4 Ideas for Training Consultant Businesses to Get Creative

In these strange times, training consultant businesses have new challenges to face. The majority of the workforce is now, at least temporarily, remote. Businesses are struggling, which often leads to slashed training budgets. Now is the time to get thoughtful and creative.

This is also an opportunity to reevaluate your business for areas of improvement. We’ve rounded up 4 ways you can reexamine your training consultancy (plus 7 free webinars and ebooks to get you started):

1. Review your training business model and pricing
2. Review your intellectual property and documents
3. Find ways to innovate
4. Measure and demonstrate your worth

Review Your Training Consultancy Business Model and Pricing 

The first place to find opportunity is within your business model and pricing. 

In this roundtable discussion, we chatted with Sandler Training, Barnes & Conti, and Gamma Compliance Training about how they structure their businesses. You may want to look into contract trainers. Now might be a good time to start licensing training. Or it might be time for a marketing campaign to highlight why your updated course to reflect new regulations is required. Take a look at your business model and consider new options that will allow you to be more flexible in changing times.

Separately, many businesses are now having frank conversations about pricing. Brush up on the theory of how to determine your pricing, as well as techniques for negotiating, in this free webinar from MBA Gus Prestera.

Review Your Intellectual Property and Training Documents

Your business revolves around your intellectual property, so now is the time to make sure it sparkles. Review all your courses and course documents to make sure they are up-to-date and effective.

When it comes to the workbooks, manuals, job aids, handouts, or other physical elements that you put in your clients’ hands, be sure to take into consideration both instructional and graphic design. Here are 2 webinars diving into each of those:

• The Secret to Better Training: Effective Handouts
• 3 Secrets to Designing Effective Job Aids

Find Ways to Innovate

No one should adopt bells and whistles just for the fun of it. But as the world changes more rapidly than ever in the coming months, your prospective clients will be looking for providers who are ahead of the curve. Whether that means finding new technology or adding new elements to your courses, now is the time to figure it out.

For example, many of our customers are experimenting with:

• Prework (we recently compiled an ebook with examples of prework, plus why and how to do it)
• Learning communities (here’s a webinar on how Zurich Insurance started a learning community of practice)

Measure and Demonstrate Your Worth

Your clients will need to demonstrate the impact you have on their business in order to keep you, and you’ll need to promise the same to your prospects to win new business.

Of course, measuring the effectiveness of training is easier said than done, especially when you are an external provider coming in for an engagement. Take the time to evaluate how you can collect data that will be relevant to your programs. Then start demonstrating that you provide a positive ROI.

To get started, check out this webinar with Richardson’s VP of Client Analytics to find out how they have approached measuring client engagements. 

Now is the time for creativity in every aspect of training consultant businesses, from how you engage with clients to how you market your services. Tell us how you’re getting creative in the comments below!