Hosting or attending a great training session is one of my favorite parts of working in a technical and interactive field. A group of people gather to learn and discuss a new form of technology, a best practices theory, or understand the next evolution in where their industry is headed. There are some fantastic trainers out there that can engage an audience and get them really thinking about how the subject matter is going to change things. When I was hosting training sessions I was representing a manufacturer trying to inform attendees about new products and get them educated on how those devices would suit their needs. However, just reading off a power point of features is never going to accomplish that end. If I were to stand up in front of a group of experienced individuals and say “I have this great new product that’s going to do all these things for you,” the conversation would quickly turn into an argument over whether my new product can do something better or different than the competitor’s. That conversation is the reason a sales department exists. As many folks have pointed out in other articles, the role of the sales person is changing. They have to be able to provide value to the customer, a fundamental understanding of the equipment as it works, how it differs from competitive products, and how the products suit the needs of the application. But being able to provide that fundamental information and competitive knowledge is not training.
While a great trainer can improve sales, that isn’t the purpose of their sessions. Trainers exist in order to provide in depth information about how things work. My preferred method when I was hosting my training sessions and consultations was to use the “why” of something to make people think. I had a habit of hosting a one hour session and not even discussing the products that I was there to represent until the last 15 to 20 minutes of the session. That might seem counter intuitive because my stated goal was to get more people informed about what we made and get it implemented in projects. But I chose to think backwards about the task. If my goal was to get the products into a job, then why not focus on the job first? I would spend 30 min or more talking about the application at hand. For example, if the project was a theater I would discuss the various things that had to be taken into account before we could even begin to think about any kind of product from any manufacturer. I would look at what kinds of performances they wanted to use the theater for, how the seating was going to be arranged, was it fixed or flexible seating, was there acoustic treatment on the walls or ceiling, where was the equipment going to be located based on the needs and requests of the client, and on, and on, and on. Teaching to the application forces people to think about how they are going to accomplish the goal of getting the best system performance and could change minds about the “standard practices” in a given application. Once I had gotten the audience to start thinking about the things that could cause them issues or require an alternate way of doing the job, only then would I start to talk about the product offerings that I had for that application. Now when I talked about the products it wasn’t just spewing off facts about this brand new box that can do X, Y, & Z. Instead I was getting the attendees to open up their minds and look at why this device’s particular way of doing things could help them solve a problem. It was associative problem solving. The next time they saw an environment where that circumstance was present they would know they had a solution for it because we had covered it.
Training is a great way to support a sales staff, but at its core it is a pure marketing effort. Marketing these days is considered an investment in gaining mind share. With the flood of information that exists in the world today, trying to keep your products, services, or even your name at the forefront of someone’s mind is a difficult task. But by using training as an opportunity to provide value in the form of situational problem solving, and only afterwards discussing how you or the company you represent can solve that problem for someone, you are going to retain a larger portion of that mind share because now they will always associate your solutions with an easy resolution.
Yes you have to get people to visualize. Applications are starting with why, not what. Why does a particular application deserve various approaches to design or implementation method? Why do people need audio and visual reinforcement, recording or distant site sharing of the application anyway? What the product types are inside the application only are relevant with beginning with the end in mind like you said. How does the applied AV make it better?
In training, we also must lead the world in what the heck Collaboration is about. Thanks to the invention of the LCD projector simultaneously being revealed to the works with PowerPoint, we equipped the world through the 90s and into the new century. We did not do much to show them how to be effective with it, but still the world came to understand Presentation. Everyone had a laptop and their own content.
The world now is about Shard Content. Living documents, constant works in progress, where it Collaboration is about Contribution. Some now AV is about involvement. And not just in meeting spaces. Everywhere. Even at the concert level, people do not want to sit a “view” the show they want to be a part of it. Interactively! One of my favorite Todd Rundgren videos is a collection of smart phone videos from the POV of the audience. Now imagine with products like the new JVC camcorders that have streaming, the crowd cams could be IMAG’ed!!!
It’s about involvement. And so to circle back to training. You also must get people out of talking-head-to-dead-head “presentations” (I do not mean Grateful). Yes the leader needs to convey the subject matter. Yet, learning is not listening. It is in part. Yet only 30% of the world are auditory learners. 40% are visual. And the balance learn by doing. Seeing is believing. Doing is becoming.-TM Yes that is a trademark of Starin. Sorry for the blatant reference.