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3 Ways to Prepare Users for Pricefx Training

March 31st, 2023 | 7 min. read

By Kate Grusemann

At this point, the decision makers in your company have decided that Pricefx training is well worth the investment. But is their reasoning as obvious to your users, and are they as excited as you are to get started? 

Here at Pricefx, with over 10 years’ experience helping our customers realize their most challenging pricing goals with the help of our cloud-native pricing software, we’ve observed that many of our customers believe that booking and attending our trainings – without any internal dialogue on why the trainings are happening – is enough to get their users on board.  

In reality, when training champions do not adequately prime their users to understand how Pricefx training helps them, there is bound to be confusion and misalignment among your user groups when our training comes around. At worst, they might not understand the value of the Pricefx software their company is adopting, which can cause low engagement with the tool in the long-term 

In this article, we’ll walk you through 3 ways your training champions can get users excited about Pricefx training so they are well prepared to get the most out of our trainings as well as the Pricefx platform itself.   

1. Align Internally on Why Training is Needed and Explain How Users Can Personally Benefit  

We often find in our training cycles that those who are involved in the negotiation of software licenses may differ from the ones who will be working directly with the software.  

Often the decision makers choosing to buy software and related trainings are different than those who use that software and attend those trainings. When this happens, the “whydriving this decision may stay with managementand kept from those who need to understand this the most. This comes at the cost of user engagement with the tool.

If a company waits until a third-party vendor like Pricefx gets involved to present the benefits of the tool to its users, this will affect companywide adoption of the tool; we know external parties are less convincing than those who already operate within the organization.  

To get your users up to speed before we come in, we recommend that training champions of the organizations hold preliminary Q&A sessions with users to explain why they’ve chosen the tool and how this tool will help the users specifically. Users will also benefit from our private training survey which is sent out beforehand to gauge the users’ own expectations for the training. 

Facilitating internal dialogue around the software prior to training will take a training session in users’ minds from a potentially boring lecture to an opportunity for them to get comfortable with the tool. 

 

2. Identify the Roles Involved and Their Responsibilities  

There are two core groups that will need to be identified upfront to facilitate a smooth training process: your training champions and your attendees. Here’s how to decide who is who.  

Choosing training champion(s)  

The training champion is the individual who advocates for and facilitates the software training program.  

They are usually a business process owner in the organization, someone who oversees the pricing process; in the case of multiphase projects when there may be several business owners with their own area of expertise, it is important that they talk to each other and align on objectives.  

If you’re lucky, the project sponsor and the training champion are the same person – they are generally already a fan of the software vendor and know intuitively why the company needs their services.  However, when the training champion is not the same as the person who signed the agreement to purchase the product, they’ll need an adequate handover from that decision maker to get the messaging of the “why” the tool is important right.  

Choosing training attendees 

Just as important is to select the group of people who will attend trainings wisely to make good use of your implementation budget.  If, out of a group of 35 people, only 10 are directly involved in software adoption, the training is likely to fall on deaf ears.  

We suggest starting with a core team, usually of about 2-5 people, who will interact most with the product; in most cases, that will be your pricing team. In the case of bigger rollouts, it’s also a good idea to include key representatives from data management and IT departments, as they’d be responsible for data preparation and system integration.  

The goal for choosing the initial training group is to keep the circle small while including all the right people for different areas of implementation, who can then go on to spread user adoption to a broader group within their own domains.  

 

 

3. Attend Pre-Trainings Where Needed  

As counterintuitive as it may seem, depending on the areas of expertise of your core training group and their own (likely specialized) background in pricing, pre-training sessions are a great-to-have before jumping into the deep end of our private trainings.  

We recommend that training champions consider organizing the following two pre-training sessions before we step in: 

Pre-trainings on pricing basics  

With good reason, very rarely will there be business users taking our trainings without any prior knowledge of pricing. However, in case you have users of non-pricing backgrounds among your core training group, we recommend inviting them to a pricing 101 training of your choice to prime them for a pricing solution training.  

Pre-trainings on the Pricefx platform 

Users who are proficient in pricing might not speak the same language as the solution they will be adopting with respect to the terminology or concepts used, so it’s important to get them aligned on this early. To do this, training champions can encourage users to head to the Pricefx Knowledge Base to get some preliminary exposure to our product.  

We’ve found that some users, usually business process owners, will have already taken our business user training, one of the paths in the knowledge base which walks business-facing users through the tool’s interface and core functions.  

Set pre-training dates in advance   

Whichever pre-training items you choose should be scheduled well in advance to lock in commitment upfront from all participants. And to get their buy-in, the invitations should be clear on why these trainings are worth their time.  

In short, organizing or taking part in pre-trainings (i.e., before our kick-off training, the first paid training module we offer), whether this looks like attending introductory pricing courses or walking through our knowledge base or training portal, ensures that the information in the paid trainings resonates with users from the very beginning.  

Pricefx Training Next Steps: Get in Touch with Us and Understand How You Benefit  

At this stage, you might be wondering why users should bother with our private trainings if they have access to our public knowledge and training portals – and you’d be asking the right question.  

Although these are excellent resources for beginners to get a taste of our platform, they are built on a standard demo environment, free of any customer-specific data. Kick-off training, the first in our private training series, features customized content based on the needs our customers express to our customer and sales teams. Users benefit by gaining practical experience with the actual environment they will be working in, which in turn minimizes delays in overall adoption once the tool is live.  

For users to engage with the more custom environment featured in private trainings, they’ll need to know the basics, and they’ll need to know why they should put in the time to consume, if we’re honest, a lot of information.  

If you need more support in deciding the best course of action prior to Pricefx training, we suggest getting in touch with your Customer Success Manager to arrange a call with one of our Customer Training specialists, who can walk you through our training process and the options available in greater detail.  

For a more in-depth look at the benefits of Pricefx training you can share with your users, consider checking out the article below: 

Kate Grusemann

Director – Customer & Partner Training in Customer Solutions , Pricefx

Kate Grusemann has been working with Pricefx for the past 7 years in different roles and areas. She headed multiple global software implementation projects in a variety of industries as an IT project management consultant and Project Mangement Competence lead. For the past 3 years, Kate has been focusing on building world-class training offerings within Pricefx and leads the global training team. In her free time, Kate is developing herself as a transformational coach & neurobiology enthusiast and taking part in impactful community projects.