This article outlines everything from what is channel partner training to the four significant pitfalls of channel partner training that organizations must avoid. It also explains how the best LMS for partner training can help overcome potential difficulties by identifying the trouble spots and making your partner training program successful.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
What Is Channel Partner Training?
Your channel partners could be franchises, wholesalers, distributors, or resellers.
The term “channel partner training” refers to training companies and individuals involved in the resale of your product offerings. One must design partner skill-building initiatives to help partners close more sales by assisting them in introducing your products to customers in the best possible light.
It is essential to train your partner network to provide customers with the best service possible, which helps build brand loyalty.
Partner training includes everything from orientation and training partners to training programs. By instructing your channel partners, you give them the knowledge they need to work effectively across your existing system.
Every aspect of your business, from sales and market reach to growth potential, will benefit from training partners and increasing their knowledge about your products or services.
Benefits Of Channel Partner Training
Partner training offers various advantages for your company. Here are a few of those benefits.
- Creates and safeguards your company’s brand.
Various partners may imply multiple voices shaping the story about your product. Training your channel partners ensures that your brand remains constant with each of its narrators.
- Spend less on support.
You don’t have to constantly reskill a partner when things go wrong if you train them properly from the beginning of your interaction. They’ll know how to avoid issues and deal with them when they arise.
- Increase retention of customers.
Increased partner responsiveness to customer issues also results from improved partner performance—this responsiveness results in higher customer retention rates.
- Enhance performance.
Partners have access to the best messaging to spread awareness of your product and promote widespread adoption. Your products remain on top by regularly adding new training content.
- Manage expectations.
When you are not meeting expectations, there is less room for surprise, whereas when clearly stated, expectations must be met on both your and the partner’s end.
Channel partner training has undeniable advantages. But partner training has its difficulties when it’s poorly implemented. Below are some challenges organizations face with channel partner training.
Challenges Of Channel Partner Training
Obtaining Organizational Support On The Inside
Partner training can be difficult because most businesses find it challenging to accept it and fail to see its value. The importance of offering training programs to boost your partner channel’s efficiency is underappreciated and frequently forgotten.
Solution: To win their support, you’ll need to persuade your organization’s members and make them aware of the benefits training can have on your business and partner relations. Explain to them how educating your business partners about your goods and services will benefit them in maintaining brand consistency and loyalty.
If budget concerns you, you can promote delivering partner training using an LMS. With the help of the tool, partners can easily access training materials in their language, which helps improve the completion rates and, consequently, the ROI of your efforts. It makes using an LMS a cost-effective decision.
Channel Partner Engagement
Once you have convinced your stakeholders, then comes the main challenge – partner engagement. Keeping channel partners engaged with the courses is necessary to ensure the success of your training efforts.
Solution: The best way to deal with this is to bring the team members with the relevant experience on board. No one would know your channel partners more than your sales team, so it’s highly recommended you take their opinion and use their expertise when creating a training session.
In addition, you won’t know what will work unless you discuss your options with your partners. Thus you must consult with your partners about what information they would like, what kind of support they need, and how they would like to receive it from the beginning.
Moreover, it would be best if you also leveraged eLearning technologies.
A learning management system is an excellent tool to help keep your partners engaged. This tool often comes with features like gamification and certifications and has multi-lingual abilities, which may improve the engagement rate.
Finance And Funding
No matter the project, funding will always be a major obstacle for most organizations. HR departments are often responsible for budgeting across departments, and convincing them to allocate resources to train external partners is certainly challenging. After all, it is about more than just offering training to partners. It also involves creating the course, ensuring its relevance, finding the right medium to deliver it, and analyzing the results.
Solution: Using an LMS that easily integrates with authoring tools is all you need to convince your HRs or those who manage budgets in your organization. Using this integration and subject matter experts in your organization helps you create a relevant and engaging course.
As we discussed, engaging in training courses helps bring improved completion rates and ROI. Furthermore, the knowledge your partners will gain from the training sessions will ensure brand consistency and customer satisfaction.
All this combined makes investing in an LMS and in partner training a cost-effective decision.
Data Collection
One challenge that most organizations face is collecting partner training data. Today, data is extremely valuable. You can direct your training efforts toward success when you have the relevant insights and reports.
Organizations that still use traditional training methods are often faced with such challenges.
Solution: This is another challenge a learning management system can easily help tackle.
Most LMS offers reporting as a feature. You can use this feature to not only personalize your training course for each partner but also to identify completion rates, certifications, and relevance of your course. Most organizations use such data to rework their training program and make them more apt for their partners.
Bottom Line
While highly beneficial for your organization and network, training your channel partners does present some difficulties. Businesses that are about to start preparing their channel partners—through formal eLearning or a blended learning approach—will run into problems that need immediate fixing. However, the best LMS will assist you in coordinating, planning, and implementing the training that equips your partners to perform excellent work and simplify the entire process.
