Training Management System Benefits For Your Sales And Marketing Teams
In our last article, we talked about how a Training Management System like Administrate can really benefit your Training Administration team, but we’re not done yet! We’re hoping to use this article series to show you how Administrate can help every single team in your training business, and this time we’re covering the Sales team and the Marketing team!
5 Ways A Training Management System Benefits Your Sales Team
1. Sell Your Courses Online
One huge benefit of Administrate is how easy it makes selling your courses online! Making the move to online sales can seem like a lot of work, or quite a scary move to make, but we’re here to show you that it’s really easy and will do wonders for your course sales!
If you want to sell your courses online, once you’ve integrated Administrate with your website, all the information you’ve already entered into Administrate will simply be pulled through automatically and displayed on your website. This means that you don’t have to worry about re-entering all the same data again on your website, as the information will be pulled through in an instant. This also means that any changes you make will be automatically updated, so you don’t need to worry about updating the same information in multiple places, or displaying incorrect data.
So why is this good for your Sales team? Well first off, making the move will not only mean that they don’t need to do any additional work with duplicate data entry, it will actually save them time as well. If you are selling your courses online, it will mean that you don’t need to process all your sales either over the phone or via email, which can be quite time-consuming for your Sales team. They will now have a lot more free time, and you’re actually leaving yourself open to a lot more sales, as customers won’t be put off with busy telephone lines or having to wait till someone is in the office to get a reply from an email.
Secondly, your Sales team will no longer have to worry about keeping track of all your customer details, or tracking when a sale is made, as Administrate will do that all for you. When a customer buys from you, all the information they enter will be pulled into Administrate and stored as a contact. This makes it so easy to see things like which students are attending which class, as well as check any contact details of any of your students in just a few seconds.
Having all this free time means your Sales team will have time for other tasks, but will also be able to be available to any customers who prefer to buy over the phone, or who are simply calling up with an enquiry, as there will be less chance of the phone lines being jammed if there are other routes for customers to make a purchase with you.
2. Use Our Message Centre
As we’ve just mentioned above, customers or potential customers may choose to get in contact with you simply to ask a question rather than actually buy something from you, and it’s important that your Sales team are able to deal with this effectively.
What system are you using just now? Chances are it’s a shared inbox, probably to an [email protected] or [email protected] email address, which the whole team will have access to. But this can get confusing quickly! Unless you remember to reply all, it can be hard to keep track of which emails have been replied to and which haven’t, which can lead to customers getting multiple replies, or not getting an answer at all, which is hardly ideal.
One answer to make the whole process run smoother is to use a message center, which is part of Administrate’s software. This can make the whole experience much easier for a number of reasons:
- Messages can be assigned to staff members, so it’s always really clear which messages are being dealt with and which still need some attention.
- You can convert the people who contact you into active sales opportunities if you need to, meaning your sales system is automatically updated, and you don’t need to worry about losing any details or forgetting to pass on the details to the relevant person – it’s all done for you.
- Easier for other team members to cover if someone is off ill or on holiday, as they can simply log in to Administrate, rather than having to worry about getting access to the email account.
3. Keep Important Contacts Up To Date
Making sure all your leads and customer contacts are up to date is an essential task for your Sales team, as you need to make sure you can get in touch with someone when you need to, and those contact details need to be correct!
You also need a centralised system to keep everything in one place, otherwise staff members could be working from their own lists, which could be out of date or incorrect. It’s important that if an update is made, such as a contact changing email address or switching company, that it is updated somewhere where everyone can see it instantly, rather than having to spend lots of time making sure everyone has the new details.
This is where Administrate’s CRM comes in. You can simply upload all your contacts’ details into the system and it will be accessible by everyone in the team – though you can set up permissions if not everyone in your company needs to see your contacts’ personal details.
Using Administrate’s CRM to hold all your contact details will not only mean all your details are secure and easy to access, but it also means they can be pulled into any other part of the Administrate system you need them to be, which cuts down on duplicate data entry and saves you lots of time.
Finally, you can set up custom fields in Administrate, to make sure you’re capturing exactly the data about your contacts that you need to be, not just the pre-filled data that another training management system may think you need!
4. Manage Those Deals
If you’re running a busy Sales team, then chances are you have lots of deals on the go, which are all at different stages, and are all managed by different people. While all the individual salespeople should have a clear idea of which deals are at what stage, it can be hard to get an overview of the entire department in a glance. This means management maybe don’t get the overview they need, but it also makes things hard if people need cover when they are off on holiday or off sick.
Administrate’s sales system allows you to customise your sales workflow, so you can set it up to have all the steps you need, as well as being able to decide how much data you require at each step, so your pipeline can be completely customised to suit the way your business, and your Sales team, works!
It also means it’s really quick and easy to get an overview of how a deal is progressing, as you can simply click on the deal and see how far along the sales pipeline they are, and what the next actions need to be in order to hopefully move them closer to that sale.
Our sales system also displays all the key data you need to see for a quick overview of how the Sales department is performing, so you don’t have to spend time scrolling and trying to find the right data. You can see all your open opportunities, closed opportunities, the projected value, projected wins, how long your sales cycle is, and what your conversion rate is. As with all the information in Administrate, this will all be updated in real-time, so you can always get an exact picture of how your company is performing right now.
5. Sell Training Tokens
Locking in repeat business and bulk deals can be a great boost for your Sales team and your business, and Administrate’s training tokens are a brilliant way to tackle this problem. Training tokens are pre-defined vouchers which you can sell to customers in blocks, which they can redeem for training at a later date – just like a gift voucher!
These are really handy if you’re selling training to a company who knows they want a certain amount of places on your training, but don’t want to book on to the training right now. This could be because they know they need their entire workforce to attend a certain kind of training over the course of a year but that is going to be challenging to schedule, and ideally they don’t want everyone to be out of the office at the same time. Training tokens allow them to know they have the training purchased, and for you to lock in a huge amount of business, and then they can worry about the specifics later.
This is great for your Sales team, because it means they can close those deals faster without having to do all the scheduling and organising in order to close the sale, and then the rest of the booking process can be dealt with by your Training Administration team instead, leaving the Sales team more time to make even more sales.
Selling training in this way should also ensure that customers will return to you time and time again, as the process is a lot easier for them, and you can even offer customers a discount if they chose to buy in this way to encourage them to place those larger orders, and keep coming back.
2 Ways A Training Management System Benefits Your Your Marketing Team
1. Collect Those Leads
Having customers email you directly is not the only way collect leads – you can also use landing forms on your website, where people can either get in touch with more questions, or fill them out in order to receive a specific piece of marketing content.
This can be a great way to provide a little something extra to your potential customers, such as eBooks, whitepapers, PDFs, or videos, which you can them give them access to or email to them, while at the same time allow you to build a marketing list of people who are interested in your business and having opted in to receiving further marketing materials from you. This means you will then be able to send them things like email newsletters, announcements, and information specific to the types of courses they are interested in.
All the information pulled in from landing forms will be displayed in the message centre, so you can always deal with the enquiry as accurately as possible.
2. Market With MailChimp
Administrate integrates with lots of other great products, but one which will definitely interest the Marketing team is our MailChimp integration. As we mentioned above, sending marketing emails and newsletters to customers and potential customers is a great marketing tool, but those emails have to look good to get results, and that’s where MailChimp comes in.
Using the MailChimp integration you can send emails to the marketing lists you have built in Administrate using MailChimp’s amazing email builder, themes, and all their other tools which enable you to create the coolest email content out there. Simply export your contacts from Administrate to MailChimp in just a few clicks, rather than having to worry about maintaining multiple contact lists in different systems.
Not only that, but you can also track all the vital data, such as bounces, opens, and clicks, which are pulled directly back into Administrate so you can analyse them along with all the other data you have in Administrate’s reporting system.
Originally published at www.getadministrate.com.
