Guest post by Steve Kapaun, President of TrainingPros. TrainingPros, Inc. founded in 1997, works closely with learning departments of large organizations to identify, attract, and support leading contract specialists for focused training and development engagements. A proprietary onboarding process led by experienced relationship managers helps ensure the right personnel for the job.
TrainingPros has been a CSR client for several years. One of the things we’ve learned through our relationship is this delicate balancing act: allowing a winning strategy to drive results versus the need to continue to look for and implement programs or tactics that will further differentiate us from the competition and provide more value to our clients. When new clients seemingly knock on our door without solicitation, and we are generating strong financial performance, it is easy to sit back and not look for opportunities to provide new services to existing clients, not improve our methods for service delivery, not look for ways in which we can deepen our relationships with our current clients, and not explore new approaches to open the doors with prospective new clients.
However, if you take that complacent approach to business, successful businesses can go the way of Kodak. Competitors could offer new services, or existing clients might consider you a commodity because your offerings do not change or your value proposition is not unique relative to your competition.
Over the last few years, TrainingPros has been striving to stay one step ahead of the competition and anticipate the needs of our clients by investing in: new services offerings, methods for improving how we deliver service to our clients, and programs to deepen and solidify our relationships with our clients (which, in turn, allow us to anticipate the needs of our clients).
Programs and strategies that we have implemented include:
Listening to our clients and consultants to find out what we do as a staffing firm that differentiates us from other staffing firms. We then created a proprietary methodology around these best practices that ensures that all of our service professionals are following the same processes that deliver consistently high-quality engagements.
Developing a proprietary personality assessment that allows us to continue to improve our ability to provide consultants to our clients who will work well together. It’s important to us to close the gap and further reduce the number of consultants who need to be replaced on projects because they do not work well with our clients.
Hiring a best-in-class business development consultant to build courage and provide methods that will help our sales professionals sell more to our current clients and acquire new clients.
Adding new service offerings including training as a service to support our clients’ ERP training programs.
Providing a radio program that our sales professionals can use to open the door with new clients. We are able to invite our target buyers to be our guest on an Internet radio program that allows the prospective client to be interviewed on topics about which the buyer is extremely passionate and knowledgeable. 75% of the time, that prospect becomes a new client because of the relationship-building experience they had as our guest on our program Learning Insights Radio.
We are always looking for that next strategy or program that help us take our business to a higher level. CSR has been a great partner with TrainingPros by helping us avoid the pitfalls of resting on our laurels. CSR pushes us to continue to build our business by identifying and implementing strategies that our clients value and keep TrainingPros on their speed dial.