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Project Success Stories

'All you can eat' pricing plan
boosts public seminar attendance.

Overall public course attendance rose 60% with the number of students enrolling in 3 or more courses increasing by more than 300%

This IT customer education business unit was confronting a steady erosion in public course attendance and average class size.  "Gray market" competitors were cannibalizing its popular gateway course offerings.  Lifetime attendance per enrollee was down to only 1.2 classes.  Systems and services sales generalists couldn’t be bothered with selling education, and when they did they deep-discounted large non-binding purchase orders where the promised volumes never materialized.  Pre-paid “training credit” plans accommodated purchase agents and accelerated cash receipts, but failed to drive incremental attendance.

In response, FUSION invented a breakthrough enterprise level education solution that has since become an industry standard.

Termed an "Unlimited Training Subscription" or sometimes "Training Passport" this solution featured the following:

• For a fixed annual subscription fee, IT decision-makers were offered unlimited access to all of the classroom learning necessary to support their project team.  The annual fee for 5 people was $24,000, with additional groups of 5 eligible for just $12,000 additional.  This incented customers to pool their enterprise-wide needs to realize the maximum savings. (Our pricing algorithm anticipated that excessive attendance would be moderated by the costs and inconvenience of sending valuable employees offsite.)

• Prior to enrollment, an education specialist was made available to examine each IT professional’s role and construct a customized training plan to fit.  This freed up sales staff and IT decision-makers from having to be curriculum experts.  Meanwhile, because the annual cost was guaranteed no matter how many courses were taken, an elaborate course-by-course proposal buildup was not required.

• A prescribed elearning library was included for when subscribers were not able to travel to classroom sessions, giving the solution a blended learning component that added substantial value at negligible incremental delivery expense.    

• The subscription fee was billed in equal monthly installments, ensuring that purchase decisions were more than just empty intentions.

• Each monthly installment was accompanied by a statement comparing actual course attendance to the original training plan as and the list price value of the training consumed vs. payments to date – providing IT decision-makers a “dashboard” on the results of the solution to date.

• Decision-makers were offered the option of opting out of the solution anytime, and recovering any payments made in excess of the list price of the training consumed.  This “bailout” clause gave salespeople added courage and provided IT execs with a “risk-free” decision.  This option was never utilized – even by customers who found they had paid a premium.

Results from the launch of the Unlimited Training Subscription Plan far exceeded expectations.

• Systems and software account managers seized on it to land high-ticket service bookings and achieve their services quota.  The number of $50K+ education accounts more than doubled.

• Overall public course attendance rose 60% with the number of students enrolling in 3 or more courses increasing by more than 300%. 

• The added attendance was easily absorbed through increasing the average class size of already scheduled sessions; so most of the incremental revenue flowed through to the bottom line.

• The largest gray-market competitor was driven out of business. 

Since our original Unlimited Training Subscription breakthrough, we have developed dozens of additional subscription-based solutions that make training easy to buy and sell in volume.  Some solutions have emphasized instructor-led training, others elearning – but most have included a strong blended learning element and have monetized the value of services previously given away.  The power of these solutions has been transformational, with some clients realizing incremental revenues in excess of 20%.