Training and consultancy can be a frustrating occupation at times. One moment you have plenty of clients and you've never been busier, the next you're desperately creating email marketing campaigns or revisiting your long-neglected social media accounts, announcing to the world that you're still alive!
Business peaks and troughs are a fact of life and securing a consistent future pipeline of your ideal clients is no easy task. Ensuring that your existing clients return to invest in more of your expertise can be equally as challenging.
What if you knew that when you clocked off from work for the day that you had clients who were just about to turn up to learn from your expertise and you didn’t have to be there? What if you could deliver your knowledge to the same standard of excellence and possibly even more effectively without being in the same room as the learner?
Package Up Your Expertise And Share It
Your expertise has a value and for those clients you are prepared to engage with face-to-face, they expect to pay a premium to have you personally spend time with them. However, there is an audience out there that would equally value your expertise, except they either can’t afford to invest in face-to-face time with you or their schedule and yours never seem to quite match up.
Many potential clients and some of your existing ones, simply don't have the time or the budget to work with you face-to-face and if they do, it may be that they can only afford to do so for a limited period of time. The solution is for you to be able to deliver your expertise at fee level that is affordable for this particular audience that they can work on and apply in their own time. That time might just be when you’re asleep.
Since 2014, the popularity of e-learning has shown no signs of slowing down, if anything the demand has significantly grown. The market for learning management systems (LMS) has exceeded growth predictions in recent years and is currently worth over $2.55bn worldwide. At TrainingToolz.com, we have certainly experienced this kind of growth with more than 85,000 courses being completed by participants, from the education sector alone, since the summer of 2013.
Why is online learning quite so popular? There appear to be 4 main reasons:
1. Economics - If the quality of the learning experience is high, online learning is of great value. There's no cost of travel to consider or overnight stays away for the learner. Other considerations are that the learner is not having to invest in the cost of your office, home heating, power and lighting, nor do they need to travel to meet with you. The economics of engaging with online learning also mean that you can open up your expertise to a whole new market of clients, who are eager to learn but who you would not previously have been able to consider working with.
2. Convenience - by offering your expertise online, you enable your clients to work when it suits them and they are not bound by your hours or availability. It also means that they can focus on learning when they are in a peak receptive state, which may not always be when you are available personally. Life sometimes has a habit of getting in the way for your clients, just as it does for you on occasions. Online learning can provide the learner with the flexibility to complete the programme within their own time frame, subject to the parameters you agree with them upfront of course.
3. More freedom - this benefit applies just as much to you as it does to your clients. If you can create a means to share your expertise, in exchange for a fee that does not require you to be present while your client learns, then that allows you to spend more time with your family or on the golf course or perhaps developing your products and services and creating new client opportunities. The same is true for your client, as they can fit their learning time around their personal and professional lives.
4. Deliver at scale – For the expert, the ability to be able to share knowledge at scale is hugely appealing. Fewer journeys by plane, train and automobile, one-time course preparation with routine updates to include the latest learnings and most importantly the ability to produce a consistent income from clients who might reside on any continent. The ability to scale ones products and services is the ambition of most businesses as it offers the security of a consistent income that regular traditional business models do not.
Your Opportunity
In a world where businesses are constantly challenging their learning budgets, you have to remain competitive. Where you find yourself delivering a higher quality, premium service then you will naturally want to give these your full attention. However, such attention comes at a price and that price is that you will not always have time to spend marketing and selling to potential future clients, which means you fall back into the boom and boost cycle.
By packaging your expertise and sharing it online, you significantly reduce the hardship of boom and bust and while you're sleeping at night, one or more of your clients will be busily working on the online assignment you have set them for that week.
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