A session attendee at the Tech Conference said (I paraphrase): “In all the proposals I’ve received from AMS vendors, the amount of training proposed seems ridiculously low to me. Why do the vendors underbid on the training aspect of their product?”
I invite the vendors to respond here, but I think there are several things at play:
- The vendors know that if cuts are needed, training is always the first item to get cut from a budget. So rather than budget what should really be budgeted, they lowball it, in order to be competitive against other bids.
- Vendors may very realistically believe that their system is so intuitive that extensive training is not needed. This may or may not be true, but I always advise my clients to “over budget” for training, to be safe.
- Many vendors are providing recorded online training, which may be part of the reason they are proposing less “fee-based” training than they have in the past.
I’ve written in many places about how critical training is to long-term success of any AMS. And that training has to come not only from the vendor but from internal resources as well (since you know, or will know, your data and database better than anyone).