We are confident you will agree…the quality of your customer base will determine how successful your company will be. Investing in your customers’ success will improve customer retention and increase your sales.
An important fact you should know, companies that train their employees experience an average of 24 percent higher gross profit margins and 218 percent higher revenue per employee. But here is the catch-22, companies that need training the most, are the least likely to offer it due to the cost.
By making available to your business customers training in business management, customer service, budgeting, team building, or more, you dramatically increase their long-term viability. Think about it for a minute, how much do you spend on things like cookouts, golf outings, t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc., none of which do a thing to increase your customers’ sales and very little to improve your business to business sales.
The objective of successful B2B training is to become a trusted advisor and expert resource for your customers. In addition to helping your customers become more professional, training on your site draws the customer to your facility where you can show them new products or services, answer questions, or welcome new accounts.
Training Increases Their (and Your) Customer Retention
Poor or no customer service training can have a devastating impact on your customer’s bottom line. It costs them (as well as you) six times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. A study by CompTIA and Prometric revealed of the customers who stop doing business with a company, 68% do so because of an attitude of indifference by the company or a specific individual. Investing in your customer will go a long way to showing your customers their business is important to you.
Training Enables Their Employees to Work Smarter
Training employees provides the necessary skills needed to cope with change in the workplace, improved the ability to solve problems, and leads to improved labor-management relations, reduced absenteeism, improved employee morale/self-esteem, positive attitude toward training, and better team performance.
Benefits to the employer of training include increased quantity and quality of work through reduced error rates, reduced waste in the production of goods and services, and reduced time per task. These benefits are accomplished by better team performance and improved effectiveness of supervisory staff and translate into financial savings, productivity gains, and higher profits. A trained employee better understands how their performance impacts other employees and the company as a whole.
Training Improves Their Employee’s Attitude
Employers who support workplace education programs enjoy a more conscientious, resourceful, loyal, and dependable workforce as a result. When employees learn that high-quality work is crucial to the success of the organization and their job security, they often become more conscientious. Once they become fully aware of what you expect of them and how their efforts fit into the big picture and they gain the skills to meet those demands, the quality of their work generally rises. A Louis Harris and Associates poll reports that among employees with poor training opportunities, 41 percent planned to leave within a year, whereas of those who considered their company’s training opportunities to be excellent, only 12 percent planned to leave. A Hackett Benchmarking and Research report shows companies that spend $218 per employee on training have more than a 16 percent voluntary turnover. In comparison, companies that spend over $273 per employee have turnovers of 7 percent.
Employers often gain because more skillful employees are more confident employees. Confidence translates into creativity and initiative that, in turn, contributes to the overall performance of the organization resulting in increased employee retention, enhanced company image, and improved recruiting. In times like these, one of the most effective ways to succeed in the business-to-business (B2B) world is to help customers operate their businesses more efficiently. The key to leveraging training in B2B is to provide education that will help your customers reach their consumers more effectively. The idea is not just to sell the fishing pole but to offer fishing lessons with the pole, so your customer learns how and where to fish.
