The evolution of cloud computing, mobile devices and social media changed the learning and development market in ways that no one could have predicted. While progressive L&D experts have been leveraging these new technologies for their employee learners, the greatest beneficiary has been opportunistic organizations who maximize their interaction and training contact with their corporate extended enterprise learners.
Are you impacting your business with extended enterprise training? If not, you are behind. Organizations in every industry globally – including yours – use extended enterprise training as a strategic tool to grow and improve their business and profitability.
Extended enterprise learning is any training, knowledge, certification or performance support provided to your non-employees such as channel distribution partners, resellers, dealers, franchises, members, customers and end-users of your products and services.
Winning your competitive race is a matter of percentages and few organizations outdistance everybody for a long period of time. Continual investment and growth in training your extended audiences and providing them targeted performance support has a proven positive impact on core business metrics. Smart organizations use this fact to their advantage.
LMS is the Backbone of Extended Enterprise
Extended enterprise learning is facilitated by a Learning Management System (LMS) to keep track of all your users, content and the relationship between the two. For over twenty years corporate organizations have been using LMSs and eLearning to provide mandatory and self-service training to their employees. Historically, LMS systems were successful in reducing training delivery costs and ensuring regulatory compliance but they fell woefully short in engaging learners, being easy to use or facilitating ecommerce. They were all about saving money.
The new cloud LMSs leverage the advances in technology to finally facilitate engagement with global extended audiences at a fractional cost in comparison traditional LMSs. With these hurdles removed organizations are focusing on delivering a measurable impact through external training and they can prove it.
Training your corporate extended enterprise audiences is all about making money, impacting business change and winning your competitive race.
Measurable Benefits of Extended Enterprise Learning
Unlike internal employee training it is easy to measure the business impact of extended enterprise learning. An extended enterprise learning management system will allow you to report on the training completions of your extended audience groups. Compare trained vs. untrained groups or individuals in any metric you are tracking such as renewals, support calls or channel sales performance to determine the measurable impact.
The measurable benefits of extended enterprise learning can be grouped into three main categories:
- Increase Income –Extended enterprise learning is about making money for an organization. If you train your channel partners about your products and how to sell them, channel partners will sell more. Similarly, if you train your customers on how to use the software they just purchased, they have a better chance to get a good start, use the product as intended, be successful and renew their subscriptions. Organizations also sell their content and certifications and create a new stream of revenue from the sale of content and channel partner certifications.
- Decrease Costs –Educating your partners, prospects and customers increases customer satisfaction and decreases the cost of customer support. Extended enterprise learning technology also decreases overall training delivery costs through the reuse of learning materials and elimination of travel and instructor costs and also reduces the regulatory compliance risk. Finally, the cost to build and support a growing and global network of partners and customers is greatly reduced through extended enterprise training and performance support.
- Accelerate Timelines – Through the use of extended enterprise training organizations can shorten timeframes for many activities. Rolling out new products, expanding into new global areas, ramping up external sales are all measurable impact areas. Onboarding new customers to successful customers is dramatically decreased with focused training and just-in-time learning interventions.
Few activities in the corporate world have the ability to impact so many of the above business metrics. Deploying an ever evolving extended enterprise outreach and training initiative can provide you a sustainable competitive advantage to outpace your competition.
Extended Enterprise Case Studies
To be really successful in extended enterprise learning it is important to develop a measurable success plan from day one. Define who you are going to target, what behavior you want to change and how you will measure it. By knowing the impact to the business you have all tools to ask for more budget and then prove the impact.
Here are three case studies of organizations that have proven the worth of training their extended enterprises. Click on the company name to access full case story and many more.
- Veeam Software, a global leader in data protection, disaster recovery and virtual environment management, provides training content to over 50,000 channel partners and 90,000 customer users, resulting in 3000 learning engagements per month and 10,000 revenue generating certifications. 95% of trained partners agree that training helped them to improve knowledge and ability to sell, improving results and productivity.
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Sealed Air is a global packaging and cleaning products manufacturer that developed and deployed a for-profit client academy to certify their clients on their products and how to properly use them. Sealed Air analyzes training completion data combined with business data to benchmark goals and measurable performance.
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International Parking Institute utilizes Docebo to train, certify, measure and report on learning for parking professionals from member organizations in every industry globally.
Conclusion
Training your corporate extended enterprise audiences is all about making money, impacting business change and winning your competitive race. There is a multitude of ways to impact your business with extended enterprise learning. The important thing is to pick business metrics you can measure from day one and document how these metrics change with extended enterprise training. You don’t have to start big. You just have to start.
About the Author
John Leh is CEO and Lead Analyst at Talented Learning, LLC, a research and consulting organization dedicated to the advancement of extended enterprise learning. John has 19 years of experience in the eLearning and LMS industry having served as a trusted advisor to more than 100 learning organizations.