Strategic Learning Alignment: Make Training a Powerful Business Partner
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View or edit your browsing history. Get to Know Us. Not Enabled Word Wise: Enabled Average Customer Review: Be the first to review this item Amazon Bestsellers Rank: Would you like to report this content as inappropriate? So providing elearning courses for your channel partners that drive performance in this area is crucial. For example, courses that teach how to communicate with your customers will help VARs to talk about your product in an educated way.
Depending on the experience of your channel partners, you may offer basic training in good communication skills. Outcomes like these can be indicators of the value of your channel partner training program. Positive results on these means the course is effective, and if the results move in tandem with your business KPIs, it means you have good alignment and the course supports the business goals.
The churn rate is the number of customers who decide not to renew after their subscription for a particular service ends. Although predicting the churn rate of your customer base is not an exact science, a proactive channel partner elearning program can help lower your churn rate by enabling representatives to retain customers.
For instance, when they are better instructed on how to deal with their confused customers, they're less likely to think of the situation as your company's fault. So in elearning courses like this, some potential outcomes might be:. Upselling and cross-selling are important business drivers that increase the customer lifetime value LTV.
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A solid elearning program should teach your channel partners how they can get those upsells and cross-sells. Some of this has to do with communication, but a lot of it has to do with teaching selling techniques that not everyone may come to their job with. Elearning courses should include topics such as easy tools for selling, the fundamentals of the selling process, and how to look for potential sales leads.
That is — what type of training content will you deliver and how will you product that content?
Your partners may need to be trained to use, understand or support your product. They need to know how to talk to customers about it and how to sell it.
A Beginner’s Guide to Building an Online Channel Partner Training Program
Occasionally, partners need more general sales training — a course in how to make a sale, for example. Partners may even require certification in a certain type of technology or software product in order to sell it effectively. Channel partners need to know the ins and outs of your products and services. This is where certification comes in. In many cases, being a channel partner means being certified by a company both to sell and support its products. Large corporations offer online academies for their partners, but smaller companies can also offer online training by using learning management systems.
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These systems allow them to build and deliver training and certification to partners remotely. Occasionally, partners may need more general training, such as a sales course or certification in a type of technology. For example, as more and more software companies begin to sell cloud solutions, there is more need than ever to provide cloud-related training to partners who might not know how to talk to customers about the cloud and its related security and privacy issues.
In this case, because the subject is so broad and not tailored to any one product or service, you might consider sending your partners to an outside trainer like CompTIA , which provides vendor-neutral IT certifications. There are several vendor-neutral certifications available.
Strategic Learning Alignment: Make Training a Powerful Business Partner)] [ Author: Rita Mehegan Smith] [Jun] on bahana-line.com *FREE* shipping on. Strategic Learning Alignment shows you how to align your training initiatives to organizational strategy to ensure Make Training a Powerful Business Partner.
While the merits of third-party certifications can be a subject of debate, vendor-neutral certifications take the onus of providing all necessary training off the manufacturer. If you need to train your partners to sell your specific product, you will probably need to develop your own training module.
If, however your partners need more basic training, you might be able to send them to a vendor-neutral program. Do you need to provide in-person training to demonstrate a product, or can you deliver it online, using a learning management system?
Perhaps a hybrid approach, in which some training is delivered live while other training is conducted via an online portal, would work best for your company and partners. If you have the money, you might be able to hire an instructional designer or a videographer. If not, you can create course materials online using tools that allow you to shoot and edit video, add quizzes and tests or share presentations. Many companies find the relationships complicated by vast education gaps, outside influences, and a wealth of other factors.
Like so many relationship problems, however, the solution lies in better communication. And while the best way to do that is through highly effective, ongoing training, driving training adoption, engagement and completion can be a challenge. The first step to overcoming potential opposition to channel partner training is to commit, from the top of your Channel Marketing or Channel Sales department on down, to creating a lasting culture of learning among your partner network.
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The Solution — Incorporate Corporate Culture: Create training content on the origins of your business, its core values, and its approach to customer management, and make it a mandatory part of your channel partner training program. As your channel partner relationships mature, you end up communicating with them less often. This creates unnecessary problems. Your partners must have always-on access to the tools they need to be successful.
Provide them with dedicated logins to a modern learning platform where they can access on-demand courseware. Channel partners are typically solicited by and contracted to a multitude of different companies.