Each Blueprinter software user needs his/her own subscription. Here's why... plus some cost-reduction strategies.
Pricing for Blueprinter software and the Blueprinting Center is more complex than many SaaS offerings because it involves two things 1) initial training and 2) ongoing tools (software).
As shown in the pricing at the bottom of www.blueprintingtraining.com, there is a $1495 charge for everything for the first year and then $39/month for software after year one. Roughly 2/3 of this first-year cost is for “training” (workshop, e-learning, BlueHelp, certification, etc.) and roughly 1/3 is for the first year of software.
There are three reasons we don’t want people sharing their subscriptions with a colleague (beside violating the subscription agreement):
- The most important is that sharing subscriptions leads to an untrained person trying to conduct important customer interviews with advanced, unfamiliar tools. Someone “borrowing” another’s password would have missed the considerable B2B VOC skills training that comes with the first-year subscription.
- The initial subscription gives users access to the Blueprinting Center for life, so they can pursue Blue Belt certification. The Blueprinting Center automatically tracks an individual’s activities for certification (# of interviews, # of completed e-learning modules, tests passed, etc.)… so it would be quite a mess if two people tried to use the same Blueprinting Center account.
- Blueprinting team members play very active roles in projects. So if the team added “John” to its project in Blueprinter software (or sets him up as a Discovery Note-taker… or Preference Moderator) this would become unwieldy if “John” is really “Fred” borrowing John’s software.
But we understand why a client would not want to pay for “everything” when a user is going to be minimally involved. Consider these four levels of participation as a way to minimize costs:
- Full, steady user: This person pays for the full training and continues their software access ($1495 for the first year, then $39/mo). This would be good for marketing or product managers that often develop new products, engineers involved in many new products, etc.
- Full, intermittent user: This person pays for full training, but does not renew their software subscription each year. The good news is they never lose access to the Blueprinting Center and can continue their software subscription (or not) whenever it comes up for renewal. With this, you’ve paid to get a fully-trained employee, and then only paid for the tools when he or she needs them.
- Intermittent “Observer”: Someone serving as an interview Moderator or Note-taker should get full training, but this need not be the case for the Observer role. Consider sending them to a public workshop (see www.blueprintingworkshop.com) where they’ll learn enough for this supporting role. This $395 option is a good fit for those that will always have fully-trained colleague(s) with them in their customer interviews. ("Fully-trained" individuals have attended this workshop, AND been coached on a real project, while employing the many resources in their Blueprinting Center.)
- Supporting role: For those needing a general awareness of Blueprinting—or just enough familiarity to invite customer to an interview—you may find that this free website is sufficient: www.blueprintingforsales.com. As the name implies, this 45-minute overview is ideal for familiarizing your sales team with Blueprinting.
We believe The AIM Institute is “aligned” with clients on this: First, we don’t want you paying for anything you don’t need. So let’s just train the people who need training when they need training… and let’s only have them pay for the software when they’re using it.
Second, let’s think beyond “projects” to building career-long skills in your employees (as with Blue Belt certification). This is how you consistently out-perform your competitors.
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