Step 1: Ask partners what they need

There's nothing worse than wasting your time on something that nobody wants or needs.

This is why it's important to start by asking questions.

Your partners have on-the-ground experience with your product or service. They know what questions consumers ask, which competitors are most relevant, and they can provide insights you can't get anywhere else.

Take time to chat with your partners. Find out what educational materials would be most useful to them and use that information to build your trainings. They may need additional product knowledge training, but you may find that they need something else, like compliance training or information on quality standards.

Step 2: Talk to internal experts

Now that you've talked to your partners about what they need, it's time to find that information.

If you're in learning and development, you may not have the knowledge that will be useful in partner training. And that's okay. But that means you need to connect with the internal subject matter experts who have the answers you need.

Summarize the notes you've taken while talking to your partners and start talking to people who know your product or service, sales process, and partners.

Talk to salespeople. Talk to support reps. Talk to your customer success team. Talk to anyone who might have direct, practical knowledge that can help your partners better sell, distribute, or otherwise work with your product or service.

Step 3: Build the training program

Armed with knowledge that will help your partners, it's time to create the partner training program.

But let's take a step back for one second.

When you're building a partner training for your product or service, it's going to be tempting to talk about how great it is, all the features that can improve people's lives, and how it's better than every competitor out there.

Resist this temptation.

Yes, your product or service is fantastic. But your partners are busy and don't have time or energy to dedicate to learning every detail about your offering. They're interested in learning information that's relevant to their job and going to help them solve problems.

Try using a bite-sized learning format: it's a great way to make your training more convenient and focused.
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Step 4: Edit ruthlessly

After talking to your partners, getting information from internal experts, and building your first partner training, it's time to edit. Even the best trainings can be made more concise after a first draft.

Go through the training and ask yourself if every piece of it will help partners do their job. If not, cut it.

For example, your partners don't need to know your company's mission and values – but they might need to know the exact specifications of your product or how your service compares to your competitors'.
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Step 5: Get feedback

After a couple rounds of editing, you'll have a lean, concise training that will help your partners. Before you start using it widely, though, get some feedback from a smaller group of partners (preferably ones that you have a very good relationship with – they'll be more likely to give you honest feedback).

Send out your training and ask what your partners think of it. It's as simple as that.

Take those replies and use them for the last round of editing and improvements. Now you have training materials that are highly focused on your partners, their needs, and information that will be useful to them.
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Step 6: Distribute

Once you've integrated feedback and created a final version of your materials, you can start sending your training to partners.

To make things easy, use a learning management system that's built for working with external teams.

(If you'd like to see how Continu makes external training easy, reach out to book a demo!)
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Step 7: Revisit your training

Just because you've distributed your training doesn't mean you're done.

Check in with your partners a month or so after you've made the training available to find out how it's working, if your partners need additional information, or if any relevant facts have changed since you first published it.

It's also a good idea to set up an annual review in which you reach out to partners to get more detailed reviews of your training materials.
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Focus on solving your partners' problems

Building partner training is a lot like creating training materials for your company's internal teams.

But don't forget that your partners don't have the time, energy, or motivation for training that your team members do. They have different priorities, and it's up to you to address those priorities in your materials.

In the end, focus on being concise. Save them time by solving for what they need, then create highly focused trainings that address their most relevant issues.

Your partners will thank you – and they'll be better prepared to sell, distribute, and answer questions about your business.