The tendency is to send two or three important staff on intensive training and then expect them to train the rest of the staff how to use the system. This happens because of the following reasons.

You should not reduce costs or cut corners in training, because any employee who believes he or she has not been properly trained is a danger to the system.

To make the most of your CRM software and to get your employees to use it efficiently, you must send them to your premises for professional training. This means you must send them off-site for training. There are both advantages and disadvantages to sending your employees off-site for training, so let’s take a look at them in more detail.

It is more economical and more efficient to train on your own premises, but it is also more disruptive, both for the trainer and for the people being trained. It is common for someone on the training course to knock on the door and ask for help, or for them to be required to leave the training session for a minor problem.

If the course were held off premises, the questions would have to wait or be resolved by someone else, since most problems are not urgent or of major importance. So, why do you allow disruptions to on-premises training? It’s because no one takes on-premises training seriously. You either offer off-premises training or have strict access procedures that apply to everyone in the company, from the senior executives to junior employees and janitors. No exceptions.

Of course, holding training on your premises makes a lot of sense in that the staff can gain hands-on experience on a copy of your data. This can also help with ironing out little problems in configuration, data integrity and system stability. But be wary of running training courses on-premise too early. While on-premises training certainly makes a lot of sense, you have to be certain that the system has settled down and all the significant wobbles have been tackled before you run such courses. If you have to choose between staff not getting trained and the backlog of data waiting to be input on the system becoming bigger as a result, as waiting for the system to become stable means that you do.

It is a mistake to send two or three key staff on intensive training and then expect them to train the rest of the staff on how to use the system. This will often lead to an epic fail.

Training CRM system end users can be a very effective way of encouraging them to use your system (and also to keep using it). While there are many different ways to do this, one of the most effective ways is to send them to your premises for training. On-premises training is even more effective than off-premises training, because it allows the staff to gain hands-on experience on a copy of the data. It also helps with the configuration, data integrity and system stability issues that CRM datawarehouse brings. This is not the only way to do it. You could also employ the services of an external CRM specialist to deliver this training. This is an option that should be considered; it will at least ensure that you get the most from the training and will provide you with additional expertise that you could not otherwise afford. The benefits of on-premises training are clear, but if off-premises training is not enough for your employees, you could also consider hiring an external CRM specialist to deliver the training. The primary benefit of off-premises training is that you can provide them with the most up-to-date training content at their own pace and in the format that they prefer. However, it is important that you select a specialist who has the right skills and experience to deliver the training, so that they can help to maintain your training investment.