What sort of customers is further education looking for?

When I run workshops to help providers from the further education world to enhance their approaches to employer engagement I always ask the question in the title.

Sometimes the question isn’t taken very seriously. Sometimes the response is given in a way that suggests I’m asking a stupid question.

Sometimes, in fact most of the time, the response is:

“We’re looking for organisations with money to spend.”

Good start

Thinking like this is a good start, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

Just because an employer has money to spend doesn’t mean he or she is going to spend it. Neither does it mean that the employer will choose to spend any money with an FE college or with a private training provider.

You need to do a lot more to identify prospects you may wish to develop relationships with, and ultimately gain business from, before you are in a position to answer the question in the title.

Do they have a problem?

Individuals and employers are more likely to spend money to help them to address problems than they are to spend money on things that are nice to have.

Unfortunately, lots of training and many qualifications are viewed by employers as nice to have, but not essential. The world won’t stop turning just because someone doesn’t have a qualification or isn’t given time off to attend a development programme.

Yet, employers will often throw money at the business problems they are facing and take action to deal with the issues that impact on their abilities to achieve.

They will look for a solution once they find a problem that is affecting their ability to achieve their objectives.

This presents you with a very clear question to answer.

Are you selling solutions to problems?

If you think you have the answer to this question, there’s another that is even more important.

Are you selling solutions to the sort of problems that employers are interested in solving?

In order to give a positive answer to the question you need to stop selling training, qualifications, NVQ, Skills for Life, Apprenticeships and so on as development programmes for individuals. They need to become solutions to business problems.

You’ll get more interest from more employers if you make this shift.

Are they willing to do something about their problem?

The answer to this question is, of course, about the real difference between needs and wants. An employer might have a whole series of needs, some of which you might help him or her to identify via your organisational needs analysis.

However, until the need is clearly pressing, that is until the need is keeping the employer awake at night, it’s going to be an uphill job selling a solution to the vast majority of employers.

Finding employers with money to spend is relatively easy. Finding employers who are prepared to spend their money on your solutions is the difficult bit.

Can they make up their minds?

You must have experienced this sort of situation. You’ve been to see the employer. You’ve got on well with the people you met. You’ve put together your proposal and sent it off . . . and nothing has happened.

You ring. You e-mail.

Nothing seems to be happening.

Well, you need to look to yourself first, and check that you really have been speaking to the right people. If you haven’t been working with the decision makers, then they probably don’t even think there is a decision to be made. After all, you haven’t put a proposal to them. There’s a proposal somewhere in their organisation, but they aren’t looking for it and they have no commitment to doing anything with it.

Then there’s the issue of the choices you have left the organisation with. Have you given them too much choice or too little? Have you made the various options clear? Make a point of checking that your prospective customer knows what the choices are and the benefits of each.

What’s the decision-making process in the organisation? Is it complex and convoluted? If it’s a long and drawn out decision-making process and you don’t have a strong advocate on the right committee, your proposal may never be reviewed in any detail.

When you find yourself in any of these situations make a judgement. Are you going to get anywhere, or should you write off your efforts?

Good customers

Employers who have problems they are prepared to do something about, and who have the money to buy a solution, are to be found in all sectors of the economy. They are there in the public sector and in the private sector. There are people in large organisations and in small ones who are prepared to commission work from colleges and from other provider organisations.

Your challenge is to seek them out, and build a relationship with them, because these are the customers you really are looking for.

This is the seventh post in a series of ten about client attraction basics.