How.io has everything you need to ensure your partners and customers get the best out of your products.  Create product education that sells and certify people with the know-how. 

Unison

Statistics NZ

NZ Police

Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board

Eagar People

Health NZ

Trusted by industry leaders

Support customers to adopt technology safely and quickly with visual mobile training. 

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Channel partner training

How.io helps you educate the people who work with your products

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How.io has everything you need to create stunning and accessible courses, guides and presentations.

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Eliminate risks and build confidence with  practice simulations and branching scenarios

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Product

Channel partners are typically a network of organizations or individuals who you rely on to help sell, configure, install and maintain your products for the end customer. Usually they earn a share of the sales price or fees for services and are motivated to work with you because they value your products and brand.

If they don’t know your brand, have little experience with your products, aren’t confident there is a potential fit or anything better than what they are used to - they can be hard people to reach. 

As channel partners and the people on the ground working with your customers are external to your organisation, you have little opportunity to inspire or influence their learning journey. Channel partners who represent your brand and service your products need to maintain a high level of quality in order for the products to shine. They need to be aware of how products should be used, maintained and who they should be sold to. They need to be kept up to date with changes, new risks and new opportunities. If a channel partner is not engaged with your brand or doesn’t realise the value your product can offer, enticing them to engage can be a challenge. Organizations can utilize a few different strategies to motivate channel partners, including free lunches and incentive schemes.

Why do channel partners want to be trained

Channel partners have a number of motivations to engage with an organization’s educational initiatives and training opportunities. Typically dealers and vendors are motivated to provide more value to their customers and stay aware of opportunities to help them meet their goals. Having deeper product knowledge demonstrates a more reliable supplier and shows the customer they’re dealing with someone who is well placed to help them solve their problems. Channel partners at the coal face of customer interactions, i.e. the installers, operators and practitioners are often recommending products and solutions to fill immediate needs. They’re motivated to provide more services, improve their reputation for capability and be seen as professional industry operators. 

What are the problems in training channel partners

External audiences are always hard to reach unless they’ve been explicitly instructed to engage. Traditional learning platforms that work on the basis a learner will come along, sign in and do all the eLearning courses they’ve been assigned struggle to motivate someone who doesn’t have to do them.


You may already have the attention of your audience, in which case this isn’t a problem. But if you exist on the periphery and don’t have huge amounts of traction in your industry or with that channel partner, getting attention can be difficult. Channel partners are likely to engage with their own learning platforms and look for opportunities to upskill and develop capability. Asking them to create an account and remember to log into another can be a challenge. 


A common issue when training channel partners is a lack of access to the people who interact with customers, i.e. the sales team, installers, operators and practitioners. While an organisation may engage with a procurement or marketing team, making the jump throughout the rest of the organisation can be a challenge. 


Unless you are regularly the focus of attention, for good or for bad, it is hard to keep someone engaged over time. Many an LMS has been stood up for an external audience, who turns up once, has a look at a course and never comes back. 


If the only place that your external audience can access your training material is via your LMS, you’re in trouble. The learning journey has many twists and turns and expecting your audience to know what they need to know and come to you to find it is a big ask. There are a range of places your audience will look for information and inspiration, these include their internal LMS, your website, searches and social media. Use short modules placed in more places to solve problems just-in-time and engage your audience when they need information. If you give them an easy way to learn what they need to learn, they’re more likely to engage with your brand going forward. 


Research has shown that installers, operators and practitioners are more likely to respond to a challenge than passively following some content in the hope there might be something useful in there. Use short practical scenarios to give your audience something to consider and an opportunity to demonstrate their professional capability and decision making skills.Simulations can provide a great learning experience that builds confidence by offering the audience a way to practice utilizing a product in a range of situations. Use 3D models to simulate problems and solutions. 


Above all, keep learning short and relevant. Get to the learning objectives quickly and if someone doesn’t need to consume lots of content, structure your courses to focus on what they really need to know. You lose attention quickly with any learning that feels like a chore. Focus on the need-to-knows and offer the opportunity to explore more with menus. Avoid anything that isn’t practical to consume quickly in a short mobile learning session.

Training channel partners is a different challenge. Use marketing strategies to engage them outside the LMS. 

Create product experts fast and maintain compliance with automated training delivery and certification

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Offset

The customer: The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board

The Plumbers, Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board are the regulators for tradespeople working in the industry. The Board sets the standards for registration and ensures workers are competent to carry out regulated work in order to safeguard the health and safety of people, their property and the environment.

Annual Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is a key requirement for registration. CPD keeps practitioners up-to-date with changes in regulation, processes, and new products and technology.

The Board needed a solution for online CPD training for those that could not attend training in-person. Key requirements were:

·	A user-friendly experience that integrates into their existing site.

·	Simple and easy-to-use platform that can cater to those with limited online training experience.

·	Mobile-friendly, interactive and intuitive training that effectively educates practitioners about new technology and processes.

·	Training to fit in with busy practitioners’ schedules, including the ability to pause and come back to training.

The How.io Solution: A practical and Integrated approach

How.io provided the perfect solution to meet the Board’s requirements.

How-io’s simple authoring tools and advanced functionality enabled the team to use existing content and create engaging, visual learning modules that simplified complex concepts.

The Board worked with subject matter experts and a designer to condense a 2 hour roadshow presentation into a simple but powerful learning experience on How.io.

A CPD consisting of interactive slides, images, quizzes and videos was created and delivered to the practitioners.

How-io enabled the training to be accessible, easy-to-use and fast to load.

The How.io API was integrated into the existing practitioner site with an innovative Single Sign On solution so practitioners could easily complete the training from a website they already use.

Mobile-friendly and modern training for busy practitioners

The CPD training was mobile-friendly and designed to feel more like social media than Elearning. A simple interface made it easy for non-technical users to focus on content, rather than work out how to drive the application.

How.io allowed practitioners to pause whenever they wanted to and close the browser. To carry on where they left off, they could simply click on the button in the practitioner site or reopen the link.

The takeaways: Practitioners like it to be simple and relevant

A survey was conducted with the near 6,000 practitioners who had completed the How.io powered online CPD training. 77.5% of respondents found it easy to access with 93% completing the modules.

The most popular sections were around the code updates and changes to regulations. Practitioners want to stay up to date with the changes that affect their jobs. Practitioners said they found online CPD training a good alternative to in-person roadshows, with 78% saying they would choose online next year.

See how we helped the industry regulator introduce new technology including Hydrogen and innovative new boilers to New Zealand.

Manufacturers

Give technology the chance to thrive

Trusted by industry leaders

Bring product training to life

Support customers to adopt technology safely and quickly with visual mobile training.

Built for driving product adoption

How.io helps you educate the people who work with your products

Operator Training

Installer training

Channel partner training

Educate

Simulate

Engage

Record

Article

Channel partner training

Training channel partners is a different challenge. Use marketing strategies to engage them outside the LMS.

Get the outcomes you need

Create product experts fast and maintain compliance with automated training delivery and certification

Case study

Plumbers, Gas Fitters and Drainlayers Board

See how we helped the industry regulator automate their CPD programme with an interactive training portal integrated with their website and CRM.

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