Training internal teams on product knowledge is one thing, but ensuring your channel partners fully understand your products and can confidently sell them, is another challenge altogether.
Without effective training, partners may struggle to position your products correctly, resulting in lost deals, inconsistent messaging and dwindling revenue. Unlike internal teams, partners aren’t immersed in your brand, which makes delivering scalable, engaging and accessible training essential.
Yet, the question remains: how can this essential training be delivered effectively and efficiently across your entire partner network?
Traditional methods, although familiar, may fall short in engagement and consistency and often lead to subpar information retention. This is where eLearning enters the scene, offering an interactive, flexible and engaging solution for product knowledge training.
In this blog post, we explore how you can harness the transformative power of eLearning to ensure your partners have a comprehensive understanding of your products, gaining the knowledge to confidently sell your products.
Traditional training methods vs eLearning – What’s the difference?
Traditional methods, including in-person seminars or lectures, often demand substantial time and logistical efforts, causing inconvenience, slow onboarding and inconsistencies, especially for remote teams.
Conversely, eLearning offers flexibility with any-time, anywhere access, ensuring partners receive up to date, customisable and consistent content without logistical challenges. Interactive elements, microlearning and real-time tracking help partners stay engaged and equipped to sell.
The role of technology in modern training methods
Technology plays a pivotal role in enabling this shift towards eLearning. Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and data analytics allow Learning Management Systems to offer personalised learning experiences, adapt to individual learning paces and provide real-time feedback.
In terms of engagement, multimedia elements like video, audio, infographics and interactive content can be easily integrated into eLearning, making the learning process more immersive, and making concepts such as product features easier to understand and contextualise.
Challenges in Product Knowledge Training
Advanced tracking and reporting features can monitor progress and performance, providing valuable insights that can be used to continuously improve the training content and methodology.
While training, in general, may have its problems, product training has a unique set of challenges.
Here are the major problems that require significant attention:
Training Without Business Context for Partners
While it is crucial to ingrain the facts about products, this can’t be the sole focus of the training process. Partners need more than product specs – they need to understand positioning, differentiators and use cases.
Training That Doesn’t Keep Up with Product Updates
Partners aren’t in-house employees, so they won’t be on top of product development and upcoming changes. Delivering this key information, quickly and easily, ensures partners are up-to-date. Training must be fresh, continuous, automated (if possible!), and easy to access.
Training Doesn’t Cater to Different Partner Roles
From the marketing department and the sales team to the customer support staff, everybody in a partner organisation requires different training. While some fundamentals might stay the same, different pathways are important to keep the training relevant for each role.
Partners Need Training They Can Apply in Real Scenarios
Product knowledge training has to be more collaborative. Using role-based scenarios, deal-specific training and community learning can help improve retention and offer a practical understanding of common situations.
Related reading: 4 Examples of Customer Training Success
How to Develop Effective Product Knowledge Training With Channel Partners
Instead of adhering to ineffectual ways of product training, your organisation can pivot to the modern learning and development process of eLearning.
Ensure its effectiveness in imparting product knowledge with the help of these ten tips:
1. Choose the Right LMS for Partner Training
Choosing an LMS that aligns with your organisational needs and learning objectives is crucial. An LMS not only hosts and delivers your eLearning content, but also tracks progress, assesses performance, facilitates communication and ultimately shapes the experience.
– Understanding your requirements
Before you dive into the sea of available LMS platforms, you need a clear understanding of your needs and objectives. Consider the size and scale of your learning audience, their technological proficiency, the complexity of the product knowledge you need to impart and your desired learning outcomes. You also need to consider the geographical dispersion of your team, as a globally dispersed team may require a system with more robust language support and timezone flexibility.
– Key features to look for
User-friendly Interface
A complex, difficult-to-navigate LMS can deter users, impairing the learning process. An intuitive, user-friendly interface encourages engagement and ensures partners spend more time learning and less time figuring out the platform.
Scalability
Your LMS should grow with your organisation. As your partner program expands or your product range grows, the system should be capable of handling more users and accommodating more courses without compromising performance.
Multi-tenant Access (or hierarchies)
Ensure your partners can only access what is relevant to them and their roles, while also providing different access rights for various levels of admins.
Customisation
Look for an LMS that allows for easy customisation of courses, learning paths and assessments. Customisation should also stretch the platform itself so it utilises your branding and works as part of your website.
Mobile Compatibility
Allow access to content anytime, anywhere, and from any device to increase flexibility, training take-up and convenience.
Analytics and Reporting
An effective LMS should provide comprehensive analytics and reporting tools. This will allow you to track individual and overall progress, assess the effectiveness of the training and make necessary adjustments.
Support
An LMS that offers robust support and training for its administrators can save time and frustration. This is particularly important when first implementing the system or when problems arise.
2. Modify Courses for Microlearning
Avoid inundating your partners with information in just one or two product knowledge training courses. Segment the contents of your eLearning modules into smaller chunks focused on particular products, customer profiles and sales practices. It will be much easier for them to retain the knowledge they absorb and prevent any confusion regarding product features and the target audience.
3. Ensure Partners Can Access Training On-Demand, Anywhere
Considering all the obstacles to be overcome with product training for channel partners, you need to make the learning process as easy as possible. One big way to do this is by accessing courses through their smartphones or tablets. This synergises well with the microlearning methodology, as partners can check their mobile devices in between short breaks to take on a course or two.
Having these informational resources available is useful for directly interfacing with customers. Partners can easily refer to the bite-sized courses on their mobile devices for help instead of leaving customers unsatisfied without solutions.
4. Use Role-Based Microlearning for Partner Sales Enablement
As well as the method of training delivery, the content of the training also needs to be relevant for the specific partner. As mentioned earlier, training that is too standardised will not be effective. For example, installers, marketers, and salespeople will not all benefit from the same training. While some areas will overlap, training should be beneficial to the partner’s role and helps them to more effectively carry out their responsibilities.
Develop learner pathways for each persona so that training is focused on what they need to know, while also linking related modules that provide opportunities to broaden knowledge and to help recognise connections and dependencies between topics.
5. Include Real-World Sales Scenarios
The flexibility of eLearning extends to interactivity. You can include course simulations depicting real-life scenarios in video and even virtual reality (VR) where your partners can practise and demonstrate their product knowledge.
This training delivery style can work as training for partners so they can make mistakes without consequence, and as an assessment tool to gauge how much knowledge they have internalised.
6. Include Case Studies
Go one step further than scenarios and use historical data from your company’s successes as part of your online product training. Results that have been proven achievable in the real world are much more convincing to partners, as they can see the practicality and relevance of the courses they are taking.
Case studies also allow your partners to see from the perspective of your company’s target audience. Then, along with their fundamental understanding of your products, partners can develop better ways of selling products knowing what customers need.
7. Integrate Multimedia
One of the biggest detriments to learning and development is creating unengaging courses. While text will probably still be the primary way of communicating facts and skills to partners, solely relying on it for your eLearning courses can lead to boring material. Include videos, infographics and podcasts in your product training modules to make learning more engaging.
- To convey how to properly use a product, explainer videos are perfect and they can be useful in both in-house and customer training.
- Infographics distil complex ideas into a digestible and visually interesting form.
- A short 5 to 10-minute podcast supplementing a course can act as a good refresher that employees can listen to before doing a product demo.
8. Curate Supplementary Online Resources
There will be partners inclined to learn as much as they can, completing training courses much faster and more easily than others. Nurture this natural tendency for learning with additional educational materials. Make a list of related eLearning courses, as well as external information such as articles, slide presentations and YouTube videos. Carefully curate these to ensure they are relevant to the specific course.
Having supplementary resources that are easily accessible online supports high-performers, leading to even greater results.
9. Use Certification & Incentives to Drive Engagement
Channel partners are driven by sales performance, not mandatory training, so incentivising learning is key. Gamification and certifications make training engaging, competitive, and rewarding.
How to Motivate Partners with Gamification:
Certifications & Badges
Offer official certifications that validate a partner’s product expertise. Digital badges can be displayed on their profiles or marketing materials, positioning them as trusted experts in your products.
Leaderboards & Points
Create friendly competition by awarding points for course completions, quiz scores, or engagement in discussion forums. A leaderboard fosters a sense of achievement and encourages partners to stay active in training.
Training-Based Incentives
Tie training completion to business benefits, such as unlocking higher-tier partner status, discounts, or access to exclusive sales tools. Partners who complete advanced certifications could gain access to priority leads, additional MDF (Market Development Funds), or co-marketing opportunities.
Sales-Ready Learning Paths
Structure training programs to progress from product fundamentals to advanced selling techniques, ensuring partners gain the knowledge they need to win deals. Offering tiered certifications—such as Silver, Gold, and Platinum—can encourage continued learning.tively.
10. Continual Learning
Product knowledge training is not a one-off activity. Courses should be continually updated, refreshed and built on to ensure partners remain up-to-date with the latest product changes, enhancements and common customer questions.
While updated product specifications and responding to customer inquiries may be learned through on-the-job training, a more effective method is conducting ongoing and follow-up training to instil this knowledge through tracking, managing and rewarding.
Related reading: How to measure product knowledge (and why it’s important)
Enhancing Product Knowledge Training With eLearning
Scaling product training across a global partner network doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Wahoo Learning provides expert eLearning content development and managed training solutions—so you can focus on driving partner sales, not building training courses. Talk to our team today.
