instantly and don’t have to wait hours till someone is in the office to manually email them and confirm their place.
This is a fantastic feature for small businesses as it allows you to offer a 24/7 purchasing option for your customers but you don’t have to hire any more staff, and you don’t have to find staff who are willing to work different shifts!
5. Keep A Close Eye On The Numbers
As we’ve mentioned above, a good reporting system is an incredibly important feature of a training management system, as it’s vital to have a good grasp of all the data and numbers flowing through your company at any one time.
If you have a tight budget to stick to each month, it really important you always have a clear picture of all the money coming into and going out of your business, and a training management platform can help you do just that.
- Reporting system – As we mentioned above, you can use the reporting system to report on any of the data you have stored within Administrate. This means you can track things like how many students you have, how much money you have outgoing, and which classes are making you the most profit.
- Sales pipeline – Keep an eye on the progress of all your deals, including ones that aren’t closed yet. This gives you a much better idea of what you’re profit and revenue are going to be over a certain period rather than just basing your numbers on closed deals.
- Customer feedback – Another great feature of a training management platform like Administrate is the ability to survey your customers to gather feedback from them, and then store it all within Administrate so it’s easy to reference in the future, and easy to use when reporting. You can easily email out surveys to your desired audience and then gather all the responses without having to do lots of extra work!
Are You Convinced?
Hopefully, we’ve shown you exactly why small and medium businesses could benefit hugely from having a training management system, and more specifically, how Administrate could help your business perform better.
If you’re interested in finding out more about how Administrate could work for a business of your size specifically, why not book a personalised demo with one of our team?
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Originally published at www.getadministrate.com.
