• Designing SaaS Training
• Delivering SaaS Training
• Monetizing SaaS Training

Designing SaaS Training

• Use a blended model: As with any training, identify your audiences and their needs and determine the best modality or blend of modalities for each.
  • Determine if there are any critical audiences that will need focused instruction, feedback, and support. These often include operations teams, admin users, or evangelists who will be the “go to” people for the rest of the organization. Focus time and resources on ensuring their acceptance, expertise, and advocacy. These are the prime audiences for instructor-led training, preferably in person, if possible.
  • For enterprise applications with a broad user base (such as 20,000+ users), minimize the amount of instructor-led training (ILT) for end users as much as possible. Even an hour-long course presents a scalability issue with that many users. Designed right, self-paced learning (whether online eLearning, or “off-line” self-study) can be just as effective, and tends to be both faster, and lower-cost from a training deployment total cost of ownership perspective. If you introduce self-paced training from initial implementation, it is easier to maintain that approach with each new release.
  • Be sure that minimizing ILT does not equate to minimizing interactivity. Whatever the modality, including hands-on, discovery based activities is critical to learning, acceptance, and adoption.
  • Augment self-paced end-user training with regularly scheduled opt-in webinars, or online “office hours” for those who have questions, or would like additional hand holding.
• Keep the documentation out of the training materials: Do not include screen shots or step/action/results tables in the training materials.
  • Push “how to” content to a set of short, discrete, self-paced demos at the task level such as, “How to add a user,” or “How to create an opportunity.” These should be short, 1-3 minute demos that people can consume in the moment of need.  Keeping these granular and task-focused is key to staying current with SaaS releases. With each release, there should be only a sub-set of demos that will need to change (unless the whole app is re-skinned).
  • Make these demos available online, and ensure there are no barriers to access. That is, don’t make users provide an additional login, force them to go to a training environment, or make them complete anything as a pre-req for access. These should be available to all users regardless of whether they have gone through training. Ideally, host these demos and make them available from within the app itself, if possible.
  • Point to and leverage these materials during the live or self-paced training so users know they exist and are available for access and self-help when back on the job. Ideally, whenever a “how to” question comes up in class, point people to the library of demos first to see if they can find the answers themselves.
  • Note that the focus of these demos is different from online help. The latter is meant to focus on features and functions, or what a button or field should do. Instead, these demos should focus on tasks, or what the user should do, which can span multiple buttons, fields, features, or screens.
• Design discovery based, scenario driven training: Keep the materials focused on the processes that the SaaS application supports.
  • People need to learn how their processes will be changing given the introduction of this new tool. The “as is” processes will vary from client to client, and the “to be” processes may also differ, given the flexibility and configurability of SaaS apps. However, the super-set set of processes that the application supports will be consistent across clients.
  • Design the training scenarios around those processes, creating discrete modules for each. You can then aggregate the appropriate sub-set of modules for each client, based on the functionality they have enabled for their configuration.
  • The scenarios themselves should be generic, yet prescriptive. For instance, if training on a CRM tool, you may have a scenario built around creating a new account. Provide generic instructions to “Create a new account” and supply parameters to use for the data entry: Account name, contact name, contact title, etc.
  • Build the scenarios around a fictitious company for continuity between modules, but make sure each module functions on its own. That is, do not introduce dependencies between modules, as not all customers will use all modules. For example, do not have a scenario of creating an account in one module and a scenario for adding a sales opportunity for that account in another module. The “create a sales opportunity” scenario needs to be based on a dataset that exists regardless of whether or not the “create an account” module has been completed earlier.
  • Tightly define the training dataset required to support each scenario. Having a training environment with a baseline dataset is critical to successful discovery-based learning.
  • Design training to move from basic to more complex tasks, building skills as participants’ progress through the materials. Ideas for doing this include:
    • Start with a UI “treasure hunt” to orient users to the interface
    • Introduce simpler scenarios with more prescribed data early, and more complex scenarios (or less prescribed data) later.
    • Provide “challenge” exercises on advanced functionality for power users or for those moving more quickly through the materials.
    • For group training sessions, have people work in teams. “Jigsaw” the modules so each team works through different scenarios, and then have the teams present what they learned back to the larger group, highlighting important steps, and calling out any “gotchas” they may have encountered, along with how to avoid them.
  Note that keeping the documentation out of the training, and keeping the scenarios generic and process focused makes maintenance much simpler. With each new release, updates are focused on identifying any new or changed tasks, modifying a subset of the “how to” demos, and perhaps building a few more. The scenario-based training materials should have little to no changes release to release. Because the scenarios are generic to the point of simply telling users to do something, changes to how that thing is done will likely have little impact to the scenario. Updates to the training materials themselves will typically only consist of adding additional scenarios when a release introduces new processes that the SaaS application supports. And in those cases, this results in creating an additional module or modules that can be snapped in and delivered to those customers who end up implementing that new functionality.

If you could only ask one question before designing training what would it be about? Budget? Target audience? Objectives? While all these clearly inform design, the most important thing you need to know is “what problem is this course meant to solve?” If you don’t know the answer to this, the rest is meaningless.

At the end of the day, training is an intervention designed to solve a business problem, so the design cannot and should not be separated from the business problem. Otherwise you could easily end up investing significant time and money into creating something lovely that doesn’t make a difference to the business.

What needs to change?

• Profits
• Market share
• Productivity
• Adoption

• Costs
• Error rates
• Time to competency

By how much?

• How is success defined for this process?
• What’s the current performance?
• Can you get me the data?

• 9 months (current performance)
• Before new sales people consistently hit or exceed their quota (definition of success for the process)
• And we think they should be able to do this within 3 months (definition of success for the training intervention)

2 X $25,000 X 20 = $1,000,000 increase in revenue

How will it change?

How will you know?

Ultimately, measurement is most useful when it is actionable. It should inform decisions about what to keep doing, what to stop doing, and what to do differently. For that reason, I’m a big fan of leading indicators, or predictors of success. Because if you wait for backwards-looking lagging indicators, or measurements of outcomes, there’s nothing you can do if you missed your target.

Note: You need to be careful to ensure that the leading indicators are well aligned with the ultimate goal, and that you give them enough time to be meaningful. (That is, that you don’t prematurely jump to conclusions.) But even before you have enough data to act, leading indicators can point you to where you might want to dig deeper to inform action.

Let’s go back to our sales example once again. In this case, the lagging indicator, or desired performance goal is clear: new sales people need to achieve quota by their first quarter on the job.

Sidebar: By this point, the lagging indicators should be pretty easy to identify. If you find that you cannot easily articulate the lagging indicators, then you haven’t done your due diligence in determining what needs to change. Go back to start.

Key leading indicators, then, would be progress to target at the end of month one, and the end of month two. (An even earlier leading indicator might be increased volume on outbound sales calls.) Clearly there is much more that goes into closing business than good sales training. But because we have the baseline data that sales people have historically only closed 75% of their target in their first two quarters, we can track if there are any noticeable improvements at month 1 or 2. And while I wouldn’t advise giving up on training if you do not see an improvement within the first month, you might consider revisiting the intervention if you are noticing poorer performance from those trained than what has typically been seen – especially if there is a non-trained group to compare to whose performance has not declined.

What if by month two you are seeing a 10% lift on average, but sales folks in one region are showing a 40% improvement? Would it make you curious about what might be going on in that region? Do they have a phenomenal trainer? Is there something about the region that makes your product particularly appealing? Do the sales people there have more experience than other new sales people? A different incentive program? An incredible management team? More face time with potential clients?

You can see how this can get nuanced pretty quickly. But if you haven’t at least defined the lagging indicators, and anticipated predictive leading indicators, you may not even notice this kind of regional difference or be prompted to ask these kinds of questions. More importantly, human performance success predictors (such as volume of outbound sales calls) are the behaviors that will enable success and the ones that should be included in your design. If you don’t identify them upfront, then what you end up with is “ready, fire, aim.” (More often, just “ready, fire.”) And how useful is that to anyone?

1. Faster horses

In the training world we tend to be pretty good at asking our target audience for input on training needs. Unfortunately, we often stop there, check the analysis box, and move on to course design. This is not to say that audience opinion isn’t worthwhile, rather that it should not be the only or the deciding factor in what we build.  Henry Ford once said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. If the only data we collect is this type of “faster horses” input, the resulting course may make attendees happy, but it may not translate into business results. And the sponsor requesting the training may take their request elsewhere the next time around.

As an example, a technology client once requested an update to a software implementation course for technical consultants. The project sponsor had done some homework and came to the planning meeting with survey results from people who had taken the first version of the course. Though overall satisfaction scores were high, the suggestions for improvement were to focus more on product features and “how to” training. Based on this input, the sponsor was ready to completely redesign the materials.

It didn’t take much digging to realize that this was not what they needed at all. The target audience was made up of technically focused people who, not surprisingly, would want ever more detailed and technical content. However, talking with business owners and participants’ managers revealed a very different need. The business problem that the course was meant to solve was a lack of product adoption. And the underlying issue was not that the implementation consultants didn’t understand the product technically, but that they weren’t able to convey the value of cutting over from the legacy tool. Nor were they able to ask their customers the right questions to determine potential barriers to success and mitigate those barriers through simple configuration choices and targeted end-user training. Revisions to the course really needed to focus on consulting skills and common customer scenarios rather than software features and functions.

Participant input has its value but it should be considered within a broader context. Don’t be fooled by faster horses just because that’s what everyone seems to want. Figure out what’s really needed. It usually only takes a few extra questions to a few extra people. Often it only takes one and one: ask the business owner, “What problem is this course meant to solve?”

2. Documentation in drag

Documentation focuses on features and functions. Training focuses on audience and objectives. Both have their place and value. However, slapping objectives on the front of a user manual doesn’t turn documentation into training. Neither does segmenting a collection of “how-to’s” by audience. Sadly, I’ve seen both done many times over, sometimes because it’s quick and easy, and sometimes because a subject matter expert (SME) “designs” the course rather than an instructional designer.

Case in point: I once witnessed a team under intense time constraints working backwards through a design document. They started by creating a content outline based on what the SME knew best, and wrote the business objectives last to ensure that they would match the planned content. Not surprisingly, the completed course was poorly received, little value was perceived, and the sponsor was extremely reluctant to invest any more money in training.

Don’t waste participant’s time with documentation disguised as training. Don’t pad your training materials with step/action/result tables that could be better delivered via online help, a content management system, or a wiki. We live in the age of search; let people pull this type of content when they need it. Save your course time for complex ideas, for discovery, for skills that require practice and feedback, and for the exploration and discourse that is so essential when you need to affect people’s thinking or behavior.

3. Instructional design as spell check

Closely related to documentation in drag is instructional design as spell check. In each case, either the sponsor doesn’t understand or doesn’t value what you have to contribute. Instructional design as spell check typically sounds like this, “I know this content really well, so I’ll write the materials, and you do an instructional design pass at the end.”  This approach often results in the fire-hose effect: everything there is to know about the topic will get included in a “course” with little consideration of audience skills or needs.  If, as part of your design pass, you are able to slog through all the content and suggest some improvements, you’re likely in for a fight on every point. After SMEs have spent so much time capturing their knowledge on paper (often working well past business hours, as they usually have day jobs) they tend to be personally invested in the materials, and not terribly receptive to making changes.

If you get an instructional-design-as-spell-check request, resist the temptation to accommodate. You can’t retrofit design after the fact. Instead, if your client insists on having SMEs do the writing, suggest that you first collaborate on upfront analysis and design. Work with the client to clearly identify what they’re hoping to accomplish with the course. Deliver objectives, outline, activity plan, and templates. And then let them go to town adding the flesh to the bones. This gives the course a fighting chance of being focused and effective from the beginning and sets you up to further refine and optimize the course when your “instructional design pass” kicks in.

4. Rabid eLearning

Rabid eLearning is what happens when the wonderful rapid eLearning tools (such as Connect, Articulate, and Captivate) fall into the wrong hands. Hour upon hour of content gets cranked out and thrown onto a web site because it can be, rather than because it should be.

I have seen an example where a client pushed over 30 one-hour “pre-work” modules to their reseller channel prior to a two-day event. The goal was laudable: minimize time “out of the field.” But the execution was painfully off-base: hour after hour of PowerPoint recordings with SME voiceovers. No interaction. No knowledge checks. No unified search functionality. Just a mandate to a captive audience: be sure to view all of these before you arrive. Putting aside for a moment the myriad design flaws, how did this serve the goal? How could it be possible that a nearly two-fold investment of time to pre-work vs. time on site would reduce opportunity loss? When exactly were the resellers expected to view all this content, anyway? On the plane?

• Breaking the content into much smaller pieces (2 minutes on each discrete topic vs. 1 hour covering all the deltas to a named feature set)
• Providing unified search functionality across all of the materials
• Including some simple interactions to break up the mind-numbing monotony
• Letting users “pull” specific content when it’s relevant rather than trying to “push” the superset to all attendees with a hard (and artificial) deadline for completion
• Leveraging social technologies: at minimum, the ability to rank and comment on each item, and to filter by most viewed, most popular, etc.

1. Clients will expect you to offer a similar discount on any new work.
2. Clients will still expect this work to have the Cadillac quality for the Chevy price point.

In terms of business goals, your goal is to remind your client of the context for the course, and explore the cost repercussions of doing nothing. (But note that this needs to be an honest exploration, not just a “sales” tactic. Be prepared to walk away if there is not a real need.) What problem is the course trying to solve? What is the value of solving that problem? If the value doesn’t justify the cost, then likely the course is not the correct solution. Suggest they rethink their priorities or approach. However, if the value does justify the cost, then you have a compelling reason to do it right.

Business drivers drive training

If these warning signs sound familiar, it may be that your customer is either not seeing or not receiving value from your training. It’s time to step back and reassess the relationship and how you can increase both the perceived and real value of the services you are providing. You likely need to change the focus of the conversation, and you may need to change the participants of the conversation as well. Elevate the discussion to a higher, more strategic level within the organization, and talk to the people who think in terms of business goals.

Successful training bears results like “increased sales by 5%”, “improved adoption by 10%”, or “decreased time to competency by 30%”, any of which are business objectives that easily justify a budget. Though it can be challenging to prove that you’ve delivered this kind of value, you’ll never get there if you don’t know what the business goal is in the first place. Define the business objective with your customer from the beginning and keep your training laser focused on delivering it.

You end with "If the collective thoughts of random strangers can design cool and fast-selling t-shirts..." in reference to Threadless.

There are definitely sites that work on that model: Wikipedia being the obvious example. But Threadless is NOT about collective creation; it's a platform for the distribution of individual inspiration.

When I look at these shirts I definitely see the product of two individual designers each with their own artistic vision. While Threadless certainly creates a way for designers to connect and influence each other, the products are acts of individual creativity.

Both of these models have their place.

I don't want an encyclopedia full of conflicting, creative, one-sided articles; I want one that's somewhat coherent and balanced. This is where collective creation is at it's best.

Conversely, I don't want art that's bland and like everything else; I want art that has a strong point of view, that I can identify strongly with, and that brings something unique. I want to see that individual inspiration shine through.

Focus

Traditional courses are time bound. Similarly, eLearning courses will only keep the audience engaged for as long as it is engaging. And more and more, our level of impatience grows. In the Google era, we know that we can find most of what we need at our fingertips, when we need it. So a formal course had better be of real value, and demonstrate that value quickly if it’s to keep our attention. Jump to the crux. Use the time that you have to convey what is most essential to the topic at hand. Ask yourself, what thinking or behavior do you want participants to begin or change? Be results oriented, and define it with an active verb. You’ll know the course has been successful if participants are able to ______. Refer to this handy little resource to help you find the exact verb you’re looking for.

Don’t short change this step. If you get the focus nailed, the rest practically falls into place on its own. The right verb will tell you what success means, and will point to the types of activities to provide for practice. The wrong verb will lead you astray. And by wrong verb, I mean “understand.” (This is a huge pet peeve of mine – how does someone demonstrate understanding? Let me count the ways…) Be precise. To “understand” a new software release could mean any number of things to any number of audiences:

• A sales rep might need to pitch its value or position it against the competition
• A sales engineer might need to demo new features or evaluate clients’ additional hardware and software requirements
• A consultant might need to configure it for a client or integrate it with the client’s current IT environment

And so on. Accurately defining the goal is a key step in getting people to adopt new behaviors. It is even more essential when trying to get people to change existing behaviors.

Relevance

There are two parts to making a course relevant: define the audience, and determine their current capabilities and attitudes. Okay, really there are three: you also need to identify where you need them to be, but we’ve addressed that above. The purpose of the course is to fill that gap between where they are at and where they need to be. So the better you define these bookends, the tighter and more relevant your course will be.

It should be fairly easy to identify who the audience is. Your client (internal or external) will typically tell you. Your job is to tease out if there is more than one audience, and if they can all realistically be addressed by the same course. Sometimes it’s an issue of different experience levels, which may be addressable by offering different levels of activities (such as “challenge” problems), or by pairing people with different experience levels to work on activities together; the more experienced or knowledgeable person gains insights by mentoring someone else, their counterpart benefits from being mentored. Other times, it just won’t make sense to address multiple audiences in the same course. Look back at the examples above. Can you imagine trying to address the sales reps and the consultants in the same course? You could water down the content until it is “relevant” to both, but you would likely lose your focus and waste a lot of time and money in the process. It might seem more costly to create two courses, but if one course serves no one well, then what have you really saved?

Determining where your audience is at can take more effort, and right-sizing that effort is a whole other blog post. But in broad strokes, you will want some sense of both their experience with and attitude towards the subject matter. You’ll only get buy-in and mind-share if the participants believe the course matters and helps. They won’t believe this if the course is too easy, too hard, or too disconnected from reality.

Practice

Building practice into a course is the easiest, yet often most neglected part. Often, well-intentioned experts will short-change time for practice in order to squeeze in more content. Don’t make this mistake. The real value of formal courses is that they provide the opportunity to practice in a safe environment and receive feedback. If you don’t see a reason for practice, there probably isn’t a reason for a course. People can read things on their own time; don’t make them sit in a classroom or click through a web-based course if giving them access to a searchable doc and/or a set of tools will accomplish the same thing when the need is more immediate and compelling.

If you’ve done your job in clearly defining the focus, you shouldn’t be struggling with squeezing in “more” content, because you’ll have already zeroed in on the “right” content. Anything that doesn’t directly support the identified goals is “nice to have” rather than “need to have” and doesn’t need to be addressed in the classroom. As for the “need to have” the activities for practice should be obvious. Look at the italicized verb in the examples listed above:

• A course for sales reps might involve brainstorming, developing “elevator pitches” or positioning, or role plays.
• A course for sales engineers would likely involve hands on time with the software, or reviews of example client environments and discussions of what to look for.
• A course for consultants would need to be lab-based and scenario driven.

The verbs both define the success criteria and illustrate what participants need to do to demonstrate that success. Having them practice in the classroom is essential if you expect them to put it into practice on the job.

What about “rapid” course development?

These elements remain the same. You can always dial up or down the level of effort in each of these areas, based on any number of factors, not least of which is the expected shelf-life of the course. (If you’re doing new software releases every three months, you’re not going to do a heavy audience analysis every time.) Regardless, define these three things even for a one-hour “Articulate” module built by a subject matter expert. Front-loading the design effort in this way will speed up the development cycle, and result in a more engaging, successful course.

1. Clearly define the goals for the intervention
2. Clearly define the constraints for the project
3. Present options and make choices (this is where the transcendence comes in)

1. Clearly define the goals for the intervention

I know this is stating the obvious, but it’s amazing how often we skip this step. We hear, “need sales training” and bang, we’re off and running. Sales training. Check. Know what that looks like. Know what that’s supposed to do. Improve sales. Got it. We’re already on to the constraints part, because we know that there is going to be a looming deadline, and we don’t have a second to lose. But not so fast. The first thing we should ask is why? Is the sales team as a whole not hitting their quotas? Are new hires struggling to be productive? Is there a new product about to be launched? Is there a corporate shift from a product sell to a solution sell? Are upsell opportunities being left on the table? Get granular, and map it back to corporate goals. Is this training supposed to improve overall revenues? A specific sub-set of revenues? Win rates? Conversion rates? For whom? Who’s being measured on these indicators, and what are their specific targets? Identifying all of this will drastically reduce the scope of content that will need to be addressed. This is critical, because we know we can’t do it all, and we can do even less, once we move on to number 2: the constraints.

2. Cleary define the constraints for the project

We tend to be a little better at this. We have all the traditional constraints that any other project operates under in terms of what’s the deadline, what’s the budget, what resources are available to support this (both training folks and sales experts), what work conflicts do those resources have, what blackout dates (holidays, vacations, sales travel, etc.) will impact our productivity, and so on. In addition, we need to know how distributed the audience is, how they will access the training, what they already know, what’s their preferred learning style, and what will their attitudes likely be towards this training. If building online training, we’ll also need to know accessibility and bandwidth constraints, compliance requirement (SCORM, AICC, etc.), technologies we can or must use, and what we need to integrate with. Finally, we’ll need to determine what’s required in terms of assessment and tracking. We should also find out how long this training is expected to be relevant.

Let’s say we’re dealing with a technology firm that is struggling with low attach rates in terms of upselling the professional version of the product suite. , which includes two extra applications from the standard edition. The two additional applications differentiate against the competition, but tend to be so complex that most sales people don’t know where to start in terms of positioning and selling them. The next release will focus on reducing some of the complexity, but isn’t due for another six months. Meanwhile, the organization believes attach rates are critical to organic growth and have added a specific target to the sales people’s goals starting in the next quarter. They need to be trained by the current quarter’s end, a month and a half from now. As a team, they are highly distributed, have aggressive quotas, and have little to no time to come out of the field for training. Also, they think most of the sales training courses they’ve attended so far have been pretty disconnected from the reality of their day-to-day work.

3. Present options and make choices

Ok, so now we know enough to start thinking through some options. The nature of the sales people’s roles and locations rules out face-to-face classes as a viable option, so realistically that leaves online options. Though at first blush, six weeks to produce and deliver eLearning is enough to make anyone want to run away screaming, there are actually a number of levers to pull to make this happen. These include:

• Options for end product:
  • Traditional eLearning: (Presumably) high quality, interactive, and self-paced, but often quite costly.
  • Webinars: Fast and cheap to produce, can be very interactive, but participants tend to multi-task if they’re not engaged, and not an easily searchable reference downstream.
  • Rapid eLearning: Relatively fast and cheap to produce, can be accessed on-demand, but limited options for content flow and interactivity.
  • Social Learning: Highly relevant and topical, but requires existing infrastructure and active participation to be of value.
• Options for the process:
  • Provide traditional analysis, design, and development support.
  • Provide analysis and design, but let the experts develop the content.
  • Provide some guidelines and templates and let the experts develop the content.
  • Provide content seeding and /or community management services for a social learning community.
• Options for quality gates:
  • Specify the number of review cycles
  • Specify the types of reviews
  • Specify the number (and authority) of the reviewers
  • Prohibit upstream changes after each gate has been closed (unless other tradeoffs are made to compensate for the rework)
• Options for the content:
  • Number of topics
  • Level of depth
  • Focus

Play with all these levers and all you can come up with any number of specific options such as:

• Create a “traditional” online training course, but make it brief and easily navigable (easy to find and jump from topic to topic rather than a linear progression), and focus only on a few key features that tend to close deals with customers. (Limit QA to only support a specific browser and operating system.)
• Create a series of webinars exploring both wins and losses, deriving lessons learned, and discussing how to apply them to current sales engagements. (Work with the sales lead of each to focus their review on the most pertinent information.)
• Build a series of 5-minute rapid eLearning modules and add them to a searchable sales portal seeded with other content and marketing collateral. Enable ratings and comments so sales people can provide feedback on the utility and efficacy of the materials. (Regularly ping the sales team via their blackberries calling out new and interesting content, and/or soliciting participation.)

Ultimately, there is always a way to meet the needs under almost any constraints, and without compromising quality. It’s all a matter of identifying priorities, exercising your creativity, and making informed tradeoffs.