Building a LMS for Your Partners (Part I)

As your business activities are getting more complicated, only relying on the Sales team in your company probably could not timely serve the revenue generating purpose. Some of the companies would build business relationship with (Channel) Partners, whom will sell your companies on your behalf. This is a of common business practice in (1) Companies that have the best branding and/or (2) Global business opportunities.

The examples for the first category are Coca-Cola., Apple, Google, BMW, HTC, D-Link and many others. The latter items are describing Importing & Exporting,  Franchising, Strategic Partnerships & Joint Venture. We easily can identify Cisco, HP, Juniper, and D-Link being having this type of business engagements as they are exporting products to foreign countries.

Training to these partners are becoming substantial, as those partners require to learning your products and sell them well in their regions. In this type of situation, your LMS should cover the learning content on your product information (such as Sales Guide, Datasheet, comparison of leading product analytics vendors, if any), latest firmware to be downloaded. This type of business information may require to be separated, due to languages in the world. Of course, it is difficult to cover all of the languages, but at least some of the most popular languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindustani and the one most used in your region.

Under this use case, you can claim that your LMS is pretty much like a FTP (file transfer protocol) server to host those documents. However, many Fortune 500 takes advantages of technology to host Internet seminair to elaborate the strength, positioning, and selling points of their products. By learning the document download records, the companies are aware of Who, When, and How (often) the materials being downloaded. This is also a way to build contact with potential leads.

There are other companies might hold in-house Hands-on technical training sessions. Where the LMS would manage partner's profile, such as Name, Employer's name, Office number. If you are taking a course, and attend some Quiz sessions in LMS, if passed, some Professional Development Unit (PDUs) can be awarded and then recorded in your profile. Many enterprise put high mark to the partners after passing exam, usually with the means of product price discount. That would encourage those partners to stay close business affiliation.

The writer of this blog is managing a training service team in a technology company. He enjoys in composing and developing hundred and hundreds technical documents for world wide partners. Sometimes, he put a silent mode, without telling or broadcasting the availability of any newly release materials. However, the LMS under his management identifies a significant amount of partners (rather than the employees in their international offices) that instantaneous download his learning materials once it has been released/published. It is like fans chasing superstar. (Do not worry, the writer is not a handsome boy nor the learners are required to buy tickets for upcoming concerts) What this writer would like to encourage you is, if you are a content creator for the LMS on company partners: keep writing good staff. Continue to advance your professional knowledge and put into writing, your hard work eventually would be recognized.

Quiz Review: Some companies might adapt leading CRM software solutions. Examples of that include Salesforce CRM, HubSpot CRM, Freshsales, or Pipedrive (and many others). Are you able to activate either (1) Learning Management System (LMS) or (2) Content Management System feature in your CRM? If so, what would be a good learning management business practice you can recommend to executive managers?