Watching “new” users/prospects interact with your product’s features / functions can be quite insightful. By paying close attention to questions they ask or areas where they seemed puzzled can give-out clues which you can use to lower the learning curve of your product. However, the approach that the trainer takes or the ideas that he/she presents while training a “new” user have long term consequences on how efficiently or effectively your product gets used in the future.
Such is also the case when you demonstrate your product to a prospective customer. Unless you use examples that are relevant and meaningful to the end user, all that you achieve is distract the users and make it harder for them to learn/appreciate your product. Primarily, because they have to first familarize themselves with a new vocabulary and place it within the context of the product being demonstrated to them to even begin completely understanding what is being said to them.
As an example, consider that you have a lead generation product whose unique strengths are that it helps realtors identify potential opportunities in the local property market. If you were to visit a commercial property developer, would you show him/her how to use the product using the examples from the residential housing market? Better yet, if you were to visit a customer in Scotland and your based primarily in London, would you show the end user examples demonstrating potential leads within his/her home market or use examples from London that you might be more familar with? The above questions are rhetorical but the answers almost always is to either elicit examples from the users themselves or at the very least prepare examples that might be meaningful to them.
You might wonder something this obvious doesn’t even need to be stated, but in reality such scenarios happen more often than not, my experience suggests it happens because of one or more of the below reasons
- Product Trainer take the easy way out and use examples which they are familiar with, primarily because they know the response to expect using certain sets of inputs falsely believing that their first priority is to ensure that the training / pitch goes as smoothly as possible and there are no surprises.
- Product Trainer / Sales Managers are not confident or have limited faith in the products ability to return appropriate results if they elicit examples from the customer – reasons could be as mundane as not knowing how to spell examples requested by the user – What if users ask me to find properties in “skye” should i type the location as “Isle of Skye” or just “skye”, did he actually mean “Isle of Skye” or is there some other “Skye” in scotland? Does our product have enough properties listed for “Skye”.
Fortunately, the solution to one or more of the above is easy but to ensure that it is followed in practice is difficult. But as a Sales Director or Product Manager there are some basic minimum processes or guidelines that you can lay out.
- Unless you have a specialised training department, you as the Product Manager should provide guidance on how end users should be trained on the product.
- Attend customer meetings and see if there are elements within the product or the training itself that could be refined.
- Request users to fill in feedback forms at the end of training so that you can measure experience.
- Impress upon staff the importance of eliciting examples from the customer being trained/visited.
- If not, at the very least prepare examples that would be relevant to the customer being trained/visited.
If you have a international product, it is more crucial to pay attention to user training. When I started out as a software developer working for a US-based firm with a development center in India amongst the first things I had to do when I started was to learn the Product that my company developed. It might be trivial to someone, but amongst the first things that struck my mind was, why are all the examples listed, have references to American culture, its products and its way of life. It seemed that the training materials had been airlifted and flown to India to teach the Indian staff without any effort to localize them and make it relevant to the users who are being taught to use the product.
Imagine trying to work through examples that ask you to create a list that includes Doritos, Lays, Pringles, Twinkies, Gucamole, Salsa, Sour Cream, Chives, Triamisu etc and writing rules such as If user “A” selects mexican cuisine then only allow “Doritos, Gucamole, Salsa , Sour Cream, Chives” to be selected. In the absence of any shared reference these words and any rules/logic surround it look meaningless distracting your from the main purpose – which is to learn how to use the product. As an another example if you see a list of names such as Garri, Ga Kenkey, Egusi, Ogbono, Indomine, Clos while attending a training course. To someone who is not African or not familiar with African culture it wouldn’t be automatically apparent that they refer to names of African food items.
In summary, when demonstrating/pitching your product in front of customers/prospects always strive to make the experience relevant and meaningful to the end user.
