Your in-house staff gets all the training resources they require. But does your remote sales team, franchisees, or vendors enjoy the same benefits? In this article, we’ll explore seven reasons how an extended enterprise LMS can help you retain top external talent.
How An Extended Enterprise LMS Can Help Retain Your Top External Talent
As organizations grow, they need to train their external teams to realize their potential and stay ahead of their competitors. Training external partners helps you provide standardized information. Successful extended enterprise training increases customer engagement and loyalty because partners can teach new customers how to use products.
Similarly, utilizing an extended enterprise LMS enables organizations to achieve consistency across distribution channels, regardless of your team’s location or job duties. Extended enterprise LMSs make training easier, faster and cost-effective for organizations.
Aside from these benefits, an extended enterprise LMS helps to retain top talent by offering the following perks.
1. Gives Immediate Access To Product Knowledge Resources
An extended enterprise LMS is invaluable to external sales teams. This approach to training avails all the new and important information to remote sales teams quickly and effectively. It is easy to modify or update online training courses using an extended enterprise LMS whenever there are changes to company policies, rules, or regulations.
Utilizing an LMS saves sales force’s time that would have been used looking for answers to the questions that customers ask. This is done by giving the remote teams FAQs to explore during their free time, as well as microlearning repositories that offer bite-sized online training activities and resources. They can even access online training materials in their native language, thanks to the multi-language support and geolocation features.
Furthermore, information is stored in one central place that every member of your external team can access on any device. Especially if you opt for a responsive LMS.
2. Provides Personalized Online Training Paths
Your external team comprises of diverse partners such as vendors and distributors. Each category of these partners needs a different type of training to achieve their goals. An extended enterprise LMS enables you to create online training courses that are suitable for every member of your external team.
This is done through personalized online training paths that allow you to cater to their specific needs, responsibilities, and preferences. For instance, when your remote sales teams and distributors need to know the features of a new product, you can develop stand-alone online training tutorials and demo videos.
These online training resources can be added on to their existing training catalog or eLearning course map to quickly bring them up to speed. Extended enterprise LMSs give you the power to deploy timely online training resources, targeted online training activities, and assess learner progress. Proper training aids in good service delivery, talent acquisition, and retention.
3. Enables Evaluation Of Training Progress To Help In Professional Development
At times, external partners have a hard time achieving product knowledge or compliance certifications. Using the built-in LMS reports and analytics features, you can monitor their progress and provide important feedback to them. For example, you can point out the factors that are hindering their personal goal achievements.
From this feedback, partners can improve their performance and gain greater experience and skills in the process. They appreciate the opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally. As such, they are more likely to remain loyal to your organization.
4. Fosters An Active Online Training Community
An extended enterprise LMS supports synchronous and blended learning. With these online training platforms, you can increase peer-to-peer interaction so that they help each other understand concepts and ideas more effectively. They also inform each other of new trends in the industry that might not be covered in the course content.
Online learners can share the challenges they face when dealing with your products, for example, through chats or group projects. This sparks a discussion among themselves where they brainstorm ways to deal with the challenges. An active online training community allows them to improve their service delivery and be more confident on-the-job, as they have all the support they need to succeed.
5. Offers Real-World Activities To Develop Analytical And Problem-Solving Skills
Extended enterprise online training gives external partners the chance to learn from their mistakes in a risk-free environment. Tasks-based online training simulations help them practice reactions to harsh customers for example. Including real-world characters fosters immersion and helps partners to gain experience and build their talents.
These true-to-life online training tools also give external partners the opportunity to identify personal areas for improvement. For instance, skills they may be lacking in order to provide the best customer care. Or product knowledge gaps that prevent them from improving their sales stats.
6. Makes External Partners Feel Like Valued Members Of The Team
Your remote sales force might feel like they’re always out of the loop. Especially if you’re using traditional training methods.
However, an extended enterprise LMS gives everyone equal opportunities to expand their knowledge and become part of the team. They get to read up on the latest company policies at the same time as your in-house staff. Your external partners are also able to build brand awareness so that they accurately reflect your company’s image to the public. For instance, they know your messaging and what your brand stands for when they walk into a meeting with a valued client.
7. Allows For Self-Paced Online Training
An extended enterprise LMS gives your external partners access to online training materials whenever it’s most convenient. For example, when they want to explore a topic on their own to bridge personal gaps or brush up on skills. They don’t have to wait until the next scheduled training session, as all the resources they need are immediately accessible.
These are just some of the ways that an extended enterprise LMS helps you retain top external talent. With extended enterprise LMS, organizations can distribute need-to-know information to partners quickly. LMS helps in professional and personal development so that they can hone their talents and cultivate loyalty to your organization.
What is involved in a successful extended enterprise LMS launch? Who can benefit from your new extended enterprise LMS? How do you find an extended enterprise LMS that falls within your price range and at the same time achieves the desired results? Download the free eBook External Training 101: Everything You Need To Know BEFORE Buying Your Next Extended Enterprise LMS to find out how to choose the right extended enterprise LMS for your organization, the available deployment options to consider, how to get external partners excited, how to monitor their performance and much more.
| Tags: Talent Retention
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