Online Training for Direct and Indirect Sales Staff

In this blog, we’ve discussed many different purposes for training employees: new protocols, compliance, safety or developing training for a client.

But when does it make sense to spend the time and money to develop courses for a company that doesn’t charge for them? Does it ever pay off to build training that doesn’t improve your own employees or bring in revenue by selling seats or access to the training?

Of course, it does.

Let’s look at one great way to leverage your training prowess to bring in revenue, even if it is indirect: product training. If your company offers a product to the market, chances are good (especially in this interconnected age) that your employees aren’t the only ones responsible for selling and marketing. There may be people who are so separated from your company that their sales pitches or marketing materials only touch on the basics of what makes your product great.

So, what could you do? Well, you could put together a series of manuals and hope that they are read with the same care that you put into writing them. Or you could produce some videos, load them onto your website and direct the sales and marketing people to them. How about a campaign of regularly scheduled emails explaining the nuances of what makes your product great?

But consider thinking “out of the box” and using training to ensure everyone responsible for explaining your product is as competent as possible at preserving your brand identity. If you already have a training staff and an LMS, this can be a fairly easy process. If you don’t, getting up-to-speed may be easier than you think (and we at Zipline would be happy to help!).

By creating a series of small online courses that highlight the most important aspects of your product, then uploading them onto a learning management system, you can control and track how your indirect representatives understand your product. It even can give you the ability to create benchmarks or thresholds that individuals must pass to be able to represent certain products.

Then, you could go a step further by incentivizing completion of those thresholds or advanced courses, if applicable. And as front-line people selling your product get more proficient, the better they become at selling, and the more your product sells.

Online training is a great way to increase the competency of people responsible for your product, whether or not they are your employees.