How Trainual AI makes employee training faster

Helping your small business document faster and train smarter.

Welcome to The Manual Weekly – LI Edition, the can’t-miss newsletter for small business leaders. You’ll find snackable bits of news highlighting emerging trends, actionable resources, and proven best practices that can help take your business to the next level.

Hot off the SMB press this week:

• Collect customer testimonials with this process template.
• 4 ways companies used to sell for over $50M.
• These built-in AI tools are gonna transform your documentation and training.

Template of the week: Collecting Customer Testimonials Process

When we’re in the buying process — like when we’re looking at new products or services for our business — we usually look for evidence of other customers’ experiences.

Typically on websites, marketers highlight catchy one-liner customer testimonials (hey, we do it too!). They're easy to absorb and instill confidence. But oftentimes, we want more robust, thoughtful customer testimonials. Ones that are full of the details you want when you’re making your final decision.

So, it makes sense that your own customer base would look for those kinds of testimonials on your site, right? But if you don’t feature any long-form customer stories, you could be losing the more cautious consumers who need an extra little nudge to try your products or services for themselves.

👉 Not sure how to get started gathering customer testimonials (long and short)? You need to set up a process — and what better way to do that than with our Collecting Customer Testimonials Process template. This step-by-step standard operating procedure (SOP) will teach your team the importance of testimonials, how to reach out to customers, and provide answers to common FAQs. It just needs your company’s unique touch, and it’s ready to share with your team.

Want more templates to help you build your business playbook? Check out our entire template archive of free, multimedia-enhanced, and customizable policy, process, and role starters. New to Trainual? Try for free.

4 ways to maximize your business’ saleable value

Wait, who said anything about selling?

Sure, you might not be looking to sell your business right now. (Or ever, for that matter.) But it’s something that should always be in the back of your mind as you grow.

Why? To be frank, if you couldn’t sell your business tomorrow, you’re not doing it right. Because it likely means that you’re not building a scalable and acquirable business that can be transitioned away from your direct involvement. AKA, it wouldn’t survive without you (and you’re not making decisions that’ll help make that happen — which is the key to building a scalable and saleable company).

Not to mention, chances are good you’ve been bitten by the business bug. AKA, you’ve got that entrepreneurial itch that tells you to take new ideas and run with them. So, if and when the time comes that you feel called to prioritize your next endeavor, you want to be ready to take action. Which means selling your current business and using the capital gained to start your new one.

🔥 Tip: When you establish smooth-running processes now, you can present potential buyers with the repeatable systems that make your business and the blueprint to running it (AKA, Trainual). Helping you establish trust with your buyer and communicate your business’s value for a successful sale.

So how do you create a business with such obvious enterprise value that big buyers will pay millions for it? Here’s the four-step formula that companies valued at $50M or more have followed:

Step 1: Deliver a ton of value customers can't readily get elsewhere.

Billionaire James Williamson offers this advice for becoming rich: Find a niche. Crush it. Deliver more value than anyone else.

In the same way, what you’re offering must have at least three differentiators from your competition. Especially if your product or services are not totally distinct and unattainable elsewhere.

And remember buyers are going to ask themselves this question: Is it more cost-effective for us to buy this company, or can we just build our version? You want to make sure you’ve laid out the groundwork that makes your business uniquely valuable for potential buyers.

👉 See all four steps.

How AI can help you document faster (and scale quicker)

Really? Because I need all the help I can get.

Would we lie to you? Since the start of the year, tons of different AI software have popped up — designed to help people (and businesses) automate their work. And if it makes our customers’ lives easier, you know we had to build those AI features into Trainual.

Couldn’t I just use ChatGPT?

We thought you wanted to save time, not waste it! Skip the unnecessary copy and paste with 🪄 Compose, the first of Trainual AI features. Just provide a few simple bullet points of the information you’d like to include, and AI will provide fully written paragraphs with all the knowledge your team could possibly need.

Sometimes, you know the exact details of what needs to be documented, but it’s hard to put those details into words. Now, as long as you have your topic and step titles filled out, Trainual AI can document the information you just can’t get out of your brain — saving you a lot of time and effort that you can use to focus on other aspects of your business.

Okay, what else you got?

Glad you asked — we’re continuously working on new ways to integrate AI into Trainual so that your business playbook can literally build itself. You can check out our new AI-powered search, which provides straightforward answers to questions you type in the search bar, along with more optimized search results. Getting you the information you need sooner and more efficiently than ever before.

Up next, do you already have some processes documented in Microsoft Word or Google Docs that you dread having to copy into Trainual?

You can now import your old files straight into your account and have it fully ready to share with your team — no restructuring required. Powered by AI, this feature reviews your doc as it’s importing to determine the best places to break down the information into bite-sized chunks. Making sure information is easy to digest when your team is training.

👉 Learn more about our current AI features. Or try all of Trainual’s AI capabilities for yourself — start a free trial.

This week's highlight reel

👩👧👦 Mom’s the word. The Mama Ladder International is partnering with several sponsors to offer the High Five Grant — helping ambitious mom entrepreneurs across the globe grow their businesses. Eight finalists will receive grants of up to $10K, office furniture credit, and free product marketing strategy meetings. Fall 2023 applications are accepted through Sept. 30.

🏎 Ka-chow! 7Eleven’s Instagram went from zero to 60 600K followers with their new strategy: turning it into a car account. Where all they do is post souped-up cars in front of their stores. We’re not surprised that they’ve seen 475% engagement growth since launching #CarsOf7ELEVEn… since Reels of stale, rolling hot dogs aren’t the most appetizing.

💸 “…when the grind takes more than 9 to 5, yeah.” The Department of Labor revealed a proposed rule where businesses would be required to pay salaried workers overtime if they make under $55K per year. If it goes through, it’ll be at a steep cost to businesses (at least those subject to the Fair Labor Standards Act).

🎃 Step aside PSL. Fall flavors are here! And sure, you could get in line for that classic pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks… for the ninth time this month. (Hey, we’re not judging.) But other companies are really going the extra mile to prove their seasonal spirit, too. Introducing new products like pumpkin spice-flavored Red Vines and apple pie-flavored milk. Hey, not knocking ‘em ‘til we try ‘em.

It’s the end of an era — we’re putting a pause on our highlight reel. But don’t fret. We’ll be delivering a brand new section starting next week (sneak peek: Trainual Tips, anyone?). 👀