What are the common challenges and pitfalls to avoid when onboarding and training new partners?

1 Align expectations and goals

The first challenge is to align your expectations and goals with your new partners. This means clearly communicating your value proposition, your partner program benefits and requirements, your expectations for partner performance and behavior, and your feedback and support mechanisms. You also need to understand your partner's expectations and goals, such as their target market, their sales cycle, their preferred communication style, and their challenges and needs. By aligning expectations and goals, you can create a shared vision, avoid misunderstandings and conflicts, and establish trust and commitment.

2 Provide relevant and engaging content

The second challenge is to provide relevant and engaging content for your new partners. This means creating content that is tailored to each partner's profile, level of knowledge, and learning preferences. It is also essential to ensure that the content is up-to-date, accurate, and consistent across different channels and formats. To achieve this, you could consider offering product demos and tutorials, sales and marketing collateral, partner portal and knowledge base, webinars and podcasts, case studies and testimonials, quizzes and assessments, or even gamification and incentives. By providing such content, you can boost your partner's confidence, competence, and motivation.

3 Streamline processes and systems

The third challenge is to streamline your processes and systems for onboarding and training new partners. This involves simplifying and automating workflows, such as partner registration, contract signing, certification, reporting, and billing. It is also important to integrate your systems, such as CRM, PRM, LMS, and CMS, to ensure data accuracy, visibility, and accessibility. To achieve this goal, you can make use of online forms and e-signatures, partner dashboards and analytics, learning management systems, content management systems, and partner relationship management software. By streamlining your processes and systems, you can reduce operational costs, errors, and delays.

4 Offer personalized and ongoing support

The fourth challenge is to offer personalized and ongoing support for your new partners. This requires providing a dedicated partner manager as a single point of contact, who can guide them through the onboarding and training process, answer their questions, address their issues, and give them feedback and recognition. Additionally, multiple support channels should be available, such as phone, email, chat, or social media, and communication should be timely and responsive. Welcome calls and emails, check-in calls and surveys, partner newsletters and updates, partner events and webinars, and partner rewards and recognition are some of the support activities that can be offered to new partners. By providing personalized and ongoing support, you can improve partner satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

5 Solicit and act on feedback

The fifth challenge is to solicit and act on feedback from your new partners. This involves asking for opinions, suggestions, and concerns about onboarding and training programs, products and services, partner programs, and support. It is important to analyze the feedback you receive, then make improvements, resolve issues, or acknowledge successes. Partner satisfaction surveys, reviews and ratings, testimonials and referrals, forums and communities, and advisory boards are all useful methods of gathering feedback. Ultimately, this will help you to improve your partner relationship, performance, and value.

6 Measure and optimize results

The sixth challenge is to measure and optimize the results of your onboarding and training program. This means defining and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) that reflect your objectives, such as partner activation rate, certification rate, revenue, retention rate, or satisfaction score. You should also benchmark and compare your results with industry standards, competitors, or best practices. To optimize your results, you can use strategies like A/B testing and experimentation, segmentation and personalization, content curation and updating, process automation and integration, or support enhancement and innovation. Ultimately, by measuring and optimizing your results, you can demonstrate a return on investment, identify strengths and weaknesses, and optimize your onboarding and training program.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?