When you work with channel partners to extend the reach of your products, it is in your best interests to look towards improving channel partner performance.
One of the best ways to aid channel partner success is to supply them with a training program with specific courses focused on their role and business.
This article will explain how to sell channel partner training courses and how they benefit your organisation, all in a step-by-step guide on how to do it successfully.
Step-by-Step Guide to Successfully Selling Your 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 program:
1. Understand the Case for Charging for Your Courses
While partners may favour complimentary courses, consider whether your existing budget can support the development of a high-quality program – without sufficient funding, the program’s effectiveness could be compromised.
Implementing a nominal fee can be a strategic move, enabling the creation of a more comprehensive and beneficial training program. This approach ensures the delivery of top-tier content and creates a sense of value and investment among partners.
By charging a modest amount, you can enhance the program’s resources and capabilities, leading to a more enriching learning experience.
Related resource: Developing Channel Partner Training Programs on a Tight Budget: Tips and Strategies
2. Understand Your Audience
This means delving into the specific needs, challenges, and aspirations of your channel partners. You can start by establishing open communication channels – surveys, feedback sessions, and regular check-ins can be invaluable.
Analyse their business models, market environments, and competitive landscapes to understand what drives them.
Beyond this, it’s essential to recognise the varying skill levels and learning styles within your audience, which allows for the development of a diverse training curriculum that caters to different learning preferences, ensuring broader engagement and effectiveness.
Additionally, understanding their business cycles and peak periods can help in timing your training for maximum impact and participation.
By tailoring your training content to these detailed insights, you not only make it more relevant and engaging but also position it as an indispensable tool for their success – only enhancing the appeal of your program and strengthening your partnerships by demonstrating your commitment to their growth and success.
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 channel partner training program, 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, and 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
Streamline your training course sales process with the help of an established LMS. A quality LMS that is designed for channel partner training should have an intuitive design that is easy for users to understand and can smoothly integrate with your CRM or marketing automation software. With such features in mind, course delivery to your channel partners can be hassle-free.
Here are some features you should look out for when choosing the best LMS for channel partner training:
- Customisable learning paths: Tailor training to specific products, services, or skills relevant to each partner.
- Scalability: Accommodate a growing number of users and courses.
- Multi-tenant architecture: Create separate, customised environments for different partners.
- Mobile accessibility: Ensure training materials are accessible on mobile devices.
- Content integration and management: Easily manage and update training content.
- Certification and compliance management: Track and manage necessary certifications.
- Analytics and reporting tools: Monitor partner progress and identify training needs.
- Social learning and collaboration tools: Encourage community learning through forums and chatrooms.
- eCommerce capabilities: Integrate eCommerce for monetised training.
- Multilingual support: Offer training in multiple languages.
- Gamification: Enhance engagement with badges, leaderboards, and rewards.
- Interactive and adaptive learning: Create interactive content that adapts to learner styles.
- User-friendly interface: Ensure an intuitive and easy-to-navigate system.
- 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 Program
For a training program to perform strongly, planning on how you will administer and support it effectively is important from the outset.
Central to robust training management are several key components:
A dedicated LMS administrator is responsible for overseeing the LMS, serving as daily support, and ensuring its ongoing efficiency and performance. Their role typically involves defining user roles, creating custom certifications, offering feedback to learners, and supporting both users and learners consistently.
The success of an LMS hinges on necessitating continuous guidance and assistance. Prompt support services for learners are essential, keeping them motivated and confident in their training. This quick response promotes trust, enhancing relationships and connectivity within your network, and ultimately powering the efficacy of the training process.
Related resource How to Manage Your Training Program Successfully
7. Create Compelling Content
The success of any training program 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, helping to contextualise the training and make 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.
For one, you don’t have direct control over the employees of your channel partners, and they may not recognise the importance of your training courses. Integrate your company’s mission, vision, and values into the courses, and make that part mandatory when your partners participate.
Your partners might also fall into complacency after a long period of working with you. Update and reorganise your training courses when necessary so they remain informed and continue learning.
There’s also the chance your channel partners have other businesses that they provide services for. Juggling multiple methodologies can lead them to put less focus on your business, resulting in poorer performance. Help them maintain the standards you agreed on with your LMS monitoring features.
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 your training courses with your partners so you can keep them as customers. Create a clear and comprehensive guide tackling frequently asked questions that they can use.
When you provide good after-sales service, expect glowing testimonials. You can then use positive reviews to further improve marketing to prospects. You can even use your LMS to get 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 program to ensure your partners and their employees are aware.
13. Use Feedback to Improve
When it comes to refining your training program, feedback is an important element.
Regularly collecting feedback through surveys, interviews, and analytics allows you to gauge the effectiveness of your content and delivery.
Feedback allows you to constructively identify common themes and areas for improvement.
As always, communication is two-way. Make sure to communicate back to your partners how their input has shaped the program.
Using this approach not only improves the training quality but also shows your commitment to meeting the needs and expectations of your channel partners.
Benefits of Training Your Channel Partners Online
There are several advantages to training your channel partners online:
Increased Cost-efficiency
Delivering your training materials through an eLearning platform makes the training even more cost-efficient. A Learning Management System (LMS) your channel partners can access anytime, anywhere is much more cost-effective than face-to-face classroom-based training sessions.
Generates More Revenue
Providing training courses generates more revenue in several ways:
- By studying your training materials, your partners improve their performance. Subsequently, they do a better job of selling your products.
- Another effect of your partners finding positive results from your learning courses is they are more likely to recommend your business to other businesses. That means more potential partners for you.
- Monetising your training through selling courses offers an opportunity to solve budget issues, create a self-sustaining program or even turn a profit.
Elevates Your Status as an Authority in the Field
Valuable training courses with your branding become powerful marketing materials. When your professional network talks about the value of your educational resources in their circles, you gain a reputation in your industry as an authority.
Offers Global Reach
Widespread accessibility eliminates the logistical complexities and costs of traditional, location-bound training methods. It enables real-time updates and dissemination of the latest information, ensuring that all partners, regardless of their location, are equally informed and up-to-date.
An online approach offers a more inclusive learning environment, where partners from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds can participate and benefit from tailored content, translated materials, or subtitles, not only enhancing the efficiency and reach of your training but also significantly contributing to building a more cohesive, informed, and skilled partner network on a global scale.
Increases Training Efficiency
Using an online training method streamlines the training process, making it more time and cost-effective as well as eradicating the need for physical venues, travel, and accommodation expenses, leading to substantial cost savings.
Delivering training at the ‘click of a button’ also ensures partners are onboarded swiftly, leading to better partnerships and increased revenue.
Standardises Messaging
Online training platforms allow for creating and distributing centralised, curated content that aligns with your goals and values.
Uniformity in training content ensures that all partners, regardless of their location, receive the same information, maintaining a consistent brand message and strategy across the board. It eliminates the variances and discrepancies that often arise in traditional training methods, where different trainers or locations might convey slightly different messages or interpretations.
Offers Robust Tracking and Measurement Tools
The incorporation of robust tracking and measurement tools in online training offers a wealth of benefits for performance evaluation and continuous improvement.
This data-driven approach not only enhances the quality of training but also allows organisations to measure the direct impact of their training programs on business outcomes, such as sales performance or product knowledge.
By leveraging these sophisticated tracking and measurement tools, businesses can ensure that their online channel partner training programs are not just educational but also strategically aligned with their broader business objectives, driving tangible results and creating a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Related resource: 8 Ways to Create Effective Channel Partner Training
Your channel partners and training courses are two key resources you can leverage to maximise your profits, especially when you synergise both. Spend on the improvement of your learning materials with your business partnerships’ long-term success in mind, and reap even greater returns in the future.
Are you looking to transform your partner training program but need help managing the complexities of designing and delivering it? With Wahoo Learning, you can deliver effective training programs to your channel partners, while reducing costs and boosting revenue. Learn more here.
