Now is a very exciting time for CourseMax. We can't wait to show you what we've built. We are getting ready to launch the 3rd major version of CourseMax about one week from today. We've been testing it out in a closed Beta and we're working out the final kinks as I write this post. What has changed you ask? Everything has changed. That's right, over the course of the last 6 months or so we have developed an entirely new application, service, and an online community for professional and continuing education. Back in late 2005, we set out on a mission to develop a great piece of software for training organizations who have traditionally had few places to turn for an application that worked the way a training organization does business. Our vision of what we wanted to do with this software and this business was shaped by our early customers. CourseMax 2.0 was a pretty good application. It handled the day to day operations of a training organization well and provided an easy way for training organizations to offer online registrations, manage their instructor's schedules, book rooms and equipment, run some reports and keep track of everything in one central place. But CourseMax 2.0 only got us part of the way to our shared vision.
With CourseMax 3.0 we've gone all the way. So what exactly have we added:
Free Online Community for Professional & Continuing Education
Why did we build a free community? Well because their isn't a good one out there and our industry needs one. The CourseMax community provides learners, learning professionals, and learning organizations to find people with common interests, network, and do business together. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and eBay are are all great tools and I use every one of them. However, these tools are generic, the social networks are broad and unfocused so they don't have the features to serve our industry.
I'll give you a couple examples.
Scenario #1: Let's say you're a professional trying to keep your skills current and you're looking to take a few courses. You want to find the course you need at a convenient location, from the best training organization, with the best instructors, how successful do you think you'll be in finding that course using Google? It will probably take hours just to find a couple options and you'll have no idea if your going to get good value for your money.
Scenario #2: Now you are an operations manager at a training organization and you need a great instructor immediately for a class you are running next week for your most important client. You need to find all of the instructors who have experience with the subject, and who get great reviews from students every time. Not only that, you need to know if they are available to teach the course next week, negotiate rates, and book one of them for the class. How easy would that be to do on LinkedIn? Again, hours of research to find the candidates and you would be lucky to find someone available who you would risk using for your best client.
The CourseMax community gives you the tools to handle these situations with ease and much more. Take a look at the the Learn More pages to learn about all of the things you can do with the free tools in the CourseMax Community. So, why is it free. Simple...we want EVERYONE to join the community. The larger the community the more valuable it is for everyone involved. We're even providing easy to use tools for training providers to keep their schedule and course catalog up to date with little or no effort.
CourseMax CRM is built on top of a robust Customer Relationship Management platform
CourseMax CRM is our premium software for training organizations. CourseMax CRM 3.0 replaces CourseMax 2.0 and then some. We built version 3.0 as an enhancement to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. We rebuilt all of the functionality we had in CourseMax 2.0 on this new platform. But now it comes with so much more:
- Custom Reporting
- A powerful Workflow Engine
- Sales Process tracking
- Marketing Campaigns
- Customer Service Case tracking
- Activity tracking for e-mails, phone calls, chat, and letters
- Outlook Integration
- Powerful Customization Features
Your getting a full-blown CRM system set up just for a training organization. Every piece of information about your valuable customers is there in one place. Go ahead, ask me if we can add that feature you've been wishing for. Not only can we do it for you...you can do it yourself too! Or, if you don't have time, we're happy to do it for you.
Two online marketing channels to drive more sales
Your website and your community presence will both be working for you to help you reach out and let your customers find you online. Your customers can find, buy, and track all of their learning right through the community. If they come directly to your web site, they can register for a course and pay for it right on your web site too. Best of all, either way they do it, you'll have the order automatically recorded in CourseMax CRM.
The Power of Choice: Host your own OR Let us host it for you
Now you can purchase CourseMax CRM licenses and host it yourself on your own servers. You can also let us take care of all the hassle and pay a low monthly fee to use the service.
Learn about all of the new features of CourseMax CRM in the Learn More pages.
Visit this blog regularly or add our feed to your reader. We'll be posting Tips, Tricks, and Instructions for using the new software as well as important industry topics right here.