Thought Leadership

What Are the Benefits of Hands-on Practice?

The CloudShare Team

May 11, 2021 - 5 min read

Have you ever considered the phrase “getting one’s hands dirty”? It sounds like an unhygienic activity we were trained as children to stay away from, but in practice, it means quite the opposite: To be involved. To commit. To put in the work, and to be active, not passive.

And this strategy is precisely the goal of hands-on training. Whether for pre-sales demos to highlight and promote features for a prospect or as hands-on technical training for new and existing customers ready to master your software post-sale training, it’s at the top of the list as a methodology to maximize effectiveness in knowledge transfer. Let’s take a look at how it works in both cases.

The pitfalls of the sales pitch

There’s no other way to say it: Whether in person or virtual, verbal pitches are a tough sell. After all, there’s only so much you can say about a product until someone asks you to put your money where your mouth is. The problem’s even more pronounced with highly technical software for a few reasons: 

• Attention fades quickly, and the customer is rarely committed to keeping up with every detail. Even the most engaging salesperson may find it difficult to hold people’s engagement for long.
• Technical software often has a massive list of features and benefits. Even the most interested prospect isn’t likely to remember everything after a verbal pitch, especially if they have no way of seeing how everything applies t o their business. 
• It’s easy to talk about features and benefits. Functionality, interface, and the end user experience are a bit more challenging to convey — but no less important. 

That problem’s easy enough to solve though, right? Just take out the laptop or send a screen-share invitation for a “packaged” product demo. Using a carefully configured, familiar system, the salesperson can then run through the features they want to highlight in an effort to wow the prospect. 

And here we come to another big problem with traditional sales pitches. These demos are usually scripted and performed by rote. This makes them a huge gamble. 

See, success with a scripted demo hinges on that demo being a perfect match for the prospect’s needs and expectations. Given that every business is a little different and every prospect is going to have slightly different expectations…to call sticking to the script ‘a shot in the dark’ seems a bit generous. 

And it’s certainly not an ideal use of anyone’s time.

The obvious alternative: Hands-on practice

Instead of a boring, non-interactive demo, why not give prospects a sandbox to explore instead? That way, they get a genuine sense of what your product can do for them, because they’re the one using it. You’re just there to provide them with guidance — either during the demo or after they’ve experienced it independently and on their own time. 

Instead of having to sit through a list of features that aren’t relevant to them, the prospect can exclusively focus on the parts of your product that interest them. Not only that, they can experiment with their own data to give themselves a more relevant idea of their usage. And as an added bonus, hands-on practice implies that your salespeople are confident enough to let prospects run free and “kick the tires” so to speak.

You have nothing to hide, and you know your software can stand on its own merits.

It’s easy to lose focus and attention when you’re squinting at a laptop screen or staring at powerpoint slides on a monitor. It’s even more difficult to pay attention when you’re sitting in an hours-long Zoom call with a salesperson, passively listening to them explain their product.But when you’re given the controls and put in the driver’s seat? That changes things. Instead of a boring, static experience, it transforms the product demo into something interactive, compelling, and, most importantly, relevant. 

The next step: Post-sales training

So, let’s say your prospect absolutely loved your software and your demo earned you a sale. Your job’s not finished just yet. The next step is to prime that customer to start using the product they’ve purchased — to help them get the most out of their new investment.

Unfortunately, anyone who’s had to deal with customer training and support knows that’s generally a lot easier said than done for a few reasons. 

First, customers aren’t going to read the manual, no matter how much work you put into it. Most of them already have enough on their plates. They don’t need to be thumbing through several hundred pages on the intricacies of your software. 

They probably aren’t going to watch any demo videos you provide to them, either. They might skim a few of the shorter ones if you’re lucky. But don’t hold your breath on that. 

Lastly, running an in-person training session is expensive, time-consuming, and usually underwhelming. It’s the same problem you ran into with your demo. Fortunately, that means the solution is more or less the same too: Make your onboarding experience more hands-on. 

Demonstrating that it’s the real thing

To get customers up to speed post-sales, hands-on training is a sure-fire way to get the knowledge into their heads – but through their hands, not through their eyes and ears. Why? Because when a customer has actively worked with a feature, whether immediately successful or even with some trial and error, those actions are now real to them. 

They’ve seen how your software works firsthand. They’ve proven to themselves that they made the right choice purchasing from you. And they know that, when push comes to shove, their actions are entirely repeatable. 

To put it another way, when a customer has the opportunity to take this shiny new product for a spin and comes back with a real experience, it remains embedded in memory in a way that passive learning cannot compete with.

In addition, hands-on technical training provides a level of confidence so important to adoption rates. Enterprise software can be overwhelming, with steep learning curves fraught with skepticism or nervousness. 

When a customer has seen first-hand that their real-world tasks are within their grasp, and that they can handily avoid frustration, wasted time, and those pesky error screens, adoption soars … as does productivity and, in turn, future orders.

Finally, hands-on practice activity also offers benefits for certification programs and reduces strain on customer support. Many platforms allow the trainer to watch the trainee and determine what parts of the product he has explored, when, and for how long. Providing a set of challenges answered not with theoretical answers but with live interaction, is the best way to be sure customers are indeed ready to manage on their own.

There’s a reason that hands-on practice is the favorite method in hospitals, as the core, central link in the process doctors undergo in their own training: “Watch one, do one, teach one.” But long before modern medicine or hi-tech, Confucius said it best and most simply:

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

This post was published in May 2021 and updated in August 2024.