An LMS offers a convenient, effective way to upgrade your staff’s skills. They can study at their own pace and time, saving you money. It can also help you maintain compliance levels and avoid regulatory fines. Extended enterprise online training is when you take your Learning Management System outside the firm without further investment. You stretch online training to retailers, wholesalers, distributors, freelance marketers, contractors, franchises, and consultants. You don’t have to increase your online training budget, but you do have to make it work. By offering additional skills to your tangent sales team, you can boost volumes and raise profits.
When we think about customizing an extended enterprise LMS, we focus on tailoring it for individual departments. However, you can go a step further and cull relevant material for external partners like franchises and delivery teams. Look through the online training course and pick out the sections that are relevant to these sales functions, including persuasion skills and segmentation.
It’s tempting to leave sales partners to their own devices. After all, your internal sales team is well placed in converting distributors. However, the more product distributors move, the more frequently they will buy. This leads to better profits overall, so equip them with skills to move your product. Go beyond promotional offers.
The shops and outlets that stock your products are not always exclusive. They often sell many other brands within your sector. Many firms use pricing and margins to convince distributors to push their product. There’s a more powerful tool, though. By teaching your partners about the benefits and usage of your products, you’re showing its value. This way, when a customer asks questions, the distributor can recommend your product using more than just the price. This builds consumer trust in both the distributor and your brand. Ensure that your partners know all the USPs. Arm them to have actual conversations about your product instead of tossing buzzwords and catchphrases.
Internally, an extended enterprise LMS can be used for tracking purposes. At a glance, you can tell the variants and volumes of everything in your store. You can monitor goods in transit and identify potential problems in logistics. It cuts expenses and makes your business and cash flow smoother. Extend this to your partners in the form of a web portal. Confidentiality makes it a bad idea to give outsiders full access. However, with the right admin rights, you can create limited profiles for external partners. They can use the system to order new stock, track their deliveries, and dip into product reference materials. They can log in and get relevant information for a client. They can also avoid inconvenient shortages.
The best use of an extended enterprise LMS is data collection. There is so much content available, and if you have the right analyst, you can make millions out of it. This doesn’t imply data sale, phishing, or anything unscrupulous. In large businesses, the company doesn’t have individual access to customers. They only deal with external partners. By logging onto your extended enterprise LMS, these partners will upload massive amounts of customer data. This data is necessary for their daily work. For example, they may log the name, residence, and preferences of their buyers. This offers the company a customer profile they can use to improve their products and services.
Many businesses use their social media platforms for sales pitches. This puts customers off. A better option is to use them as opportunities for extended enterprise training. Don’t just push your product. Give customers relevant industry data. Offer tips and tricks on how to get the most out of your services. Add value to their lives. This builds trust and boosts conversion.
Intertwine your customers’ online and offline training experiences with your company. You should also include your social media credentials on all your products and build campaigns around it. Invite users to earn discounts or rewards by clicking through to your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram pages. Put this information prominently in your packaging.
External partners are more likely to remain with your organization if they are satisfied with your online training program. It gives them the knowledge they need to fulfill their obligations, thus forming a mutually beneficial partnership for years to come. As a result, you don’t need to pay for another round of online training for their replacements or lose out on valuable sales opportunities while new partners deal with the learning curve.
L&D isn’t strictly an in-house matter. Your external partners can be just as helpful in boosting profits. You can equip them with necessary skills without spending any extra cash. Teach your distributors how to sell your product. Equip them with detailed product knowledge. Help them keep up-to-date stock records, and gather customer data in a responsible way. Train your customers, as well. Build loyalty to keep them coming back.
Want to learn more about the possibilities of an Extended Enterprise LMS? Download our free eBook External Training 101: Everything You Need To Know BEFORE Buying Your Next Extended Enterprise LMS to discover how an extended enterprise LMS can benefit your company’s bottom line. It also features tips to monitor external partner performance and get them excited about the extended enterprise LMS launch, as well as how to choose the best pricing model and deployment options for your new system.