Turn Product Training into a Profit Center

All sorts of retailers can turn a profit by training customers. Think about computer stores that charge people for lessons on how to get the best from the devices they’ve purchased. But the opportunities aren’t limited to high-tech items. Specialty food retailers are charging for cooking lessons, and mountain bike retailers for skill-building clinics.
     Even if you don’t charge a fee, training customers can help your bottom line. People often buy more features in a product than they know how to use, and they then become more likely to return the product when they’re unable to master the features. Or they'll rate down not only the product, but also the store, in word-of-mouth and fingers-to-keyboard reviews. Frequent product returns and negative reviews can reduce your profitability.
     When it comes to the value-added of training, you could end up making money overall, even if you lose money on doing the training.
     Here are a few research-based tips on getting the best from product training:

• Set reasonable expectations regarding the ease of learning. If the nature of the product or the nature of your trainees leads you to think the process will be tough, warn the people. If there are multiple skills to learn, teach one at a time before asking the learner to combine them. Researchers at University of South Carolina and University of Colorado-Boulder find that when consumers have reasonable expectations, their evaluations of the products are more accurate. On the other hand, if the learning process is much more difficult than they’d anticipated, they rate the product quality more negatively, generally not realizing why they’re doing this.
• Involve a variety of the learners’ senses and capabilities. Tell them in words, give it to them in writing, demonstrate it to them, have them move their muscles to demonstrate it to you or others. A broad range of research over the years confirms that this helps people acquire skills more easily and use the skills in more situations.
• Accommodate different learning styles with different sorts of training. An important example of this comes from research at State University of New York-Buffalo and Indiana University: With the people who learn best by following instructions, give brief lessons with some spacing between. With the people who learn best by actual experience, give longer lessons and/or lessons that come closer together.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

Click below for more:
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Teach Sensory Terms to Avoid Misleading
Have Suppliers Train Staff and Shoppers
Distribute Worksheets for Child Consumers