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.
MONTREAL – Travel company Transat AT Inc. reported a loss in its latest quarter compared with a profit a year earlier as its revenue edged lower.
The parent company of Air Transat says it lost $39.9 million or $1.03 per diluted share in its quarter ended July 31.
The result compared with a profit of $57.3 million or $1.49 per diluted share a year earlier.
Revenue in what was the company’s third quarter totalled $736.2 million, down from $746.3 million in the same quarter last year.
On an adjusted basis, Transat says it lost $1.10 per share in its latest quarter compared with an adjusted profit of $1.10 per share a year earlier.
Transat chief executive Annick Guérard says demand for leisure travel remains healthy, as evidenced by higher traffic, but consumers are increasingly price conscious given the current economic uncertainty.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
Dollarama Inc.’s food aisles may have expanded far beyond sweet treats or piles of gum by the checkout counter in recent years, but its chief executive maintains his company is “not in the grocery business,” even if it’s keeping an eye on the sector.
“It’s just one small part of our store,” Neil Rossy told analysts on a Wednesday call, where he was questioned about the company’s food merchandise and rivals playing in the same space.
“We will keep an eye on all retailers — like all retailers keep an eye on us — to make sure that we’re competitive and we understand what’s out there.”
Over the last decade and as consumers have more recently sought deals, Dollarama’s food merchandise has expanded to include bread and pantry staples like cereal, rice and pasta sold at prices on par or below supermarkets.
However, the competition in the discount segment of the market Dollarama operates in intensified recently when the country’s biggest grocery chain began piloting a new ultra-discount store.
The No Name stores being tested by Loblaw Cos. Ltd. in Windsor, St. Catharines and Brockville, Ont., are billed as 20 per cent cheaper than discount retail competitors including No Frills. The grocery giant is able to offer such cost savings by relying on a smaller store footprint, fewer chilled products and a hearty range of No Name merchandise.
Though Rossy brushed off notions that his company is a supermarket challenger, grocers aren’t off his radar.
“All retailers in Canada are realistic about the fact that everyone is everyone’s competition on any given item or category,” he said.
Rossy declined to reveal how much of the chain’s sales would overlap with Loblaw or the food category, arguing the vast variety of items Dollarama sells is its strength rather than its grocery products alone.
“What makes Dollarama Dollarama is a very wide assortment of different departments that somewhat represent the old five-and-dime local convenience store,” he said.
The breadth of Dollarama’s offerings helped carry the company to a second-quarter profit of $285.9 million, up from $245.8 million in the same quarter last year as its sales rose 7.4 per cent.
The retailer said Wednesday the profit amounted to $1.02 per diluted share for the 13-week period ended July 28, up from 86 cents per diluted share a year earlier.
The period the quarter covers includes the start of summer, when Rossy said the weather was “terrible.”
“The weather got slightly better towards the end of the summer and our sales certainly increased, but not enough to make up for the season’s horrible start,” he said.
Sales totalled $1.56 billion for the quarter, up from $1.46 billion in the same quarter last year.
Comparable store sales, a key metric for retailers, increased 4.7 per cent, while the average transaction was down2.2 per cent and traffic was up seven per cent, RBC analyst Irene Nattel pointed out.
She told investors in a note that the numbers reflect “solid demand as cautious consumers focus on core consumables and everyday essentials.”
Analysts have attributed such behaviour to interest rates that have been slow to drop and high prices of key consumer goods, which are weighing on household budgets.
To cope, many Canadians have spent more time seeking deals, trading down to more affordable brands and forgoing small luxuries they would treat themselves to in better economic times.
“When people feel squeezed, they tend to shy away from discretionary, focus on the basics,” Rossy said. “When people are feeling good about their wallet, they tend to be more lax about the basics and more willing to spend on discretionary.”
The current economic situation has drawn in not just the average Canadian looking to save a buck or two, but also wealthier consumers.
“When the entire economy is feeling slightly squeezed, we get more consumers who might not have to or want to shop at a Dollarama generally or who enjoy shopping at a Dollarama but have the luxury of not having to worry about the price in some other store that they happen to be standing in that has those goods,” Rossy said.
“Well, when times are tougher, they’ll consider the extra five minutes to go to the store next door.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
TORONTO – The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ordered TD Bank Group to pay US$28 million for repeatedly sharing inaccurate, negative information about its customers to consumer reporting companies.
The agency says TD has to pay US$7.76 million in total to tens of thousands of victims of its illegal actions, along with a US$20 million civil penalty.
It says TD shared information that contained systemic errors about credit card and bank deposit accounts to consumer reporting companies, which can include credit reports as well as screening reports for tenants and employees and other background checks.
CFPB director Rohit Chopra says in a statement that TD threatened the consumer reports of customers with fraudulent information then “barely lifted a finger to fix it,” and that regulators will need to “focus major attention” on TD Bank to change its course.
TD says in a statement it self-identified these issues and proactively worked to improve its practices, and that it is committed to delivering on its responsibilities to its customers.
The bank also faces scrutiny in the U.S. over its anti-money laundering program where it expects to pay more than US$3 billion in monetary penalties to resolve.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
