When it comes to pricing software, training is often overlooked, with resources focused more on the more visible, end-to-end pricing processes. You may find yourself asking, why should a company with a finite budget for software implementation invest even more effort into getting its users fully trained — can’t they just learn along the way?
Here at Pricefx, with over a decade of experience helping customers reach their pricing goals with cloud-native pricing software, we’ve found that the question is not if you should invest in training, but when.
We already know that employee training is a best practice for effective technology adoption. How far in advance companies decide to take part in training is one reliable predictor of whether their project teams can adopt the tool proficiently and in line with how they imagined (and within the planned budget and timeline). After all, when you consider what is the ideal project stage to explore potential problems or questions around the tool – before or after implementation – the importance of getting the timing of trainings right becomes a no-brainer.
In this article, we explore some of the key ways companies benefit from participating in Pricefx trainings early on, as well as uncover the real cost of not taking advantage of trainings when it matters most.
Before jumping in, let’s quickly revisit the training options we offer at Pricefx to place this discussion in its right context.
What training options does Pricefx offer?
At Pricefx, our core training offerings include User-Specific Training and Project-Specific Training.
User-Specific Training
Offered on a monthly basis, this training type serves four groups of users: business users, administrators, solution developers, and integration engineers. Following business go-live, user-specific training covers a wide range of modules depending on the customer need, from the basics of the user interface to advanced technical training.
Project-Specific Training
This specialized training program consists of three components: Kick-off Training, UAT Training, and Solution Adoption Training (formerly known as Post Implementation Training). In simple terms, Kick-off Training is an introduction to the tool navigation, UAT Training prepares users for end-to-end testing, and Solution Adoption Training prepares key users to start fully implementing the tool on a day-to-day basis.
7 Benefits of Pricefx Training
1. Understand Key Pricefx Terms and Capabilities
For brand-new users with no prior exposure to the tool, kick-off training is a great foundation to become more comfortable with navigating the Pricefx interface and understanding the core functionalities of the tool. Users at this stage are exposed to a standard demo environment, free of any customization or data pertaining to a specific customer, to easily visualize how the tool works at a basic level.
Apart from learning about the features of the software, users are also introduced to the terminology used most in the platform to better align their past naming conventions with those of Pricefx, as they may have the same words for different concepts and vice versa. Users who can accurately name and navigate the key features of their software package are more likely to interact with the tool in more meaningful ways relative to their business goals.
2. Guide Productive Discussions Between Key Users and Pricefx
Early-stage training can also serve as a powerful vehicle to guide the thinking in the organization on how they want to use the tool to best serve their purposes.
As expected, there will be a disconnect between business users and technical users on their approach to the tool, and having conversations earlier between those key players helps close this gap in understanding. Using kick-off training as a jumping-off point for productive discussions between companies and Pricefx on tool requirements prevents this kind of misalignment in the organization and improves productivity in the long term.
3. Increase User Engagement
Being thrown into a new tool without receiving prior training is not only ineffective, it’s demoralizing. By allowing users to play with the tool, draw comparisons to how things have been done in the past, and ask questions, our UAT training instills users’ confidence in their abilities that will carry over into other stages of the project. Capturing users’ imaginations through hands-on, practical experience is a critical part of any successful software rollout, as it supports greater companywide acceptance of the tool.
4. Set Up Internal Knowledge Resources
If in-group bias has taught us anything, it’s that we tend to trust people in our own circles more than those outside of them – and that’s why we offer trainings that set up companies to bring their knowledge capabilities in-house. Companies lacking the resources to support continuous external trainings can take advantage of the Solution Adoption training module to prepare internal members to disseminate the knowledge themselves to other users in the organization.
As an equally valuable bonus, participants of the Solution Adoption training work with Pricefx to create a reference playbook, which holds key details of their custom solutions and exercises for the most important user scenarios. This playbook, which is exclusive to this module, can be then reused later both as an internal knowledge source for the organization and onboarding tool for future users.
5. Broaden Your User Groups
A major benefit of the UAT and Solution Adoption trainings is expanding the group of users who are proficient in the software, preventing a situation where only a handful of people understand the tool at a given point. If a large group of users are expected to interact with the tool somewhere down the line, our UAT and Solution Adoption trainings are an efficient way to get them up to speed in one swoop. While smaller teams may be satisfied with just sprint demos and can go without UAT training, they can still profit from Solution Adoption training.
6. Provide Actionable Feedback Earlier
In the UAT Training stage, users have the opportunity to provide actionable feedback on their custom solution which can be fixed prior to implementation end, avoiding costly backtracking and delays in the future. Whether this means suggesting minor cosmetic changes to the user interface, customization of the tool features, or flagging any perceived bugs in the system, trainings provide users the space to make those kinds of calls prior to launch, accelerating time to value.
7. Build Self-Sufficiency
We understand many customers prefer not to be fully dependent on external providers to manage their tools for them. Self-reliance breeds innovation and creativity in an organization, and an over-reliance on vendors to understand its tools shouldn’t get in the way of that.
With this in mind, Pricefx offers a learning path which empowers customers to maintain and support their solutions using their own internal resources. This particular benefit primarily serves two user groups, admin users and solution developers. Both paths, while tailored in their offerings to the needs of each user group, impart to all users the necessary knowledge and skills to support independence in the long term.
Apart from enabling users to own their own processes, self-sufficiency also presents a real material advantage to the organization. Companies who bring these resources in-house enjoy more optimized costs of solution maintenance than those who are more reliant on vendors, keeping the savings for more critical budget items.
What are the consequences of not investing time in training?
Skipping trainings in the early stages of software adoption also comes with its own set of risks. Here are the most common setbacks we’ve seen customers face when they don’t invest the time in trainings when their users need it most.
Project Delays
Taking part in trainings in the early stages of implementation reduces the risk of project delays resulting from unnecessary back-and-forth around how the tool works. And while training certainly isn’t a magic pill for avoiding these discussions entirely, ensuring alignment across the customer team on the terminology and functions of the tool at the onset primes these discussions to be more productive than redundant.
Scope Creep
When there are unresolved misunderstandings about the solution’s capabilities, companies will inevitably come across roadblocks in the implementation stage that were not originally accounted for in the initial project costs and timings. Maybe they expected a certain functionality or design element to exist in the tool which needs to be then added in at a later stage. Users can avoid unnecessary scope creep by dedicating the time to understand the tool better upfront and flag potential issues sooner.
Poor Software Utilization
If your organization has already made a significant investment in pricing software, why not use the solution to its full potential?
We’ve found that actual usage of pricing software varies widely across organizations, with some users logging into the tool as little as once a year.
Training is an easy way to recover that lost ROI resulting from minimal engagement with the tool. Users are more inclined to take advantage of a greater portion of a tool’s capabilities when they are sufficiently trained on how to work with it — this becomes especially important the more users are added.
Mismatched User Expectations and Reality
Customers will be in for a surprise once they discover that the price lists are a world away visually from the Excel spreadsheets they may be used to working with. When users do not invest sufficient time in training prior to kicking off, the likelihood that they either do not understand the tool in fundamental ways or misunderstand how the tool can help them becomes that much higher.
Invest in Pricefx Training Early for Successful Software Adoption in the Longterm
We recognize that software adoption is still not a common practice in many organizations today. Customers tend to underestimate the gap between technical and business go-lives, assuming that once the tool is up and running, they can simply start using the tool without too many major issues.
In reality, this way of thinking couldn’t be further from the truth. Without sufficient priming in the early project stages on how the tool actually works and, relative to this, proper alignment on what the organization expects to get from the tool, users miss out on a smooth (and cost-efficient) implementation process in addition to sustainable mechanisms for long-term software maintenance.
Taking part in trainings in the early stages of software adoption is always a good idea; how much, how often, and which training modules is completely up to you and your business needs. Whatever this turns out to look like, the Pricefx training team is always here to find the best solutions with our customers together.
For a more in-depth look at all the Pricefx training offerings, consider checking out our article below. Or if you’re ready to kick off the learning path, you can head directly to the Pricefx Knowledge Base.
