Let’s Talk Training! » business plan

Does Your “Sales Force” Know Your Business Plan?

will kenny — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:11:39 +0000

Last time I wrote about the need for a true business plan approach to running your internal training function. Since training departments rely on funds from the rest of the company, almost a form of external financing, I suggested that most departments could benefit from crafting business plans similar to the ones small, independent training companies take to their creditors and investors.

Here’s one more lesson from small training companies: In a successful small business, everyone in the company knows the business plan. Every employee is aware of the goals, the target market, the key strategies that drive the company.

Why? Because the “sales force” in a small company is everybody. Every time someone inside the company interacts with someone outside the company, that is an opportunity to promote the business, to build relationships that help them reach their goals.

Your training department doesn’t have a dedicated band of “sales representatives” who go out and beat the bushes to drum up customers. Your department head does a lot of the formal selling to the leadership team, especially during annual budget discussions.

But informal selling can make a huge difference to the support you enjoy across the company. And broad recognition of the benefits you bring to the company is built up—or weakened—with every interaction between a member of your training department and anyone else in the company.

Unfortunately, in too many training departments, employees leave the “heavy thinking” to management; they just “do their jobs.” They see winning budget battles, getting access to resources, building cooperation among other company functions they serve as something the department leader does.

A clear business plan can be a huge help in turning all of your staff into your sales force:

Your plan should clearly identify the relationship-building, or “selling,” function as a part of every single employee’s job.
A formal business plan should be shared with everyone in the training department, with a strong message that everyone on the staff is expected to be able to articulate the key elements of that plan.
For the best results, especially if this is a new approach for you, give the staff some explicit training in responding to questions, sharing the plan, and recognizing opportunities to promote the plan. In other words, train your staff to respond to conversations and interactions in new ways, routinely weaving department messages for their “customers” into their communications with the rest of the company.

The power of your business plan can be simply, and accurately, gauged by the number of people who routinely express its key components. If only the department head knows what the business plan is, you are throwing away countless opportunities to “build a brand” that it is more resistant to downsizing and budget attacks. Just as importantly, a well respected “internal brand” opens new opportunities, developing a more sympathetic audience within your organization when you want to try something new.

If all the staff in your department regularly include elements they learned from the business plan in their working conversations with others, you have a much larger and more effective “sales force” working for you.

And when you have delivered your key messages so relentlessly, so consistently, that people in other departments start using your favorite phrases from the business plan to describe your training function, you know you have the support to maximize your contribution to your organization’s success.

You Need a Business Plan for your Corporate Training Department

will kenny — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:12:36 +0000

Will Kenny, Best Training Practices

As we all know, there are many small companies offering various kinds of training services. They may deliver standard seminars or provide coaching. They may offer content development, step in to facilitate internal discussions of various kinds or create delivery tools such as online courses. They may be one-person shops or small organizations with several employees. And almost every one of these small training consultancies has something that is rare in the departments of their corporate counterparts—a business plan.

They have formal business plans for both philosophical and practical reasons. Philosophically, a business plan helps focus efforts on the opportunities, resources, and practices that lead to success. Practically, a business plan is required to get a loan or raise any other form of financing.

These business plans don’t have to be very elaborate. Simple answers to a few key questions will do most of the work:

Who is your market, your audience?
How many people will you serve and where?
What are their needs? How will you meet those needs?
What resources do you require to meet those needs—funds, equipment, people?
Where else can they get their needs met?
How will you generate revenue? Why will they buy?
How do we know the business leadership knows how to succeed in this business?
What potential threats do you see, and how do you plan to overcome them?

Apply those questions to the corporate training environment, with an internal training department, and I think you’ll find few people in most training departments who can begin to answer them. In many companies, the training function “just is,” and the fundamental questions are rarely asked . . . at least by management within the training function. More importantly, every employee in the training function needs to understand these questions and know the answers to them, especially as questions like those may be hinted at by other departments when budgets get tight.

Those small consultancies know that unless they tell their story effectively, they aren’t going to get the loans they need to expand their business. And internal training functions are really in much the same situation. They don’t generate enough revenue from per-person fees for their courses to pay for their operating costs. They live on “credit” from the rest of the organization, on what they get from “investors” elsewhere in the company.

It makes perfect sense, then, to be able and ready to present a business plan that supports that financing. You may already have a lot of those answers in your department objectives, budget documents, training catalog and so on. Even so, a true business plan provides a somewhat different focus. It’s the difference between:

Talking about what you do, what your activities are, how you manage your resources; and
Talking about how you help, why and where you are needed, what benefits justify investment.

In other words, the first approach talks about you and your department. The business plan approach talks about your customers and investors, the organization you serve. Formalizing that outward-looking perspective helps you focus your conversations on the benefits your “business” brings to the rest of the organization. It also helps you make better decisions about where to apply resources or where to look for additional support, crucial decisions when the budget is under pressure.

Your business colleagues truly appreciate a business-like approach. Run your business better, with a clear business plan, and you are likely to pick up a few more “wins” in the budget battle.