Marketing an eLearning system is primarily determined by who can use it, when is it available and what metric are you going to attach to the system.  Having recently experienced a similar experienced on how to market the eLearning product, let me share with you our decision process.  We first needed to answer these questions:

1)      Determine who is the purchaser of your product

2)      Determine what is the cost for your product

3)      Determine the availability of the product

4)      Decide how you are planning to measure effectiveness of your training.

For us, we shied away from individual sales.  All of the competitors to our training product have focused on the individual training sale.  While this is an excellent method to determine highly motivated individuals who will take the training to heart and implement the tools taught.  The only problem is that it was a ‘me-too’ product offering and difficult to build a business around.

Our decision was to build out the entire product line and focus on corporate relationship sales.  Many in the industry we have concentrated on, are cutting back on their internal training programs and people, and yet they still need high-quality training.  Our product, since it is primarily web-based is a perfect sale to these companies.  We create the product once, and then sell it over and over.

The second aspect of our decision process was to decide if it was: just web-based, or class-room based, or webinar based, or some combination of all three.  Our initial thought was just to make it web-based, because of the flexibility, reliability and deliverability of the product.  Upon further review, we also felt that the other two delivery systems should be incorporated.  So, in addition to the web-based solution, we conduct monthly webinar’s for the management and top salespeople.  Plus, we committed to attend up to two events [sales conventions and or regional meetings] as a keynote speaker and to run a break-out session for our clients.

Our decision to market out product in this fashion, allowed for us to differentiate our product from our competitors.