How To Overcome 5 Challenges Of Growing Your Channel Partner Network Profits With The Right Training Tools
A channel partner network provides an awesome way to grow the reach of your product and your organization’s revenue. But without the right practices in place, the high cost of managing partners will stunt your revenue growth.
A new publication by Docebo, "Powering Partner Performance through Channel Training", examines the common complications that can affect a channel partner network. Docebo also provides best practices for avoiding these complications and shows how a Learning Management System can help train and manage channel partners efficiently to increase return on channel investment with the paper.
5 Common Complications Of Growing Your Channel Partner Network Profits
The paper reveals the root of all partner channel problems stem from 5 common complications. Furthermore, it analyzes each complication before suggesting a series of best practices and learning technology-based solutions.
1. Protecting The Parent Brand.
A poorly trained channel partner can do more harm than good when it comes to representing your brand, leading to a poor image and missed opportunities. The paper outlines several best practices to ensure your partners act as strong brand ambassadors:
- Share marketing assets and campaigns with partner channels to ensure brand cohesiveness.
- Tailor all training to the partner’s regional customs and language.
- Connect your channel partners with your internal subject knowledge experts.
There are also suggestions and examples of how a Learning Management System can ensure the health of your parent brand:
- Deliver your training in a variety of modalities via Learning Management System to appeal to various methods of learning.
- Use social tools within the Learning Management System to connect channel partners with your internal Subject Matter Experts.
- Offer sales and marketing training with the Learning Management System as well as product training to guarantee channel partners are selling at their highest potential.
- Customize the Learning Management System environment with white labeling tools to reinforce the brand.
2. Maintaining A Relevant And Engaging Relationship.
The report explains the importance of engaging your channel partners to ensure a strong relationship. Channel partners need the right training and incentives to be motivated to sell your product instead of merely mentioning it:
- Develop a strong onboarding plan early in the relationship to set a good tone early.
- Incentivize training and sales with the right rewards.
A Learning Management System can support the relationship by:
- Motivating training compliance and sales performance with built-in gamification and rewards tools.
- Providing a always-available source of information with an online knowledge library.
- Allowing the learner to use microlearning at the point need.
3. Managing A Growing List Of Channel Partners.
As your organization grows, so should your channel partner network. Without the right tools, this network can quickly become an overly cumbersome investment. If time is money, then every moment spent managing channel partners has a negative impact on the overall return on channel investment. The white paper suggest several to automate the relationship to increase the ROCI.
- Provide single sign-on across all partner channel management software.
- Ensure proper integrations between all partner channel management software.
You can use a Learning Management System to efficiently grow your partner network by:
- Automating course enrollments to ensure each channel receive the right training.
- Creating required certifications to ensure channel partners are well trained to represent your brand.
4. Preventing And Managing Partner Conflicts.
The chance of partner conflicts will increase as your channel grows. You need to be able to prevent competition among partners and handle conflicts with clearly defined policies when they arise:
- Develop rules of engagement that are shared between all channel partners.
- Use a deal registration system between all partners to keep every party aware of current prospects.
A Learning Management System can aid these efforts by:
- Ensuring partners know the rules of engagement with a required learning course and certifications.
5. Evaluating And Optimizing Channel Partnerships.
You need to evaluate every aspect of your partner channel network to ensure its health and determine any weaknesses within the partnership.
- Use data to evaluate the success of marketing, sales, and training performance.
- Compare training data with sales data can show why a partner isn’t meeting sales expectations.
Docebo suggests using a Learning Management System to:
- Provide strong data on learning completion and performance.
- Customize and optimize training to meet the found weakness in correlation with learner habits and local customs.
With this report, Docebo shows that most of the problems facing channel partner networks stem from 5 root complications. The suggested best practices and Learning Management System based solutions provide a plan for monitoring and managing channel partners with little hands-on engagement. Download the full report and learn how you can see better results from all you channel partners while spending less time managing them.