Introduction
Product training can be an uphill battle — almost like climbing a mountain. It demands a steep learning curve, throws unexpected hurdles your way and requires whole-hearted commitment. Add to this the lack of structure and consistency in your product training plan, and you’re looking at a total disaster.
A poorly executed training program can confuse your users and employees, leaving a bad impression and leading to subpar performance.
Enter a product training template.
A template can serve as a handy guide to tackle every twist and turn while climbing the product training mountain. It gives you a standardized framework to create more consistent and reader-friendly training documentation for customers and employees.
This exhaustive guide will explain how to use a product training template and give you a 5-step framework to design your own template. We’ll also share a template made with Scribe to get the ball rolling quickly!
What is a product training template?
Product training is the process of teaching internal and external stakeholders about every aspect of a product. A product training template sets the groundwork for this process by creating a consistent layout for explaining every function and component of the product.
You can customize this template for different audiences and goals. For example, your product training documentation will differ for every user persona. Similarly, training documents created for internal use will vary from those designed for external stakeholders.
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Why do you need a product training template?
With so many documentation requirements on your plate, it’s only natural to wonder: do I really need a product training template? You might consider it as an extra layer of paperwork adding to your woes. But in reality, such a template pays dividends in many ways.
Here are the five most crucial reasons why a product training template is essential for a well-functioning team:
Standardize employee training efforts
How often have you struggled to streamline training schedules and materials for new hires? If your answer is “don’t even ask”, a product training template will be a godsend to you.
This template can standardize your training process and bring more consistency to your content. It’ll naturally lead to less chaos and confusion while improving employee outputs from the get-go. What’s more, you can also minimize misinformation among new hires.
Scale your training efforts at any time
Scalability is another major benefit of a standard training template. Going on a hiring spree to expand your team quickly? Onboarding multiple new joiners simultaneously? A product training template helps you meet growing demand at any point.
You’re always prepared to accommodate a higher need for training resources because this templatized resource reduces the time required for every project.
Easily customize training for different teams
The marketing team doesn’t look at your product the same way as the engineering or customer success teams. So, your training efforts have to be tailored to the goals and responsibilities of every team. Thankfully, with a product training template, customizing your resources for every team is a cakewalk.
You can customize your template to meet the varying objectives and perspectives of individual teams or roles. This simplifies your product for every employee to do their role better.
Not just employees, you can also customize your template to educate prospects and users. Approach the training material differently from the perspective of a potential customer considering your product and an existing customer looking to get the best out of it.
Save time and maximize efficiency for trainers
A pre-built template also takes stress off of your trainers’ plate. They don’t have to spend too much time looking for the right resources to create custom training materials. A template will speed up the process and help them create content more efficiently. It’s also easy to maintain, so they can update the content whenever there’s a change in your product.
How to create a product training template in 5 easy steps
Convinced that you need a product training template to support your team and customers? Great! Now, let’s help you create an airtight template with this five-step framework:
Identify the intended audience
Before everything else, decide who you’re creating this template for. Product companies need training materials for multiple types of audiences. The template should ideally create a common ground for all these audiences to simplify your training efforts.
Here are the three most common audiences you can target for product training:
- Internal teams: This includes your entire workforce, covering roles like product managers, sales representatives, developers, customer support staff, marketers, and more.
- External teams: This includes your vendors, partners, and distributors who support your company externally. It essentially covers all third-party providers working with your team.
- End-users: This includes individuals and companies using your product. They can be paying customers or prospects.
Think of this step as necessary research for clearly understanding your audience and creating meaningful content for them.
Outline your training objectives
The most important part of the product training puzzle is deciding the objectives for your training program. Every team and user persona will approach your product from a different perspective. Your training content should match their intent and share the most relevant information.
You can create laser-focused content for your training materials by setting the right objectives initially. Here are a few goals to consider for different audiences:
- Sales team: complete training about product functionality, customer objections, and sales enablement content
- Customer service team: relevant training for delivering quick and accurate resolutions for any queries and assisting customers in getting the best out of the product
- Marketing team: relevant training to effectively position the product and reach the right users through targeted campaigns
- Prospects and customers: complete training about the product, covering every feature and commonly asked questions
You can also outline the objectives for training investors and other stakeholders within the company.
Create and test a layout for your template
Defining your audience. Check. Setting your goals. Check. Next stop: creating a foolproof layout.
A good template gives you a well-defined structure to support your training efforts and organize information quickly. Naturally, you’ll need to spend some trial-and-error time creating the perfect layout for this template.
Since this template has to meet the need of multiple audiences, it’s best to structure your template in a way that connects the dots for all of them. Decide common sections that you’d want to include for every team/user. Then, create a set of sections you’d like to include for a specific audience. This quick exercise will create some common ground for all your trainees and give you a solid layout for the template.
Remember to test this layout internally before setting it as the standard. You should also update it regularly to ensure you’re not missing out on critical information.
Choose the right tool to share the template
Now it’s time to bring your template design to life with Scribe, your documentation pal.
Scribe can convert any process or task into a step-by-step guide in a few seconds. So, you can quickly document instructions, SOPs, how-tos and more. It cuts your documentation time by a huge margin and offers the ease of creating documents seamlessly.
But here’s the best part: Pages let you templatize any type of content you create regularly. You can convert your basic layout into a customizable template with Pages and add individual Scribes, rich media, and text to design your training content. It’s intuitive, easily shareable, and user-friendly— a complete package!
Here’s a free product training template designed on Scribe to do all the heavy lifting for you:
Simplify training for your team with our product training template
The quality of your product training can determine the success of your product in the long run. If your users and employees aren’t fully aware of the product, you’ll inevitably see a dip in adoption rates and sales.
Empower your customers and teams to get the best out of your product with a standardized product training template. It’ll streamline and accelerate your training efforts without putting too much pressure on your trainers.
Try Scribe’s free product training template to get started today!
