Glossary

Partner Training

What is Partner Training?

Partner training provides channel partners, resellers, and distributors with the necessary knowledge and skills to promote and sell a product or service. In addition to product training, it may include guidance on everything from sales tools to objection handling. Its long-term goal is twofold.

First, it promotes stronger partner relationships by empowering and enabling vendors. It also improves sales performance, as vendors have a better understanding of what they’re selling, who they’re selling to, and why.  

Why is Partner Training Important? 

Especially in the context of software sales, partners functionally act as third-party sales teams. If those teams don’t understand both the products they’re selling and the brand associated with those products, they’ll likely struggle to convert. Depending on the size of their knowledge gaps, they may even cause reputational damage through poor customer experiences. 

A lack of effective training and onboarding can also hamper the growth of your partner ecosystem. If vendors feel as though you’re not adequately preparing them to sell to prospective customers, they’re a great deal more likely to terminate their relationship with you. 

The Benefits of Partner Training

Through effective training, your partnerships may grow deeper, more collaborative, and ultimately more successful for all parties.  In addition to increased partner engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction, this brings with it some considerable benefits: 

• A more consistent brand experience across all sales channels
• Increased revenue 
• Enhanced partner sales performance
• Cost-effective scaling and growth
• Opportunities to expand into new markets

Best Practices for Better Partner Training

Effective partner training is about more than information delivery. Your organization also needs to provide the right training environment. In addition to deploying a partner learning management system (LMS), you should keep the following best practices in mind.  

Define The Scope of Your Training

Before developing your training program, consider what your partners need to know about: 

• Product features
• Running demos
• Technical knowledge
• Safety requirements
• Rules and regulations
• Brand identity
• Sales strategies
• Common pain points and objections
• Sales collateral
• Partner enablement software
• Your overall sales process
• Key performance indicators
• Other resources 

The specifics will vary significantly based on both product and industry. Partner training for a software-as-a-service organization is going to look very different from that of an industrial parts manufacturer, after all. Keep this in mind as you develop your training, as it’ll also inform how content is both formatted and delivered. 

Personalize Your Content

Instead of plugging one-size-fits-all modules to every partner, adjust your training based on role, region, and expertise. Start by identifying the major personas in your partner ecosystem. Define the following:

• Who they are
• What they do
• Industries in which they typically work
• How and why they’re selling your product

Use this information to create a template for each persona. From there, further personalize those templates for each individual partner. While you can potentially handle this manually, it may be more efficient and cost-effective to leverage artificial intelligence. 

Provided you’ve chosen the right partner training LMS, this should be relatively easy to do, as most modern training management software supports adaptive learning out-of-the-box. 

Measure, Optimize, and Support

Lastly, actively monitor both the efficacy and effectiveness of your training. Think about what training KPIs provide the best window into whether you’ve fulfilled your primary objectives. You should also gather feedback from partners and vendors who’ve completed their training, as they’ll be able to tell you what may be missing. 

Don’t just focus on areas where your training needs improvement. Look at what you’re doing right, as well. As an added bonus, success stories and partner wins can potentially be turned into additional sales and marketing collateral.