Monetising Training Courses: How to Sell Training to Your Channel Partners

Monetising your training courses is one of the most effective ways to turn your channel partner programme into a valuable revenue stream.

By offering targeted courses tailored to your partners' specific roles and needs, you can not only boost their performance and extend your product's reach, but also generate a steady stream of income in the process.

This step-by-step guide will walk you through how to sell channel partner training courses and the benefits they can bring to your business.

Step-by-Step Guide to Successfully Selling Training Courses

Effective partners recognise that training is essential for success, as it equips them with the knowledge to more efficiently sell your products, benefiting everyone involved.

Once they see how the training aligns with their goals, they’re often willing to invest in it.

Here are the key steps to take when monetising your channel partner training programme:

1. Understand the Case for Charging for Your Courses

While partners may prefer free courses, it's worth considering whether your current budget can support a high-quality programme. Without enough funding, the program's effectiveness may suffer.

Charging a small fee can be a smart move. It allows you to build a more comprehensive training programme, ensuring top-quality content while giving partners a sense of value and investment.

A modest fee can also boost the programme's resources and capabilities, ultimately leading to a better learning experience for everyone involved.

Related resource: Developing Training Programmes on a Budget: Tips and Strategies

2. Understand Your Audience

To truly understand your channel partners, start by opening up clear lines of communication. Surveys, feedback sessions, and regular check-ins are all great ways to gather insights into their specific needs, challenges, and goals.

Study their business models, market environments, and competitive landscapes. This will give you a clearer picture of what motivates them and how you can best support them.

Keep in mind that your partners will have varying skill levels and learning styles. Use this knowledge to build a training curriculum that caters to different preferences, making it more engaging and effective for everyone.

Also consider their business cycles and peak periods. Timing your training around these can significantly boost participation and impact.

When your training content reflects all of these insights, it becomes more relevant and useful to your partners.

3. Offer Courses that Solve Your Partners’ Problems

A good starting mindset to have is to consider your partners’ problems as your own.

Write down those who you believe would find your training courses valuable. From that list, cross-reference it with your current courses to see which ones match the needs of the partners you can help.

The number one factor should be how beneficial the courses would be to their success.

While you may work in the same industry and have similar goals, it’s not always the case that your people have the same training needs. Do additional research to ensure you don’t end up selling educational material your partners have no use for.

4. Develop a Pricing Strategy

When setting prices for your monetised training programme, consider different models like subscription-based, per-user, or tiered pricing to accommodate various partner needs and scales.

• Subscription-based pricing offers ongoing access for a regular fee
• Per-user pricing is great for specific, targeted training needs
• Tiered pricing can cater to different levels of engagement or company size

The cost of your training courses doesn’t have to be high. By utilising economies of scale, you can keep costs low for your partners while still maintaining profitability.

Part of this involves scaling up the training offerings efficiently to reduce the per-unit cost of delivering training.

Adopting these strategies will help you create a pricing structure that is attractive to partners and sustainable for your business.

5. Utilise a Specialist eLearning Platform

A quality LMS can simplify how you sell and deliver training courses to your channel partners. Look for one that's easy to navigate and integrates seamlessly with your CRM or marketing automation software.

With the right LMS in place, delivering courses to your channel partners becomes much more straightforward.

Here are some features you should look out for when choosing the best LMS for channel partner training:

1. Customisable learning paths: Tailor training to specific products, services, or skills relevant to each partner.
2. Scalability: Accommodate a growing number of users and courses.
3. Multi-tenant architecture: Create separate, customised environments for different partners.
4. Mobile accessibility: Ensure training materials are accessible on mobile devices.
5. Content integration and management: Easily manage and update training content.
6. Certification and compliance management: Track and manage necessary certifications.
7. Analytics and reporting tools: Monitor partner progress and identify training needs.
8. Social learning and collaboration tools: Encourage community learning through forums and chatrooms.
9. eCommerce capabilities: Integrate eCommerce for monetised training.
10. Multilingual support: Offer training in multiple languages.
11. Gamification: Enhance engagement with badges, leaderboards, and rewards.
12. Interactive and adaptive learning: Create interactive content that adapts to learner styles.
13. User-friendly interface: Ensure an intuitive and easy-to-navigate system.
14. System integration: Enable integration with CRM, HR, and other enterprise systems.

Related resource: How to Choose Partner Training Software

6. Plan for How to Support and Administer Your Programme

For a training programme to be successful, it's important to plan how you will manage and support it from the start.

There are a couple of key components to effective training management:

1. A dedicated LMS administrator oversees the LMS on a day-to-day basis, ensuring it runs smoothly and efficiently. Their responsibilities typically include defining user roles, creating custom certifications, providing feedback to learners, and offering consistent support to both users and learners.
2. Ongoing guidance and support are also critical to the success of an LMS. Providing learners with prompt assistance keeps them motivated and confident throughout their training. Quick responses build trust, strengthen relationships within your network, and ultimately improve the effectiveness of the training programme.

Related resource: How to Manage Your Training Programme Successfully

7. Create Compelling Content

The success of any training programme largely depends on its content being both engaging and informative.

To help create compelling content, you can incorporate real-world examples that resonate with your channel partners’ daily experiences, contextualising the training and making the learning more relevant and impactful.

Additionally, integrating interactive elements such as quizzes, interactive scenarios, and simulations can significantly enhance engagement.

Remember, the goal is to create content that educates and captivates your audience.

8. Gamify Your Courses to Encourage Participation

Using gamification in online training courses can significantly boost engagement and motivation among channel partners.

Gamification introduces elements like points, badges, leaderboards, and rewards, transforming learning into a more interactive and competitive experience, not only making training more enjoyable but also encouraging continuous participation and completion.

By setting up milestones and rewards, partners are incentivised to progress through the courses.

Incorporating these playful elements into your training strategy can make learning more appealing and effective, leading to higher completion rates and better knowledge retention.

9. Anticipate Challenges and Prepare For Them

Part of your plan to sell training courses should include exploring potential roadblocks.

One challenge is that you don't have direct control over your channel partners' employees, and they may not prioritise your training courses. To address this, integrate your company's mission, vision, and values into the courses and make that section mandatory.

After working together for a long time, your partners may also become complacent. Keep your training courses up to date and reorganise them when needed to ensure your partners stay informed and continue to develop their skills.

It's also worth noting that your channel partners may work with other businesses at the same time. Managing multiple methodologies can cause them to lose focus on your business, leading to weaker performance.

Use your LMS monitoring features to help them maintain the standards you've agreed upon.

Related resource: The Challenges of Channel Partner Training (and how to solve them)

10. Market Your Courses

Come up with a marketing plan that speaks to the people in charge of corporate training and shows how your courses will benefit their companies. Approach this like you would a marketing campaign to customers.

You should also deploy your marketing team to create an outreach strategy. Don’t forget to take testimonials from your pre-sold and pilot courses to emphasise their effectiveness.

11. Beef Up Your After-sales Service

Customer retention is key to profitability, with as little as a 5% increase leading to a 25% to 95% increase in profits.

Reduce troubleshooting by offering training courses to your partners, helping you retain them as customers. Put together a clear, comprehensive FAQ guide they can refer to whenever needed.

Good after-sales service leads to positive reviews. Use those testimonials to strengthen your marketing efforts and attract new prospects. You can also use your LMS to collect valuable feedback through quizzes and surveys.

12. Reward Compliance

Achieving 100% compliance with your training courses should be rewarded to incentivise your channel partners to fully engage with and learn from the courses you sell.

The higher the completion rate, the greater the chances your partners will perform better at selling your product.

Award them with formal certifications and digital badges that your partners can proudly display and use as promotional tools.

Special prizes such as giveaways and discounts can be even more motivating. Include a module in your training course that explains your incentive programme to ensure your partners and their employees are aware.

13. Use Feedback to Improve

Feedback is essential to improving your training programme.

Collect feedback regularly through surveys, interviews, and analytics to measure how effective your content and delivery are. Look for common themes and areas that need improvement.

Remember, communication goes both ways. Let your partners know how their feedback has influenced the programme.

This approach not only raises the quality of your training, but also shows your channel partners that you are committed to meeting their needs and expectations.

Benefits of Training Your Channel Partners Online

There are several advantages to training your channel partners online:

Increased Cost-efficiency

Delivering training through an eLearning platform is more cost-efficient than face-to-face classroom sessions. A Learning Management System (LMS) allows channel partners to access training anytime, anywhere, at a fraction of the cost.

Generates More Revenue

Providing training courses generates more revenue in several ways:

• Better-trained partners improve their performance and do a better job of selling your products.
• Partners who find value in your courses are more likely to recommend your business to others, meaning more potential partners for you.
• Monetising your training by selling courses can help solve budget issues, create a self-sustaining programme, or even turn a profit.

Elevates Your Status as an Authority in the Field

Valuable, branded training courses become powerful marketing materials. When your professional network talks about the value of your educational resources, you gain a reputation as an authority in your industry.

Offers Global Reach

Online training eliminates the logistical complexities and costs of location-bound training. It enables real-time updates, ensuring all partners are equally informed, regardless of location.

An online approach also creates a more inclusive learning environment, where partners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can benefit from tailored content, translated materials, or subtitles, helping to build a more cohesive and skilled partner network on a global scale.

Increases Training Efficiency

Online training streamlines the process, removing the need for physical venues, travel, and accommodation expenses. Delivering training at the click of a button ensures partners are onboarded quickly, leading to better partnerships and increased revenue.

Standardises Messaging

Online training platforms allow you to create and distribute centralised content that aligns with your goals and values. This ensures all partners receive the same information, maintaining a consistent brand message and eliminating the discrepancies that can arise in traditional training methods.

Offers Robust Tracking and Measurement Tools

Online training's tracking and measurement tools offer valuable insights for performance evaluation and continuous improvement. This data-driven approach allows organisations to measure the direct impact of training on business outcomes, such as sales performance or product knowledge, ensuring programmes are strategically aligned with broader business objectives.

Related resource: 8 Ways to Create Effective Channel Partner Training

Summary: The Key To Monetising Training Courses

Transform Your Partner Training Programme with Wahoo Learning

Are you looking to transform your partner training programme but need help managing the complexities of designing and delivering it?

With Wahoo Learning, you can deliver effective training programmes to your channel partners while reducing costs and boosting revenue.

Learn more about our managed learning services or contact us to discuss how we can help boost your partner training programme.