Item: Thinkific
Rating: 8
Author: Marc Alford

Overall Satisfaction with Thinkific

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Thinkific as both the internal LMS, and as a training platform for all of our partner offices across Canada and soon the US.

The main problem was standardizing training across 16 different offices in Canada, to streamline sales training so it could be easily scalable. We utilize Thinkific as the training platform for not just sales reps training, but also training on supervisor/leadership roles and beyond through all 5 major phases of the sales business. Each phase has it's own training dashboard.

Pros and Cons

Pros

learning platform customizability
ease of course content building and hosting external elements
analytics and completion reports

Cons

auto formatting of some course building content, does not format well on phone vs desktop
filter by group functionality for website based content, it's mostly filter by enrollments
the plug and play web building is convenient but really we need a UX/UI designer to build a super good looking website. Plug and play builder works but doesnt look SUPER sharp if done by someone with no dev skills or coding ability

Return on Investment

pre thinkific vs post thinkific launch for sales training, our sales reps are getting their first solo sale on average 0.6 days faster. Before it was 5.7 days on average to sell by themselves, now it is 5.1 days on average accross 1500 sales reps that have completed the training since launching the training in May 2024

Usability

while it is promoted as plug n play, a lot of the elements require some knowledge of web building and coding, especially manipulating course snips in HTML. It is great and super user friendly as long as you have a base understanding on how to read html and have previous experience using web builders like WIX, Shopify, or Wordpress, but if you have 0 experience in coding, UI or web builders, it will have a decent learning curve

Alternatives Considered

We used a training platform called Rise. While it was a good platform to build and host courses, it gave us zero room for custom options and or branding. Thinkific allowed us to create our own branded website to house courses, and hide content based on where they are in their development, to have multiple dashboards (phases) and to have content visible.. but locked, offered a much more complex and unique user experience vs just having one content library in an all courses list that offered no unique learning path experience

Key Insights

Do you think Thinkific delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Thinkific's feature set?

Yes

Did Thinkific live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Thinkific go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Thinkific again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Adobe Illustrator CC, Canva, Adobe InDesign

Likelihood to Recommend

To have 16 different offices have material that is unique to them, all on the same URL dashboard, as we can hide content from one office to the next based on their enrollments, this gives us pretty awesome custom options to tailor training here and there to be specific to each office

Comments

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