Both businesses and startups these days invest in employee learning and development (EL&D) to increase profit margins and sustain growth. But no organization can accelerate growth and beat the competition in a knowledge economy without training the dealers, resellers, franchisees, and other channel partners who market and sell its products or services.
In addition to driving business growth, channel training or channel partner training helps businesses to improve customer retention, decrease customer support costs, create new revenue streams, and strengthen brand value. However, every business can make channel training or reseller training successful only by launching a variety of training programs or courses.
While implementing channel training strategies, your business must focus on providing useful and up-to-date information to existing channel partners regularly. At the same time, you must require people to complete certain courses or training programs to become certified resellers or partners. You can train and educate partners and resellers across regions using the right LMS system for channel training.
The LMS systems will help you to curtail both time and costs by facilitating channel training automation. You can use a new-age LMS platform to educate, engage, and retain channel partners without deploying dedicated HR executives. At the same time, you can help, motivate, and educate channel partners by enabling them to learn at their own pace as well as interact with instructors.
Along with overcoming many shortcomings of traditional learning, the channel partner training LMS will help your business to share relevant and updated information with many channel partners quickly and simultaneously across geographies. The right LMS solution will help your business to implement and streamline reseller training in a number of ways.
9 Ways an LMS Solution Helps Your Business to Deliver Channel Training Consistently
1) Train Channel Partners across Regions
Your business needs to train channel partners in a distributed learning environment. Hence, it can train a large number of channel partners across regions only by adopting elearning. The right LMS solution will help your business to train a large number of channel partners regularly and simultaneously across geographic locations.
You simply need to create and deploy the training programs only once. The channel partners can access the content over the internet from anywhere. Also, they can access the LMS on a smartphone or tablet to complete the training program in a flexible and convenient way.
2) Provide Access to Multi-Format Digital Content
LMS solutions help your businesses to provide personalized training to every channel partner by providing access to multi-format digital content. Most LMS solutions these days support a wide range of digital content – ebooks, video tutorials, audiobooks, infographics, documents, and quizzes.
Also, they help you to create training materials by providing built-in tools and features. You can leverage the built-in content authoring tools to enable every channel partner to personalize his learning path by accessing the appropriate digital content. Also, you can measure progress by making the learner take quizzes or complete assignments.
3) Enable Self-Paced Learning
You cannot make channel training programs successful without enabling self-paced learning.
According to Wharton Online,
“Self-paced, or on-demand, learning is a learning style in which individuals advance through an educational program on their own. You may take the same classes as others, but you’ll progress through the course and complete assignments at your own pace.”
The LMS solution will enable your channel partners to acquire and update knowledge in their own way by enabling anytime and anywhere access to digital content. Also, it will every channel partner to learn in his preferred way – reading an ebook, watching a video clip, listening to an audiobook, or taking quizzes.
4) Facilitate Virtual Instructor-Led Training
In addition to facilitating self-paced elearning, LMS solutions these days support virtual instructor-led training (VILT). You can implement VILT to enable instructors and learners to interact with each other from different locations in a virtual learning environment.
Many new-age LMS solutions further enable instructors to interact with learners through discussion forums, query corners, chats, and leaderboards. Your business can leverage these communication features to enable channel partners to ask questions and clear doubts by interacting with instructors remotely.
5) Monitor and Measure Progress
You can make channel training impactful only when channel partners access content and complete courses. You can easily check if the channel partners are accessing your content and measure their progress by generating reports based on real-time training data.
Also, you can issue digital certificates to the channel partners automatically once their complete a course automatically. The new-age LMS solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to make channel training an ongoing process by recommending relevant courses and content to learners regularly.
6) Accelerate Course Development and Deployment
Often businesses need to train channel partners in a short amount of time each time a new product is developed or an existing product is modified. Most LMS solutions these days come with built-in content authoring tools. The administrators or instructors can use these tools to share relevant information with channel partners by deploying microlearning courses.
A channel partner can access and complete the content in a few minutes regardless of his geographic location. Also, you can make it easier for channel partners to understand and retain information by delivering content in multiple formats – ebooks, audiobooks, or video clips.
7) Motivate and Persuade Channel Partners to Learn
Like employees, your channel partners will update their knowledge and gather updated information after working hours. Hence, you cannot make training programs successful without encouraging, motivating, and persuading channel partners to learn.
The new-generation LMS solutions help you to boost learner engagement by implementing gamified learning, microlearning, and social learning. You can leverage the features and options included in the LMS solution to keep learners motivated by fostering friendly competition and giving intangible rewards.
8) Divide Learners into Groups
Most businesses these days change channel partners regularly. Also, the channel partners have to deal with employee turnover regularly. That is why; it becomes essential for your business to divide learners into multiple groups strategically. Also, you must allow channel partners to train their employees adequately.
While configuring or customizing the LMS software, you can divide learners into relevant groups as well as update the profile of individual learners automatically. The LMS further helps you to delegate training program administration to various channel partners.
9) Curtail Overall Channel Training Cost
As highlighted by several studies, enterprises can curtail learning and development costs by 40% to 60% by adopting elearning instead of traditional learning. You can leverage the cost benefits of elearning by investing in the right LMS system for channel training.
In addition to training many channel partners simultaneously, the LMS will help you to reduce the cost of printing training materials and deploying dedicated instructors. Your business can further cut down upfront and ongoing infrastructural costs by opting for a cloud-based LMS platform.
Mintbook makes it easier for you to deliver channel partner training by developing a cloud-based LMS system for channel training. In addition to being customizable and scalable, the LMS solution boosts channel training delivery by supporting self-paced learning, instructor-led learning, microlearning, gamified learning, and social learning. Also, the LMS for channel partners comes with a complementary Digital Library platform, which aids in the training process.
