The best way to train employees & channel partners

training-w730.jpg

After interviewing numerous companies about their growth and challenges for the B2BNXT blog, a recurring growth challenge was “how to train employees and channel partners”?

Training employees means you can clone the best ones and share best practices. Training channel partners means effectively scaling your sales force with no fixed costs.

Training can be a serious growth hurdle

Recently, I spoke with a company that launched a new product. It’s been so successful that channel partners have been signing up left and right.

The problem is, they don’t have the resources to train these partners on the solution and how to sell it. They never anticipate such participation…

Sounds like a good problem to have, right? But now they risk damaging these relationships and their reputation in an unforgiving industry. There’s nothing worse than getting a partner excited about your solution and then asking them to wait.

We all know the answer

The most effective way to scale your training is on-demand VIDEO.

But we also know the objection: it’s too complicated and expensive. How to get started, who is the right video production partner, how much to budget for it.

But why are processes so unstructured, and why is video so expensive?

It’s because video production agencies are set up to produce high-quality, smaller-scale projects (in terms of volume, not budget): a video explainer for your website or digital ads, or a TV commercial. If you ask them to produce a training course, they will start the conversation at $100,000.

Why is video so expensive?

There’s lots of people and high fixed costs involved in video production. Before production, you need a team to work on scripts, find the right talent, and coordinate production. For production, you need a producer, a videographer, crew, equipment, location, actor. And after production, you need to edit everything.

Since an agency can’t utilize this talent and equipment 100%, they have to hire contractors. And when you hire contractors on an ad hoc basis, you end up paying an arm and a leg. But you pass on these costs to clients, so who cares, right?

So can video-based training have a positive ROI?

We started working on this challenge months ago. Worked with many different partners to find the right solution. And finally, we found the way to slash costs by 50-80% (!)

In fact, you can get a full 10-20 module training program produced for as little as $10,000.

How?

  1. Spend ZERO dollars on customer acquisition. Each client refers at least 3 new clients!

  2. Minimize fixed costs through volume and batch-production (high capacity utilization).

  3. Own studio and high-end equipment, have talented crew on staff (eliminate high fees).

  4. Streamline the process to minimize rework.

Why stop at training videos?

With such an affordable video solution, you can now create on-demand courses, video podcasts, sales videos, social media videos, product demos, etc.

As long as we can batch produce them and follow our processes, changes are you’re in for some big cost savings.

This can really level the playing field and put smaller companies on par with much larger corporations that have resources to fund in-house video production teams.