Making A Hard Sell Easy

The FinPa New Media Story

In the late 1990s when Damian O'Sullivan was working in resource development at Melbourne’s Swinburne University he discovered a colleague developing a computer-based training program. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Man, that is just crazy; that is the future’.” O’Sullivan was so inspired that he decided to try it himself. He applied for funding to develop a CD ROM on risk assessment for CitiPower; he won the funding and the contract. So began Intuitive Training Solutions, his first business consultancy based on computer training. He says: “I thought: 'Here's a way to make a living'."

The first 12 months were hard work as O’Sullivan — a former ESL teacher with qualifications in Spanish and Portuguese — struggled to teach himself computer programming. He says: “I just wasn’t that good at it.” Eventually he realised there were programmers around who could do it better. Playing to his strengths, he employed computer experts for the technological work while he concentrated on the training programs’ educational aspects.

That experience sowed the seeds for FinPa New Media, an online education business that O’Sullivan started in 2002 with a former colleague and teacher, Roe Maas. O’Sullivan says: “We enable companies with an end-to-end solution for delivering training online. It combines the expertise of computer technologists such as video with educators to design interactive, educational resources.”

O’Sullivan thought he had a great product on his hands but the concept was hard to sell. They struggled to make potential clients understand their offering and what it would take to get their training content online. Clients would come into his office, throw their manual at him and say, “There you are. Put it online.” But as O’Sullivan explains, it’s a lot more complex than that.

Before putting a client’s training resources online, many issues need to be considered. What language(s) do the client’s staff speak? how literate are they? how accessible are computers in the workplace? O’Sullivan says: “Our sales pitch ended up being an expensive educational session. We were spending a lot of time and resources on presales. Sometimes we spent days or even weeks talking to clients and assessing huge volumes of content without always getting the sale.”

O’Sullivan says “It was too hard to buy from us. We knew our stuff was really good but we never had a clearly defined offering.” The company has great equipment such as green-screen technology, which allows clients to be videoed and later digitally placed in their choice of background. “But how were we going to get it into peoples’ hands so they could look at it, play with it, show it to people in their organisation?”

As sales leads turned into lead weights, the financial situation began to look grim. “You start having months where you’ve got more money going out than coming in. The only way we survived was on a line of credit.”

The Challenge

How to engage clients.

The Solution

O’Sullivan and his team realised they had to change their business model to survive. They needed to minimize unproductive downtime and achieve sales. In other words, the company had to engage fast and furiously with potential clients. O’Sullivan believed clients needed to be educated about what it would take to get their training online. O’Sullivan says: “We had to put our money where our mouth is and educate our clients.”

This lead to the development of a client-engagement program, which turns the sales pitch into an educational demonstration of the product. It is visually compelling, interactive and teaches the stages of getting training online while it sells the concept. O’Sullivan says: “A visual representation shows the whole engagement model. You click on any step and it is clearly defined.”

The first step for a client to get their training online is to assess their e-Learning readiness. This means a client’s content must be in a certain shape before FinPa’s designers can begin work. Some clients are not e-Learning ready because their written content is not available, comprehensive or accurate enough. Sometimes, O’Sullivan says, the content exists only in a client’s mind and needs to be assembled.

To become e-Learning ready, clients may rework their training content themselves or hire FinPa’s consultancy. O’Sullivan says: “In the past we spent a lot of time on presales and it was murky for the customer and us, and then maybe they wouldn’t go with us anyway. Now we’ve created a consultancy from presales costs. We very quickly qualify the sale and offer an initial consultancy / workshop if the customer wants to continue down the path of e-Learning.”

The new business model does not focus on selling a whizz-bang premium product with one cheque at the end. Instead, O'Sullivan sees the business’s success riding on the long-term relationship with the client. He says: “It’s a royalty model. We make a little bit of money from each student that comes through the online training. You can sleep and still make the money.”

Educating clients about the process has paid dividends. O’Sullivan says: “In a job pending for a Registered Training Organisation, initially worth $80,000 with ongoing income coming from additional e-Learning projects over several years, the client said, ‘You taught us better than anyone about what it’s going to take to put this online’.”

Another light-bulb moment for O’Sullivan was deciding to define his ideal customer: somebody passionate about their brand and content, who is interested in the learning and not just about pushing out content for the sake of it. Accordingly, O’Sullivan seeks out partnerships with organisations that have high-quality content and access to large markets, such as associations with a large membership. O’Sullivan says such partnerships bring together a winning combination: high-quality content delivered at a low cost with easy access to a large group of participants.

The Result

FinPa New Media is now the e-Learning partner of some of Australia’s leading training organisations including the Group Training Association and the Master Builders Association of Victoria. In 2007, FinPa New Media earned a position on the Victorian Government’s e-services panel and since August 2008 has been one of 23 e-Learning companies on the preferred supplier panel for the Australian Public Service Commission.

FinPa New Media has been recognized by awards too. It was a finalist in the 2004 Australian Interactive Media Industry Association awards in the “Best Learning” category and the 2005 Victorian Training Awards for Training Initiative of the Year. It won the Judith Bissland Innovation in Education Award at Swinburne University in 2005. In 2006, AusIndustry recognised FinPa New Media with a Commercialisation of Emerging Technologies (COMET) grant worth $65,000 in the first round and a subsequent $55,000 in the second round.

O’Sullivan says: “In the past couple of financial years, business has been reasonably flat and it has only started to go north because we made more sales when we had a clearer offering to the market and it was easier to put the product into our clients’ hands. Between 2007¬–08 and 2008–09 FinPa enjoyed a 27% increase in revenue. O’Sullivan says the great story about the company’s growth will be in six to twelve months time. “Now we have all the infrastructure, partnerships and big clients with lots of people needing training who are going to use our system. So we know it’s a very positive outlook in terms of growth.”

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