Training buyers can cost a lot of money and time depending on the complexity of your product or services. However, that investment is worth the cost because training is one of the most overlooked post-sale growth levers. Well-trained customers bring more value to your company, experience less remorse, and can ultimately become a long-time partner to your brand.

In this article, we will explain how training is an underappreciated growth lever that can cultivate the most loyal, long-term customers.

The Cost of Not Training Buyers

Some products require minimal training, and hobbyists can often learn by doing and even consult online forums to answer any remaining questions. Many products, however, require some form of training before buyers can get their full value from the product. Even though it will rarely appear as a line item in your organization’s operating budget, it is still important to consider how much it costs a business not to train its buyers properly.

During the period between purchase and the full product value, customers may form negative opinions of your brand and abandon product use. Companies might not want to face the upfront cost of training buyers, but they are just deferring and distributing that cost across other budgets. Customer support teams, customer success teams, and those who handle customer churn will have to address issues that could have been avoided if buyers had been properly trained.

Shortening Time-to-Value

Time-to-value (TTV) is a metric that measures the time it takes for a new customer to experience a tangible benefit from a product after purchasing it. Training customers shortens TTV by compressing the amount of time between purchase and the customer getting the full value out of the product or service.

Buyers who cannot figure out how to get value from a product in the first few days or even weeks after purchase will start to form an opinion about your product and brand before it has a chance to prove itself. In fact, every day that a customer goes without experiencing value from your product is a day where doubt about their purchase decision compounds.

Reducing Buyer’s Remorse

Better upfront training will also greatly reduce the likelihood that your customer experiences buyer’s remorse. Untrained users will naturally default to underusing your product and then judge it accordingly. A proper training regimen intervenes directly into that loop by giving the buyer evidence that their decision was sound.

Training cannot mitigate buyer’s remorse related directly to your product’s capabilities, but it can be a game-changer for buyer’s remorse related to the user's unfamiliarity with your product’s capabilities. In fact, your organization should consider proper user training a fundamental part of your services rather than a formality or add-on.

Reducing Support Burden

Training customers upfront instead of deferring that cost will also significantly reduce the burden put upon your support staff later on. Most support tickets are really knowledge gaps, and a well-trained customer base shifts the function of support teams from reactive firefighting to genuine edge-case handling.

Untrained customers are going to generate more tickets in total as well as tickets that are more expensive to resolve. Trained customers can self-resolve so many issues, leaving your support staff to handle other and more complex customer issues. Extensive knowledge bases and AI support tools can further alleviate that burden so that human support staff are required to mainly handle the most escalated customer issues.

Improving Organic Upselling

Attempts to upsell land differently when a customer already trusts their own competence with the base product, and training enables that competence. For example, a machine chop owner who is fully satisfied with their purchased woodworking tools is likely to turn to the same brand when they need to purchase acrylic machining tools.

An untrained, dissatisfied customer is more likely to resist new features or companion products from the same brand, because they are still struggling to get value from the base product. Well-trained, loyal customers are more likely to repurchase the same product as well as be open to purchasing new products or services from the same brand.

Increasing Customer Loyalty

Thorough training will also lead to greater customer loyalty. After all, customer satisfaction is key to obtaining customer loyalty. Trained customers are also more likely to stay once they have invested a certain amount of effort and time into learning a specific system.

Switching to a different brand to get a similar product would require learning the unique features of that new brand’s product. Customer loyalty is structural, so a proper customer training process helps build and support that structural component.

Encouraging Habit Formation

Finally, training customers encourages habit formation with said product. Training helps customers get over that initial friction between purchase and value. Although the central goal of training should be knowledge formation, a secondary goal should be training customers fast enough for habit loops to form before their attention can move on to other products or priorities.

Once usage becomes habitual, customer retention becomes a default rather than part of a whole renewal conversation. Well-trained customers will get the most value out of your product and become habitual, loyal customers. When done correctly, that is certainly worth the investment.

Key Takeaways

Although it takes concentrated effort and designated staff members, training is an overlooked post-sale growth lever. Properly trained customers are less likely to have buyer’s remorse or to burden your support team with issues down the line.

Training also shortens time-to-value, increases customer loyalty, improves organic upselling, and encourages positive habit formation. All of these factors mean that there is also a high cost to your organization if you do not prioritize your customers getting the most value they can from your products. Proper training models turn one-time buyers into loyal, long-time business partners.