The Overlooked Training Partner

The Overlooked Training Partner By Jim Paluch

You have made the move and introduced the power of consistent in-house training into your organization and are already reaping the benefits. It may be that you have chosen the Lawn & Garden Retailer Training Challenge or have invested the time and energy to create your own process; regardless of the method, training is having an impact. If you are really serious about the training process you may have developed several partners to make it effective. You have partnered with key people in the company to instruct on those issues that they are best suited to teach; you have enlisted the help of the employees in role-playing and problem solving to enhance critical thinking and gained support of top management to budget the training; you may have even sought the help of outside vendors to instruct on specific topics. Even with all of this assistance from others, it is quite possible that you are overlooking one of the key partnerships to making your training successful, relevant and even profitable. This potential partner is so important that it is the very reason you have decided to train. The partner being underutilized is your customer!

To gain an appreciation of the potential in partnering with your customers in training efforts, first consider their feelings toward your company and training. They are taking for granted that you are training. They just assume that the company they have chosen is professional and that the person they are dealing with is qualified to do so. Those that are rendering a service are expected to have the needed skills to render it. Observe your own actions when you walk into a barbershop or chiropractor’s office. Look for the diploma or certificate to verify that at least one head of hair had been cut or back cracked! When the company mission statement talks about “exceeding customer expectations,” isn’t the company that is not training already falling short of the customers’ expectations by not training. Customers expect your company to be trained, so do not let them down — get them involved.

The Marketing Advantage

Every customer has a choice of whom they will choose to perform a service. This is a great thing for the company that is training and knows how to use training as a marketing advantage. When positioned correctly with the customer, training will separate the company from the competition and cause the customer to narrow the choice to a company that does not train or one that is training. To begin your partnership, consider one or more of the following to enhance this marketing advantage and your training efforts.

Tell It

• Send a training schedule to your clients, and let them know what you will be training on this month.
• Send out a press release that you have joined the Training Challenge or have sent a number of employees to a qualified training program.
• In your customer surveys, state that the customer’s input is essential to the design and continued improvement of your training curriculum.
• In your sales process, highlight your weekly training classes, on-site quality discussions or safety meetings.

Show It

• Send an E-mail to the appropriate clients to tell them that a training crew will be on-site today or that their site has been chosen as a model site for quality standards and will be toured by new team members.
• Increase the partnership, and invite them to teach a training session for your team. It could be on customer service, client awareness or how a decision is made to choose nursery or garden center services.
• One of the most effective ways to show you are training is a good old-fashioned client forum. Invite several of your clients to be on a panel in front of your company, and ask questions of what they like best and least about your company. The results are amazing.
• Pretend to be them. Even though you are not directly showing the customer you are training, the results could be powerful. Employees at Skinner Nurseries, Jacksonville, Fla., spend a training session a month walking through their nurseries, asking the question, “What would our customers think right now?” then discussing the employees’ responses.

Prove It

• Send out press releases on successful certification of employees.
• Show pictures of company training in your presentation portfolios or PowerPoint.
• Certification patches as part of the uniforms stand out and show your training commitment.
• The best proof? Perform as a professional!

Just as every partner should bring something to the table, your customers will certainly add to your training efforts. As you heighten customer awareness and position training as your marketing advantage by telling, showing and proving, then “buyer confidence” will increase. The peace of mind that customers can have by knowing, not assuming, that their garden center is actively training and producing professional results is the customer’s reward for being a training partner. Increased buyer confidence allows a company to achieve some of the goals of initiating training in the first place. Increased buyer confidence results in increased sales, increased prices and increased profitability. In partnering with your customers and getting them involved, the equation becomes simple; training equals profits.