Some time has passed since I held my last open seminar on Customer Relationship Management. In the mean time I had some engagements on universities or in form of in-house education.
From my experience, open seminars are particularly challenging comparing to the other two forms of lectures. In-house educations allow precise matching the content to the audience. Thorough preparation and understanding of expectations of the audience can be performed before the actual education. Usually one or more preparatory assessments and meetings are performed. The company that orders the education is in most of the cases a fair candidate to be used in business cases.
Academic lectures, from the other side, usually have homogenous audience. The lecturer has to prepare more facts, is able to offer long definitions that students systematically write down. Faculty students are unfortunatelly, in general, passive in terms of expectations over the quality of lectures and speakers. This puts lower pressure on the lecturer, despite his decisiveness to invest time to gain the maximum quality.
Open seminars however attract people with very different expectations, mostly totally out of lecturer’s control. It does not help much even when put the maximum effort to understand each seminar attendant’s „why“. You will usually have 3 or 4 different homogenous sets of people within an usual group of 10 or 15. Here are some profiles from my experience:
| Est. share | Profile | Their motivation |
| 40% | The general knowledge seeker | I heard a lot about this CRM. I’d really like to learn more about it. |
| 30% | The CRM professional | Let’s see what does this guy have to say that I still don’t know. |
| 20% | The project guy | We are implementing the XY software, we will learn how to do it (usualy 2-3 persons from the same organization) |
| 10% | The victim of transformation | My boss has sent me ’cause we have te fancy HR initiative in our organization, but I don’t care much about the topic. You don’t mind if I leave after lunch? |
The bottom line is that you will never be able to make everyone perfectly satisfied with the content. Therefore I usually estimate which of the groups is dominant and then try to narrow the content for that group, without forgetting the rest of the audience.
My first open seminar after several years has some additional challenges comparing to the previous ones. The education provider (Institute for management / Istitut za menadzment) offers mostly soft skills educations such as coaching, fast reading techniques and creative writing. My CRM course stands out from the self–transformational and workshop–like educations. I estimate that the general tone given by most of the lecturers at Institute for management will impact expectations over my content and educational style. Therefore I have decided to adapt the seminar, making it more interactive with more usable material to take away. My next imperative, independent to the Institute for management’s clients, was to modernize the content, make it more attractive and up to date. So I’ll spend some time during te seminar on the Social Media role within CRM and I’ll open a discussion about a new CRM concept. I will share some of my thoughts about new possibilities of Web 2.0 enabled CRM development, which I call the in-the-product CRM.
Wow, I’m looking forward to lead the course on 18.11.2010. at Institut za menadzment, Zagreb.