How to Develop Product Knowledge Through Online Training

Nov 20, 2024 | Articles

In today’s fast-paced market, equipping your team with comprehensive product knowledge is crucial. Online product training can help your employees represent your brand and handle customer problems more confidently. This can ultimately lead to better customer experiences, better customer retention, and even more sales!

This article outlines tips for developing successful product training courses for your employees, including best practices for delivering product training online, and the most important things to consider when building product training content.

How to deliver effective product training online

Product training is a crucial aspect of ensuring that employees and customers have a thorough understanding of your company’s offerings. It not only helps to improve their knowledge and skills, but also contributes to enhancing their overall experience with your brand. But delivering effective product training can be challenging.

To address common product training challenges, here are six best practices for delivering successful product training online:

1. Accessibility is key

Make training convenient. Ensure that your training is accessible at any time and from any place. To facilitate offline and mobile learning, make sure that your Learning Management System (LMS) is responsive, mobile-friendly, and intuitive enough that learners can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. To make video or audio elements accessible to hearing impaired learners, be sure to include subtitles, transcripts, and text highlights of key takeaways.

2. Solve real customer problems

Offer application-focused learning. Rather than emphasizing only the specs, features, and functions of your product, focus on the problems these features can solve for your customer. Your sales team needs to know and share the benefits of your product. The best way to do this is to make those benefits relevant to the customer’s real-world problems. To empower your revenue team – salespeople, customer service reps, and other customer-facing employees – you have to give them all the information they need to confidently communicate product benefits: brief demos, brochures, bulleted lists, and tutorials that show how the product solves everyday challenges for your customer.

3. Simplify product training

Cover one product or feature per module. To avoid cognitive overload, focus each product training module on a single product or product feature. Opt for microlearning – brief, easily digestible eLearning modules – or just-in-time learning – resources that solve problems or answer questions in the moment – to help you convey critical product information without overwhelming your employees.

Developing custom learning paths can facilitate more in-depth or continuous product training, because they break learning down into manageable pieces while still covering more than one product or feature. Employees enrolled in learning paths need to finish and/or pass one course to continue onto the next. This approach also allows for more flexibility, since an employee can complete each course at their own speed or even use AI tools to customize their learning journey.

4. Keep product knowledge fresh

Offer ongoing learning and certification opportunities. Refresher courses, badges, leaderboards, and certification programs are all effective tools for keeping employees engaged and up-to-date on the latest product features and updates.

Refresher courses can be added to learning paths, automatically assigned by managers based on past course activity, or made widely available for any ambitious employee seeking additional professional development.

Badges and leaderboards are gamification tools that L&D often uses to foster a healthy sense of competition among learners. Revenue teams are often a competitive bunch – so, publicly recognizing and rewarding learning progress can be a great way to motivate them.

Certification programs reinforce continuous learning, because they are usually updated by relevant professional organizations or certification bodies, and often require renewal. Companies can benefit from developing their own product training certification programs because they can be leveraged for customer training, or sold as external training for additional revenue.

5. Assess and reinforce learning

Maximize success with regular assessments. Getting the most out of your product training program can only happen with proper planning and feedback mechanisms.

Before you even execute new product trainings, you’ll need to work with your organization’s leadership to generate clear learning and business objectives. Use these to guide your product training, and then develop assessments that demonstrate learner knowledge and reinforce critical information. Analyze these assessments to measure the success of your product training program and identify areas where additional training might be needed.

Gathering learner feedback through forums, surveys, and one-on-one conversations, can also provide your team with additional insights about the effectiveness and impact of your product training.

What should product training cover?

Salespeople, partners, and customer experience teams should know your product inside-and-out, but there’s more to product knowledge than specs, features, and pricing.

To become a trusted expert in your industry, build stronger customer relationships, and drive recurring revenue, companies need to provide their holistic product knowledge training.

Here are three elements of product knowledge to include in your comprehensive product training program:

1. Your product’s target audience

Product training should teach your team about your core audience, and about how your product solves common problems of that core audience. By understanding the key benefits of your product, and why it’s relevant to your target audience, revenue teams can not only better anticipate customer needs, but also identify customers who may not be a good fit for your organization, preventing any potential issues with product compatibility in the future.

2. How your product compares to competitors

To truly understand your product, your team needs to know your brand’s reputation and have a clear picture of where it stands in relation to competitors. Product training should prepare employees to answer lead or customer questions about how your product stacks up with other similar products on the market. Consider including up-to-date battlecards that outline the pricing, unique selling points, and weaknesses of competitor products.

3. Your product’s buyer’s journey

What your employee needs to know about your product often depends on who they are talking to, and where that person is in their buyer’s journey.

A lead is going to have a lot of questions about your product, compared to a new customer who has already been onboarded, or a long-time customer with a specific question. That’s why product training needs to prepare each customer-facing employee with training that helps them address the common needs or questions of the types of buyers they communicate with the most – whether it’s new leads, qualified leads, new or existing customers.

Likewise, client-facing product training should also vary, based on who is taking it. For example, a brand new customer may need more in-depth training than a long-time customer – who may only need a refresher course on the latest updates.

Building product knowledge with online learning

The best product training programs offer accessible, applicable, digestible, relevant, and measurable learning opportunities. This not only increases the confidence of your employees when discussing the product, but also ensures that both employees and customers are receiving accurate and consistent information.

With these strategies, your team can develop more engaging and effective online product training programs that empowers everyone across the enterprise with the product knowledge they need to succeed!