What is Partner Training? From Definition to Course Creation

raining is not always about improving skills or getting your employees ready for a change. It is also about making your sales, product, or brand successful via sharing knowledge and insights. 

That’s an important part of partner training, which goes beyond teaching or upskilling. It ensures that your business partners or stakeholders have enough knowledge and insights to understand your products, services, and values to sell them right. 

Whether you are working with resellers or affiliates, effective partner training can be a game-changer. 

Read on to know what it is, why it matters, and how to build the right program for your business.

What is Partner Training?

Partner training is a comprehensive term for various training provided to third parties, or business partners, to promote, sell, or resell your products or services and ensure customer satisfaction.

Upon the partner training, or channel partner training, the partners get knowledge and tools to sell and distribute the product as if they are a part of your team. 

That’s why the primary goal of such a course is to create alignment between your company and its partners. It makes everyone speak the same language about the product’s features, benefits, and use cases.

What is channel partner training usually about?

• Courses on brand identity and values.
• Courses on certain products or services.
• Courease on regulations and policies regarding product selling or using.
• Courses to offer support and guidance in terms of customer satisfaction and sales.

As a result, channel partner training is pretty popular in SaaS, manufacturing, and retail. For instance, in SaaS, partners need in-depth knowledge of software features to demonstrate value to potential customers. 

Regarding manufacturing companies, they may train distributors on product specifications and safety requirements. Lastly, in retail, partners need insights on selling points and best strategies. 

In the end, it is an important strategy to help your partners offer and sell your products with quality in mind and greater trust.

Benefits of Partner Training

Partner training can be a game changer for your business in the long run. Why? With it, you can impact partner relationships, product sales, and communication with clients. 

Let’s cover the key benefits of channel partner training:

• Increased partner engagement. Once you provide the partners with valuable details, it helps them develop their business and adds to loyalty. That way, you support and motivate partners and create long-term business relations.
• Improved sales performance. With a deep understanding of the products, the partners can easily highlight key benefits and answer pain points, adding to sales.
• Better brand reputation. By sharing brand principles, guidelines, and frameworks, you avoid miscommunication. Moreover, such training ensures all networks communicate the same messages and maintain a consistent brand image.
• You grow with vendors. Once partners sell different products, the great training allows you to improve loyalty and create relationships that bring more opportunities for your products and services.
• Scalability and growth. Partners may act as an extension of your sales team. If you offer enough training, they can scale operations and boost revenue without significantly increasing internal resources.

Highlight: Channel partner training can significantly improve sales, yet, it also affects the brand and scalability of business. There, are great long-term effects if you cooperate with and train partners effectively.

How to Create an Effective Channel Partner Training Program

Developing an effective training program is not an easy task. Even though there are some great general guidelines, each training is different. 

It means that you should develop one while considering the goals of the business, the specifics of the industry, and the knowledge you are going to share.

Let’s explore how to develop a great partner training program.

#Step 1. Define objectives and KPIs

Start with setting clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your business objectives. 

First of all, keep in mind the tangible results that you can achieve. They may refer to partner retention, sales increase, or onboarding. 

Importantly, it is important to use the SMART framework (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), when setting the goals and shaping the program.

Next, ensure you link designing a partner training to certain challenges or opportunities. For instance, your goal may be to expand into a new market. Under this scenario, your program will prioritize onboarding and educating new partners about market-specific product needs. 

On the other hand, if you aim to improve partner sales performance, your training would emphasize advanced product knowledge and selling techniques.

Examples of great partner training goals

• To expand market reach: Onboard 6 new partners in a specific region by the end of Q2 to support market growth.
• To improve retention rates: Increase new partner retention by 40% within six months by bringing training and product knowledge programs.
• To enhance sales performance: Get a 10% increase in partner-driven sales of a specific product within the next quarter via targeted sales training.
• To streamline onboarding: Reduce the onboarding period by 1 week while maintaining a 90% partner satisfaction rate in feedback surveys.

#Step 2. Understand partner needs and roles

Partner programs can be different depending on the niche, product, and the partners themselves. Thus, you must see and acknowledge their unique needs, responsibilities, and challenges. The better you know them, the better you can answer their requests. 

The best recommendation is to conduct surveys, do interviews before training, and collect feedback during or after training. It will allow you to understand knowledge gaps and partner training needs.

Here are some peculiarities and examples considering the impact of roles on channel partner training:

Training program for distributors

Let’s say you want to create a course for distributors. There, your target audience will be sales units that offer and promote products to resellers. As their needs contemplate marketing and selling, your program will likely include product knowledge, marketing strategies, and insights. 

Training program for value-added resellers (VARs)

What if you are to offer a partner training program for value-added resellers? Your audience may be teams that sell directly or that customize your products. That’s why, during training, you may need to focus on advanced features and opportunities, customization options, and FAQ.

Training program for franchise partners

Another example refers to the franchise partners and alliance partners. Such actors may want to know how they can handle selling, support services, or complement products with other offers. 

The audience may be different actors, from management to customer-related teams. Therefore, your training program is likely to have an emphasis on brand standards, strategies to work with customers, or even insights into operations. 

#Step 3. Provide the right training materials and reflect the training type

Based on the roles and needs, you would need to provide the right materials. In most cases, the first modules will be about a brand or involve a product overview. 

What else? Well, for general program training your content may include the following:

• Product knowledge. It involves information about features, benefits, and use cases.
• Rules and expectations. Usually, they are about communication standards, company structure, legal matters, and policies.
• Quality standards. These materials are to share guidelines to follow for partners in selling and distributing, 
• Guides and tutorials. You’re likely to offer step-by-step instructions or demos for using and marketing products or support consistent partner communication and brand reputation.
• Sales strategies and techniques. The particular group of content refers to effective methods for product presenting, pricing, and closing deals, including case studies.
• Management and leadership sessions. These may refer to sessions for partner managers on building and developing their teams or strategies.

At the same time, your training may focus solely on legal part, compliance, product, or marketing. That’s why you should think of such types of programs as sales training, product training, or customer training.

They all may be a part of a large partner training strategy.

#Step 4. Find a training format that suits you

The format you use to handle training plays a crucial role. Sure, you can take it to the office settings. Yet, the online format is pretty popular nowadays, offering more accessibility and greater reach.

What are the things to consider, if you want to take an e-learning centralized approach?

• Live webinars for real-time interaction
• On-demand lessons or courses for flexibility
• Separate learning spaces for different teams.
• Hybrid or blended learning. 

Note. To effectively handle remote partner training programs, you may need a set of tools or a separate LMS with features to create modules, anage activities, and track assignments. 

That’s how EducateMe allows you to have a course library with all materials or create personalized learning paths for different teams. 

Moreover, you can create customized learning spaces there for different learning cohorts.

Lastly, you can use mobile learning or bite-sized learning to train partners on the go or during short breaks. For field workers and sales teams, it may be a pretty effective strategy.

#Step 5. Engage and encourage 

Importantly, if you want to keep your partners engaged, you will need to support your training programs with gamification, rewards, and collaboration. 

Firstly, think of including gamification elements in your programs. For instance, you can use leaders boards, badges, or rewards to foster competition or participation. Additionally, celebrate partner successes by highlighting their achievements through newsletters or meetings.

Also, peer reviews and collaboration are great tools to make knowledge stick. That way, you can ask partners or experts to share ideas, work together on projects, or simply discuss cases. 

Here is how peer reviews may look in online training:

Importantly, offer certifications to recognize their efforts and achievements. They can also contribute to their credibility and confidence when representing your brand. 

#Step 6. Track performance, collect feedback, and optimize

In the end, if you want your training program to succeed in the long run, you would need to monitor partners’ progress and adapt to their changing needs. In this regard, you may define key KPIs and link them to training data. 

In particular, you may monitor training completion rates, certification achievements, post-training sales performance, and partner satisfaction scores.

At the same time, do not forget to conduct surveys and interviews. With feedback tools and LMS analytics, you can gather more insights to see whether partners drop off or fail to complete certain assignments. 

For instance, analyze quiz scores and update materials or modules where partners struggle.

Other than that, do not forget to ask your partners the targeted questions to have better feedback about:

• Clarity of the training content;
• The confidence about selling and promoting strategies;
• Answering to specific challenges;
• Accessibility to the training materials

They will help you improve the partner training courses and give insights on how to make partners’ experiences better. The best courses require constant updates, so use analytics to make necessary changes.

How to Choose the Best LMS for Partner Training

After the first successful program, you would want to make it work for other partners. Yet, not every tool is great for multiple teams. 

What are the features to look for in an LMS for your training program? Here’s the list:

• Course management and automation. These options will allow you to easily onboard new partners and scale without additional burden for your instructor and employees.
• Customization and branding LMS. You’ll want to create a branded training experience that reflects your company’s identity and values. On the other hand, you will want to use customization to offer training to diverse departments via subaccounts.
• Integration capabilities. For patterns training, API and native integrations with business tools are a must. Why? You will want to work with data, easily enroll partners, and provide diverse training experiences.
• Analytics and reporting. Lastly, you’d need to track partner progress, collect feedback, and evaluate the overall effectiveness of your training program. It will allow you to meet your business goals and scale further.

If you are looking for an LMS with such features, here’s a list of the best partner training software that can help you, whether you want to onboard partners or offer sales or product courses.

Wrapping Up

Partner training is not just about sharing knowledge; it’s about building a foundation for mutual success. To succeed, you need to align your partners with your business goals and empower them with the right tools. 

Whether you’re looking to improve sales performance, boost engagement, or scale your operations, do not forget to have clear goals, offer the right content to the right audience, track partners’ results and optimize the courses based on the feedback.