What to Charge for Corporate CPR Training

A dental office calls and asks what you charge to certify eight staff. Most training companies answer with their public class price times eight. That answer loses the job about as often as it wins it, and when it wins, it usually wins at the wrong number.

Corporate training is not a retail class sold in bulk. It is a different product with a different cost structure, and pricing it like a discount on the public rate is how owners end up driving across the county for less than they make in their own classroom.

The two ways owners get this wrong

The first mistake is quoting the public price with no discount. The buyer already knows what a seat costs, because it is on your website. If there is no advantage to booking eight at once, there is no reason to book eight at once, and they send people to your public class one at a time instead. You get the same revenue and lose the relationship.

The second mistake is the panicked discount. Someone asks for a better rate, the owner has no structure to fall back on, and picks a number on the phone. That number becomes the price forever, it is different for every client, and none of it survives contact with a bigger group later.

If your group price is a number you invent on the call, it is not a price. It is a flinch.

What fixes both is a published ladder. The rate falls as the group grows, everyone in the group pays the same rate, and the buyer can see the whole structure before they call. That removes the negotiation entirely, because the discount is already in writing.

The ladder we actually run

These are our real onsite prices, per student, with a five student minimum. They are on the site, in a calculator, so a buyer can price their own group at midnight without talking to anyone.

• 5 students, the minimum: $80 per student
• 6 to 10 students: $78 per student
• 11 to 15 students: $73 per student
• 16 to 30 students: $68 per student
• 30 or more students: $60 per student

Two things about that ladder are worth stealing. The steps are small, and the floor is high. A common instinct is to make the top tier dramatic, something like half price at thirty students. Resist it. The instructor hour costs the same whether the room holds six people or twenty six, and the manikins do not get cheaper. A shallow ladder still gives the buyer a reason to consolidate, without training a whole market to wait for your biggest discount.

The other quiet decision in there: our BLS and Heartsaver ladders land on the same per student numbers even though the public prices differ. The buyer of a group is buying a visit, not a course catalogue. Making the group rate depend on which course they picked adds a conversation nobody wanted.

The minimum is doing more work than the price

The five student minimum is not there to squeeze anyone. It is there because a three person onsite job is a loss dressed up as a booking. You still load the car, still drive, still set up, still run the skills checks, and still do the paperwork. The only thing that shrank is the revenue.

The minimum also gives you a clean, friendly answer to the small enquiry instead of an awkward one. Nobody has to be told no. They get sent to the public class, or told to add the front office to reach five, which is how a three person job quietly becomes a six person job.

ACLS and PALS are a different shape

Advanced courses do not fit a five student minimum, because a hospital sending two nurses for ACLS is a completely normal request. So that ladder starts at one, and it steps down much harder: from the single student rate it falls at every head for the first several students before flattening out.

The reason it can be steeper is that the advanced course starts from a much higher price, so there is room to move without going under the cost of the instructor hour. The principle is the same as the group ladder, the arithmetic just has more space in it.

What actually goes in the quote

Price is the smallest part of a corporate quote. What the buyer is really trying to work out is whether this is going to be a problem for them.

1. 01The per student rate and the total, both stated plainly. Never make an office manager do the multiplication.
2. 02What you bring, item by item. Manikins, AED trainers, materials. This is the line that separates you from someone teaching off a laptop.
3. 03How long it takes and what the room needs. A buyer blocking calendars needs to know whether this is two hours or a day.
4. 04When cards arrive. Same day is a genuine differentiator, and it is the detail that gets forwarded to the person who actually approves the spend.
5. 05What happens to the person who calls in sick. Every group has one. Saying they can join a public class later removes the last objection.

Notice that four of those five are not about money. Corporate buyers are not price shopping the way individuals do. They are risk shopping. The quote that wins is usually the one that reads like it has been done before.

Publish the ladder

The strongest argument for putting the whole ladder on the page is that it works while you are teaching. A facilities manager pricing a staff day at nine at night is not going to fill in a contact form to find out whether you are in budget. They are going to find someone whose numbers are visible.

The objection is always that a competitor will see it. They will. They will also see it if they call you pretending to be a dental office, which takes about four minutes. Pricing is not the moat. Being the company that answers the question before it is asked is the moat.