If there’s one thing that’s true of indirect sale ecosystems, regardless of market, it’s this: The easier you make it for partners to sell your product, the more likely they are to do so.
One of the best ways to help ensure a new partner will become a valuable partner in short order is to make your on-boarding process as smooth as possible. For many partner sales staff, on-boarding will be their first introduction to your company and your product. Make a great first impression with quality on-boarding and training materials, and that will help make sales staff who want to sell your product!
There’s no one right way to onboard sales partners, but we’ve got some suggestions on how to improve your processes. Do it right, and your partners will be excited to sell your product from day one!
1. Avoid lengthy seminars (get innovative with your technique!)
If you’re still flying representatives around the country to conduct multi-day seminars, chances are there are better alternatives – like online learning modules. Most sales staff hate extended classroom sessions, since that takes away from their time on the phone. Do what you can to minimize the disruption to their day-to-day work life.
2. Remember to focus on what's beneficial to your channel partners
Don’t take it for granted that sales partner staff will be excited about your product – your on-boarding materials should be “selling” you to the staff, and making them excited. Be sure to include plenty of information about how working with you, and selling your product, will be beneficial to them. This is a great time to talk about your incentive programs.
3. Make your on-boarding materials as engaging as possible
Great training materials go beyond lectures and slideshows. A good training module should be multimedia, incorporating a variety of teaching methods including visuals, audio, animation, and more. This helps keep things interesting, as well as making the materials approachable to people with different learning styles.
Also, when in doubt, add some humor. Humor is a great teacher and there are few, if any, situations where a training session won’t be improved with some jokes.
4. Prioritize your training materials, and leave some for later
Don’t dump everything onto the partner sales staff on day one. It’s overwhelming, and will likely result in them forgetting a lot of critical information. Instead, it’s much better to break up your training materials into multiple tiers, and make higher tiers part of ongoing career development. When structured properly, this will incentivize sales partners to keep doing more training as time allows – particularly when you offer bonuses for completing your advanced training modules.
5. Embrace automated solutions
Few things are going to be more effective at overhauling and streamlining your on-boarding than automated systems which new partners can work through at their own pace. Plus, automating the process takes a huge burden your shoulders, or the shoulders of your partner manager. Modern cloud-based systems make it entirely possible to create complete sets of training materials, complete with testing, that track employee results at a personal level.
Streamline Training and On-boarding With LogicBay
Among the many features of our LogicBay PRM platform, it integrates a full set of training systems. You can create as many training modules as you like, grouped according to career path, and track each salesperson’s individual success. The system is entirely cloud-based and automated, allowing your partners to train themselves with minimal administrative burdens.
To learn more about how the LogicBay methodology can enable superior training systems, just contact us.
