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Practical Security: The cost of technology training

Staying current in the security space becomes more challenging every year.

The complexity of the solutions and the abundance of new products — combined with new releases of existing products — makes for a hectic pace just trying to keep up.

Not only is it a challenge to stay current, it is expensive to keep our technical teams up to date. Obviously we need our partners in protection to provide training on their products.
However, this brings up a bit of an uncomfortable issue for many dealers and integrators: the cost. Let’s understand the cost of attending training, hosted by the manufacturer or distributor, for a security product.

Often there is a training fee for their trainer to attend your workplace or at the local distributor to train your sales staff and technical staff. On top of the training fees, you obviously have to pay your staff their usual wages to attend. Now, while they are in training, you lose that day’s revenue for their time. Using rough numbers to generate an example it would look like this:

• Lost revenue potential for the day: $1,000
• Paying a technician with statutory burdens: approximately $300 – $400
• Training/travel costs for training: $300+

As you can see, the true cost of attending training is somewhere between $1,600 and $2,000. That’s a lot of money with no guaranteed return on investment for one day of training. If the manufacturer is the trainer, you have invested more than $1,500 to sell their product. They are generating revenue with the purpose of generating more revenue — they can’t lose.

My professional opinion is that manufacturers that want your team to attend their training because it will greatly benefit you, and them, should recognize that it is equally beneficial to have more people trained on their product and find ways to reduce that cost. Manufacturers that have faith in their product and truly want business partners should be willing to provide their dealers with the tools to properly sell and service those products.

Under the present method of training, if you pay, they train. No obligation or commitment from the manufacturers of anything other than becoming certified, often with no restrictions on how many dealers they’ll train. This is not a fair and equitable solution when one side is taking all of the risk.

I respect the manufacturers that provide training — we need it. We need their knowledge to properly work with their products. If the issue for manufacturers is about cost recovery, build that into your price. If your product is solid you’ll have nothing to worry about. We all want to generate more revenue — that’s the reason most folks are in business.

Often, manufacturers will work with distribution partners for training facilities to reduce cost. Some product training is offered virtually, and others have offered us the option to send technicians to their facilities. While the innovation is appreciated, there’s more to be done. What about:

• Offer rebates on the training fees when a sales number is achieved. This creates an incentive to ensure the training is working and an incentive to sell the product.
• Offer training outside of normal business hours. For small companies it is not always possible to have multiple technicians out of the field for a day.
• Instead of offering training with a free piece of hardware, remove the hardware from the equation and reduce the cost further.
• If you train people well, they sell the hardware. There’s no risk.
• Offer any real incentive for us to have our team attend your training. If an experienced technician can use your products without training, give them a reason to attend.

In the absence of training, technicians are working on hardware or software that can be unfamiliar to them. Sometimes they’ll call the distributor and seek advice, or a co-worker, or a competitor.

At the end of the day, problem-solving is what technicians do and they’re a resourceful group. During my career, I’ve only seen the lack of product specific certification hold us back a small number of times. That means people are by-passing the training for whatever reason.

Let me be clear: we want training. Everyone benefits from trained technical staff in the field. Under the current delivery model, the manufacturers benefit more than the people they are training.

Roger Miller is the president of Northeastern Protection Service Inc. (www.protectionpartner.ca)