In order to achieve its goal, your organisation needs to collaborate with a lot of people. Some of these people are internal members such as employees of the organisation. On the other hand, some of these collaborations are also with external partners such as suppliers, resellers, distributors, etc. Such external partners are also referred to as channel partners.
In a much formal and structured sense, a channel partner is a company that partners up with your organisation to assist you in marketing and selling your products and services. Thus, it is important that you offer effective training to your channel partners with respect to their assigned tasks. This is necessary to ensure that your partners understand the message that you want to convey to your customers. Such training also equips your channel partners with the required skills and confidence to participate in various processes
But how do you offer such training? How do you make sure that your existing training programme is effective and valuable?
If you know these answers, great! But if you don’t, then keep reading on.
Here we have shared 3 tips to create an effective channel training programme:
1. Determine The Training Objectives
To create an effective training programme, the first step should be to determine the objectives of the training. You need to find out the areas/aspects that your channel partners actually need help or improvement with. These requirements can vary depending upon the type of the product/service, life-cycle stage of your organisation and many other factors.
For example, the primary objective of the training programmes for new channel partners should be to introduce them to the product or service that they are supposed to sell. On the other hand, the objective of the training programme for the existing channel partners can be to introduce the updated target market, how to increase sales, etc. Similarly, channel partner training can also be offered before a new product launch to ensure that your partners are prepared to deal with it in the best way possible.
The bottom line is that you will only be able to add effectiveness to your training programme when you are clear about the objectives that you aim to achieve with it. This will make sure that you focus on the right areas while building the programme.
2. Make Technology Your Partner
Keeping in mind the technological dependence of businesses these days, this step is quite obvious. Your organisation should analyse its channel partner training requirements and then implement the right technology to fulfil them. Thanks to fast-paced innovations, currently there are numerous tools and platforms that you can use to not only create but also deliver powerful training programmes.
For example, Skilljar is a cloud-based LMS that allows organisations to scale their channel training programmes with an in-built authoring tool and much more.
Most of such tools come with unique features that can streamline and optimise the training process. Your channel partners can access training material from anywhere anytime, using any device. Plus, you can easily change or modify the content as many times as you want without hindering the ongoing training. Other features such as gamification elements, progress tracker, and automate reports can also aid in increasing the effectiveness of your training programmes.
3. Review and Update
While the first two tips are focused on creating an effective training programme, the last one is about maintaining that efficiency. Over time, the needs of your channel partners might change or you might identify a few more areas of improvement during the training session. In addition to this, the industry regulations might also change. This requires you to modify the course content as well as the programme’s structure in order to ensure that it stays relevant.
Thus, you should keep your eyes open and review your training programmes regularly. You should also aim to update those programmes timely in case the reviews bring out any significant information that was previously unknown.
Conclusion
Channel partner training is a crucial part of the success of any organisation. Thus, special attention should be paid to understanding the learning needs of the channel partners. Then, the above-mentioned tips should be followed to create and deliver an effective training programme.