Know Your Audience. Or do you ?

So I prepared my first course, teaching something besides “How to add a new contact to ACT!”.

It was not much of a stretch, but I decided to start a 15 minute lecture on prepping a PC before an install of ACT!. This lecture was to the other students in my “Instructional Design” course at www.sxu.edu.

I followed my “courseware” on building courseware, and I followed the principles of:

1) Course Objectives

2) Duration

3) Materials & Equipment

4) Delivery Method(s). I chose lecture only because it was new technology to a non-technology audience), and I also did a little bit of demonstration, but not too much. Handouts were also given on how to determine PC memory and OS.

5) Evaluation

The result…

I felt uncomfortable, and I realized in 3 minutes that I was over their heads anyway.

My lesson learned.

Don’t assume

I came across as too technical of a presentation. Although I worked furiously to pair down the ACT! install procedure, I didn’t know my audience well enough.

After being in the software business for 15 years, I probably wind up assuming too much about my audience or client’s knowledge at times. After all, our peers are technicians that in many cases blow my doors off in technical knowledge about PCs and programming also.

So, I hope this helps you reconsider your assumptions about your next audience’s knowledge about PCs and ACT!.
Mondo

How Do You Measure Training ROI ?

One of the lectures in our class discussed the “business” aspect of training.  It’s cited that training is always the first line item cut, no matter the reason.

So trainers keep this in mind when they need to “justify their existence” in an era of cutbacks.

As part of our training classes, we are starting to build an ROI calculator.  I haven’t figured out the ACT! formula yet.  Here is the formula course uses.

ROI=(Program Benefits – Program Costs)/Program Costs*100

The challenge I see with CRM training is putting a dollar value on the benefit.  How do you quantify the CRM training benefit ?
Mondo