How To Wow Your External Partners: 7 Extended Enterprise Online Training Activities To Consider
With the help of online training activities, learners can comprehend even the most difficult of concepts and retain the knowledge more effectively, especially when compared to traditional training. Since many organizations require external partners to run their operations successfully, it is essential to train them too.
It is also imperative to note that these partners have busy schedules and that they simply don’t have time for lengthy online training courses.
To make sure that they gain the essential skills and knowledge, you must make your external enterprise online training brief and engaging, by integrating training activities. Let’s look at some of the top online training activities that will wow external partners.
1. Simulations That Allow Them To Interact With Virtual Customers
Some external partners like suppliers, vendors, and distributors deal with your organization’s customers directly. As such, it is important that they have all relevant customer relations skills. To equip them with these abilities, include online training simulations in the eLearning course design that let your partners mimic real-life interactions with virtual clients.
For instance, you can create an online training simulation that requires every external partner to introduce your product to a new customer and persuade him/her to buy it.
Training your external partners on customer interaction equips them with the knowledge that helps them market your product more effectively, and change any negative perceptions about your products, given that your external partners will now become your best brand advocates.
2. Product Video Demos
All external partners need to have correct information about an organization’s products. Therefore, regular training is required to keep them in tabs with information on the latest lines and new uses for old offerings. Giving your external partners this information in prose will not be effective. Your investors, for example, are busy people. They might not have the time to read through a 10-page manual or brochure.
To avoid this and ensure that they learn all the need-to-know information, replace long lectures with interesting online product demos that will show them the exact use of your products. Ensure that the demos are detailed enough and that they deal with product descriptions exclusively. Include only the essential information. Too many unimportant details may confuse your external partners and impede understanding.
3. Branching Scenarios That Allow Them To Test Reactions In Tough Situations
There are many tough situations that external partners can come across. Vendors, distributors, suppliers, and franchisees come into contact with unfriendly customers regularly. Investors and the management are adversely affected by crises in your organization. They need training on how to act/react in such cases.
Branching scenarios are the best way to equip them with these skills. Rather than tell them what to do, present them with a problem and let them solve it. Many challenges should be created for these scenarios to suit the roles of each partner. They will learn based on the decisions they make. Make sure that you provide feedback regularly to prevent the online learners from straying too far from the correct answer.
4. Q&A Sessions
External partners need as much information as possible to accurately reflect your brand. For instance, investors need to understand your new product clearly before they decide to inject more money into your company. It would be unwise to train them and leave. Have a Question & Answer session after the training. Be sure to answer everyone’s questions and provide clarifications where necessary. Q&A sessions make online training interesting and memorable. Online instructors should have their own set of questions for these sessions to gauge if the essential concepts have been understood.
5. Storytelling For Online Training That Requires External Partners To Read A Lot Of Text
At times, external enterprise online training in text is unavoidable. In these cases, integrate stories in the eLearning course design to break the monotony and boost the engagement factor. Stories should have characters that the external partners can relate to. They should also be humanized to allow the partners to connect and tie the ideas into real-world applications.
You can even bring the storytelling to life by using images, audio, and video clips to improve memory retention. Pairing it with the text-based story caters to diverse learning preferences.
6. At-A-Glance Infographics
Develop infographics that offer external partners a brief overview of a task or product. For example, a step-by-step look at how to complete the sales transaction using the mobile app. Or an infographic that showcases a product’s unique features and selling points. External partners have the ability to download these infographics and view them on-the-go, even when they aren’t able to connect to the platform. For instance, when they are in the middle of a client sales call and there’s no Wi-Fi available.
7. Social Media Support Groups
Social media gives you a platform to interact with external partners and encourage them to share insights with one another. Create a closed group that’s exclusively for extended enterprise trainees. Post a weekly prompt or tip to get the online discussion started. Encourage them to share online training resources of their own for the benefit of the entire team. You can also schedule social media events, such as live videos, Q&As, and contests.
Conclusion
These extended enterprise online training activities will not only impress external partners but help them improve their work performance. They make the online training experience more enjoyable and get remote sales staff, franchisees, and other stakeholders involved in the process. Just remember, keep it short and to-the-point so that your geographically dispersed team members can always find time to train.
What is involved in a successful extended enterprise LMS launch? Download the free eBook External Training 101: Everything You Need To Know Before Buying Your Next Extended Enterprise LMS to find out, among others, how to choose the right extended enterprise LMS for your organization, the available deployment options to consider, and how to get external partners excited and monitor their performance with an extended enterprise LMS.
