If you have knowledge and experience to impart to teams and employees, but you’re wondering how to sell corporate training programs, you’ve come to the right place.
Believe it or not, companies are spending $8 billion per year on corporate training.
You can get a piece of that action.
But you need to know how to set up, launch, and sell corporate training programs the right way.
In this case study, we’ll look at how corporate sales training expert Marc Wayshak built a successful training business and how he developed additional revenue streams by adding online training.
“Since being on AccessAlly, my membership site has tripled in members. The ability to do one-click upsells alone generates 25% of my revenue. Plus, the quizzing functionality allows me to sell my membership program to corporations which also added an other 20% in revenue in the past year.” -Marc Wayshak
Marc’s Advice on Selling Corporate Training Programs to Teams
Before we dive into Marc’s sales advice, let’s see why we might want to emulate his strategies and learn from him.
Marc Wayshak is a sales strategist and the bestselling author of Game Plan Selling and Breaking All Barriers.
He created the Game Plan Selling System™, a data-driven and science-based sales methodology that balances both qualitative and quantitative research with proven results in client companies.
Marc’s innovative selling system works for salespeople, entrepreneurs, and companies alike. He is a frequent contributor to Inc, HubSpot, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur Magazine. Marc holds an MBA from the University of Oxford and a BA in social sciences from Harvard University.
Plus, he practices what he preaches by having a successful sales training business himself.
Here are some of the key things that Marc recommends to help you sell corporate training programs to teams:
1. Think like a doctor, not a salesperson
Many salespeople come in with the training solution they want to sell. Instead, Marc recommends thinking like a doctor and diagnosing what a company might need help with.
This way, before presenting a training course or solution, you can fully understand the company’s HR and training needs.
2. Disqualify prospects early, then sell to the decision maker
When selling corporate training to teams, you need to realize that not every prospect will be a good fit. That means you can save time and energy by focusing on the right clients, and being willing to let people know if it’s not the right for them.
Similarly, Marc recommends knowing who you’re speaking with. If you’re not speaking with a CEO, Chief Learning Officer, or VP of a big organization, you might run into a wall when the non-decision maker can’t move forward with a training purchase. Locate the decision maker early on and make sure they are part of the sales process.
3. Don’t be attached to the sale
This is a great sales tip, no matter what you’re selling, but it applies to the sales of corporate training too.
Marc’s advice is to remain unattached to the outcome of your sales efforts. When you approach a sales conversation this way, you can give prospects the most honest and useful recommendations, whether that means purchasing your training or not.
This way, you become a trusted advisor instead of a salesperson just out to hawk your training product.
4. Focus on delivering results first
The Chief Learning Officer doesn’t care about your training, your experience, or your track record.
What they’re looking for is a solution to their problems, and results for their team members.
When you focus on delivering results, the way you deliver a training program isn’t as important.
For example, Marc Wayshak shares that he often gets companies asking him to deliver a sales-focused keynote presentation.
But he’s found that after even the best of keynote presentations, employees will go back to doing things the way they always did within a week’s time.
Instead, Marc recommends an in-depth ongoing training process, which always includes an online training element.
How Selling Online Corporate Training Programs Can Help You Earn More (Without Working Harder)
If you offer in-person training, then you might be surprised to learn that companies are getting between 50% and 80% of their training needs through online courses.
This doesn’t mean that you need to stop offering in-person training, but it does mean adding an online corporate training can do a lot for your business.
Marc has been delivering in-person training to sales teams for many years, but his business changed when he added an online training element.
Marc is able to earn more for the same efforts by having an online corporate training program for teams.
With an 8 week intensive that includes role-play, online interaction, and quizzing, Marc’s corporate sales clients are seeing results.
The fundamental difference in how Marc does business changed in 3 ways since adding online sales training to his offerings:
1. Online corporate training reduces travel costs
According to Marc, for a lot of companies, getting everyone together in one place to do a 3-day sales training is cost-prohibitive.
There are more companies now with virtual teams and employees, so offering online training that is facilitated by the sales leadership is so much easier.
2. Online courses allow you to work with smaller teams
Another benefit that Marc found by offering online sales training is that he can work with smaller teams.
For a company with 5 salespeople, it would be cost-prohibitive for Marc to travel and train them. But now this company can invest a couple of thousand dollars and get everyone into a world-class sales training program, that they wouldn’t have had access to otherwise.
3. Online training increases visibility for team leadership
Companies want to make sure that when they invest in training, their employees get the training they paid for.
That means having the ability to show employee progress through a team management dashboard, which is done through AccessAlly.
Thanks to his training portal, Marc was able to significantly increase the price of his larger sales training for bigger clients because he can show results to team leadership online.
Selecting the Right Technology
When it comes time to choose which technology will allow you to sell your training to companies better, there are plenty of options to choose from.
Some of the key things you’ll want to look for include:
- Integration with your existing CRM or automation marketing platform
- Interactive elements like progress tracking, quizzing, certificates of completion, gamification
- The ability for teams to self-manage their employees, so that you can sell bulk licenses to your courses and online portal
For Marc, AccessAlly handled all of these and more.
In his words:
“AccessAlly has been huge for us. Super easy to use, very professional looking.
In particular, having the quizzing functionality is big because it allows us to show the client whether a salesperson is truly participating in the course.
From a learning perspective, it also helps participants to digest what they just learned about.
I’ve learned that it just takes very simple but effective quizzes to get results.
AccessAlly’s LMS features also helps us to drip the content, so we’ve broken up what was a really big course into an 8-week training.
So each week they get a new module. Each module has a homework assignment and exercises to do.
At the end of the 8 weeks, they come out with complete sales training.
Because I’ve been able to sell my membership program to corporations, I’ve added another 20% in revenue in the past year.”
Migrating From CustomerHub to AccessAlly
If you already have some membership-style content hosted somewhere, you might be hesitant to undertake a migration effort to switch to AccessAlly.
For Marc, the decision to leave CustomerHub was a no-brainer.
CustomerHub (by Infusionsoft) was not mobile responsive, and he knew that there had to be another option for his online training program.
According to Marc:
“I had a friend who was using AccessAlly, and after he showed me how it works I saw that it’s a really simple plugin, fully customizable, I have complete ownership of it.
I looked at other companies out there and I couldn’t find anything close to what we needed, and that was available in AccessAlly.
Switching wasn’t that hard. We just had my assistant download the content from CustomerHub and then put it into AccessAlly.
We didn’t have quiz functionality in CustomerHub, so we created our quizzes directly in AccessAlly.
Since being on AccessAlly, my membership site has tripled in members. The ability to do one-click upsells alone generates 25% of my revenue.
The transition itself wasn’t that hard, it was just labor-intensive to copy over the content. Overall pretty simple, because AccessAlly lets you clone pages and just plug in the content.”
Adding Quizzes and Team Portals To Deliver Better Results
One thing that Marc Wayshak is clear on is that selling isn’t about “making the sale”, it’s about delivering results.
It’s one thing to put together an online training or even an in-person program, and call it a day.
But it’s a whole other thing to really put in the follow-up and follow-through that will get teams to learn and start using your methodologies and training.
That’s why offering a team management portal that gives leaders an overview of their team’s progress is so effective.
It’s also why quizzes and membership portals are worth more to organizations and companies.
AccessAlly makes creating these team management dashboards easy, along with all of the progress tracking and quizes to help learners stay motivated.
What Marc’s Website Strategist Had to Say About the Project
The initial launch hosted his current program sold to individuals as well as the already planned expansion to teams within companies.
On the user end, the site provides a personalized experience where a specific learning track is defined for each user.
For individuals, the track is based upon the initial onboarding quiz results and for companies, it is defined according to their specific team’s needs.
This combined with a credit system that accumulates points as they complete the multiple courses and unlocks levels of certificates gives all Marc’s Sales Lab members a premium and unique experience.”
Raine Boyd, Website Strategist
More Sales Tips from Marc
We covered a lot in this post, but Marc had a few more things to share on how to sell corporate training programs.
He recommends using an online course as an addition to what you’re already selling.
You can easily double the size of any training sale just by including an online training portal.
In today’s world with all of the daily distractions, having access to a training portal is big because employees can do the training on their own time.
Get more advice for selling training courses to companies here:
- Check out Marc Wayshak’s sales training
- Our post on how to sell training to companies in bulk
Ditch the duct tape with AccessAlly for WordPress.
Run your online courses, memberships, coaching programs, and communities in one place.
