Virtual training

The Road to Upsell and Cross-sell Your Training Bundle As Part of the Customer Retention Journey

The CloudShare Team

Feb 22, 2023 - 3 min read

Looking to increase the subscription renewal rates for your training programs? You’re in the right place! Join us as we look at how training professionals can steal some tips and tricks from Customer Success to ensure service renewals through cross-selling and upselling strategies. 

Explain the Value of Training as a Retention Strategy

Upselling and cross-selling your training effectively is all about successfully translating the value of your education to the customer. If they can see that the training adds value, they will be happy to engage. 

You can learn a lot from Customer Success here. CS teams work with customers across the whole customer lifecycle, adding value at relevant stages, and encouraging users to see the optimum value with technology. You can do the same with training. Let’s look with greater depth at three strategies.

Remember! These aren’t meant to be put into place 2 weeks prior to the renewal date. These can all be embedded as part of your training strategy from day one, helping you to show customers the value of training as a powerful product in and of itself, not just an optional add-on.

1. Successful onboarding

In our recent webinar with EverAfter, one of the best practices the team discussed for attracting renewals is to leverage the onboarding stage. 

When your customers start working with your product, they are looking to you to make their job quicker, or their work more accurate. They aren’t interested in all of the product’s bells and whistles – they want to see the value as soon as possible. 

Training is a powerful tactic to see that value much faster, and to walk the user through the steps that it takes to start seeing success in their roles. Explain to your user that training will help them to get the most out of the product quickly, as however simple you think your technology might be – there will always be a learning curve and friction to contend with. 

2. Add a Price Tag

When Customer Success encourages users to take an upsell or a cross-sell opportunity, such as a higher tier subscription, a complementary technology solution, or more user accounts – they aren’t expected to give that value away for free. 

However, some training teams feel that educational content should be free for users, and that adding a dollar value to training materials could negatively impact adoption. In fact, studies show that the opposite is true. 

Maria Manning Chapman, President of TSIA, discusses the fallacy of free. She describes how the barrier to whether customers adopt your training or not isn’t whether they pay for it, it’s whether they consume it! And people are far more likely to consume something they have paid for, as they are concerned about getting value out of the purchase that they’ve made. 

In this way, when you explain to your customers that they are getting something valuable, and they pay for the training – they are much more likely to utilize it, see value, and sign up for more. 

Bonus? You’ll be opening a direct revenue stream for the company, too. Can’t argue with that.  

3. Gathering the Right Data

Customer Success would never dream of creating an onboarding program, a product adoption strategy, or a drive for more customers without having a way to monitor and understand the impact of their work. After all, today, all teams are measured by how they can move the needle on critical business outcomes. Whether this is pure-play dollar signs, or correlations to objectives like subscription renewals, reduced churn, or higher customer satisfaction, being able to draw that dotted line and prove the worth of the work you’re doing is vital. 

The same is true in training. For customer training teams, the main goal is always going to be attracting customers to purchase and engage with training content. You can then use the data that you gather to compare trained and untrained cohorts against the organizational metrics that matter to the C-suite. For example, if your executives are looking to lose fewer big logo customers, you can show that trained customers are less likely to churn. If product adoption is the item on this quarter’s agenda, display the data that shows trained users are more likely to engage deeply with your product. 

No matter what results you show, the outcome will be that the more users you educate – the better! This is a great starting point for obtaining buy-in for additional education programs, such as an Academy, a Certification, or even just a greater number of webinars and tutorials on how the customer can see value with your technology. 

Ready to Improve Training Subscription Renewals with Cross-selling and Upselling Strategies?

Training and Customer Education teams can learn a little something from their brothers and sisters in Customer Success. Improve service renewals and encourage adoption of training materials by:

• Focusing on onboarding: This is the critical stage where customers need to see value with your product as the tool. 

• Charging what training is worth: Don’t be afraid of a price tag – this is what proves to users that your content is valuable. 

• Measuring critical metrics: Make sure that you can draw correlations between your training, and essential business KPIs.