If you have some knowledge about the desktop publishing industry, you would know how important QuarkXPress was in the 80s and 90s. A skilled user of Quark could command a handsome salary and the product simply stood unopposed and was the backbone of the industry. In 2001, Apple released OSX, this was a defining moment and literally the beginning of the demise of Quark. The makers of Quark refused to create a version of the product compatible with OSX. In tandem, Adobe came up with InDesign with a whole bunch of innovative features and since then there was no looking back. There is an interesting lesson for software makers here. If you refuse to adapt to changing user requirements, do not price your product sensibly, and do not have adequate product training; be prepared to fail. In this blog post, we look at how organizations can use an LXP instead of an LMS to fix learning gaps in their customer education and channel partner training plans.   

Limitations of the Traditional LMS in Deploying Customer Education Training

Several organizations continue to use legacy learning management systems to run their employee training programs. These are traditional systems designed for closed learning within a group of learners and focus on the learning administrator’s delegation of training to employees. The systems are designed to function within the organization’s network and employees are forced to learn within the office premises itself. Some learning management systems offer a highly stripped-down version of a mobile app that allows some basic learning to be accessed via the smartphone.   

Now, these are the restrictions within the organization for employees working there itself. Now consider the problems that the organization would face if it were to run training for its customers and channel partners? One solution would be to offer regular in-person training workshops at regular intervals. But this would incur a significant expense for the organization. IT restrictions and firewall & security issues ensure that external individuals are not granted access to the official organizational LMS.

Why Sales Training Matters?

In this article published in the “Harvard Business Review” – the authors Thomas Steenburgh and Michael Ahearne stress upon the importance of adequate training of sales staff. Quoting the authors – “In general, organizations don’t do enough to help salespeople navigate this complex process. Our research suggests that what usually passes for training when a product is launched is merely a product showcase in disguise; the main challenges that will arise during the sales cycle aren’t addressed. At the launch meeting, product development teams typically devote too much attention to the product’s bells and whistles, believing that their primary goal is to get the salespeople excited enough about the innovation to take it to all their customers. Early in the cycle, not only must the salesperson provide the right product information, but customers must feel they have the right information. That involves establishing trust and demonstrating a deep understanding of the customer’s challenges. Later in the cycle, the salesperson must help the customer understand, assess, and manage the risks and the people issues associated with change. Too few companies help salespeople learn to do this.”

Here are some important stats on sales training:

• Continuous training gives 50% higher net sales per employee
• The average company spends $10,000 – $15,000 to hire an individual and only $2,000 a year in sales training
• 55% of the people making their living in sales don’t have the right skills to be successful
• It takes 10 months or more for a new sales rep to be fully productive
• Retaining current customers is 6 to 7 times less costly than acquiring new ones

Hence it becomes evident that the gap in training the sales team about the product is one that must be filled.

Channel Partner & Sales Vendor Training

What drives the revenue and growth of an organization? A no-brainer, right? You make a fabulous product and sell it. Efficient sales teams go a long way in determining the growth and success of an organization. Hence it is of paramount importance that your sales team, your channel partners, and authorized vendors are adequately trained to sell your product. Remember, in most cases, your end-user/customer is not going to be dealing with you directly. It is the impression that these vendors and sales partners make with their knowledge that will convince a person to buy your product. Ensure that your channel vendors and sales partners are trained. Look for a training platform that offers a choice of web-app and mobile-app training. Empower your sales teams to be up to date with your product and those of your competitors to help them sell your product with ease.    

Customer Education

Software solutions follow a regular release cycle and are updated with new features with each release. In such a scenario, organizations should invest in customer education and create adequate product training for customers and product-users. This training will educate customers about the new features of the product. Deploy up-to-date product training using an LXP. See the example of Wrike below.

Wrike

Wrike is a collaborative project management SaaS platform. They used a combination of product training videos and Typeform pages to onboard users and educate them with interesting tutorials. Learn more about Wrike’s collaboration with Typeform and how they improved the learning experience.

Look for a training platform that lets you customize the branding and offers a consistent user and learner experience. Like your sales training solution allows your customers and users to choose between a mobile app and a web app to access product training and customer education solutions.

Case Study

Simplifying Vendor Training for a Global Healthcare Leader

One of our clients, a Fortune 100 company, and leading global healthcare leader came to us with a request. They had a lot of training content that was already hosted on their corporate LMS. They wanted a way to train their vendors, channel partners, customers, and end-users. Firewall restrictions and corporate IT policies dictated that these vendors could not access the corporate LMS. They wanted a readymade solution that could be deployed easily and would require minimum maintenance or administration from their technical team. They also wanted the platform to offer detailed learner analytics and clear reporting dashboards.

Origin’s technical team studied the business requirements given by the client and proposed the deployment of its proprietary, flagship, mobile-first, cloud-based learning experience platform – Origin Fractal LXP.

A customized version of Origin Fractal LXP was deployed complying with the client’s branding guidelines. Courses were rolled out on this instance and each vendor was given the ability to add new users to the platform and track course completion. This ‘tracking and completion feature’ enables the vendor-employees to be trained and certified on the client’s products and processes. This has been a win-win situation for both the client and the vendors as the system allows both to scale up their training base without a huge investment in setting up a parallel infrastructure. We believe that we have created a powerful and intuitive new platform that you can use to deliver training and meet your extended enterprise education needs. If you would like to sign up for a free, unconditional trial or learn more about Origin Fractal LXP, please write to info@originlearning.com.