When faced with struggling customer and partner training programs, many organizations react by throwing new technologies on their learning tech stack and hoping they solve the problem. But technology is just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Successful customer and partner training requires support that goes beyond platforms, apps, and even AI.
We see four interdependent elements that, working in concert, determine whether training becomes an engine for growth. Our four get-rights are: Strategy, Content, Technology, and Operating Model. Here’s what each one looks like when done well, as well as red flags to watch out for.
Strategy: Build a North Star That Lets You Say No
The most common red flag in a learning strategy isn’t a lack of good ideas. Rather, it’s a failure to set a realistic focus and align the organization around it. Without a clear north star, every stakeholder request gets a “yes”. The learning catalog becomes a collection of unrelated initiatives, promises go unfulfilled, and the program drifts further from what learners actually need.
World-class programs start with thorough research: interviews with partners and/or customers, competitive benchmarking, and a broad understanding of the market landscape. From this foundation, teams develop a strategy that defines the target learning experience in detail: learner personas, competitors, feature prioritization, content plan, KPIs, and a clear product roadmap. This approach moves beyond treating learning as a line item on L&D’s budget, and instead becomes a high-level, cross-functional growth strategy.
We find that one of the best tests of any learning strategy is when a senior leader walks in with an off-strategy idea, the team can respond with “no” and explain why.
Content: Start With the Business Outcome, Not the Product
The clearest signal of a flagging content strategy is a catalog dominated solely by product knowledge.
This isn’t to say that traditional product-related content is irrelevant; there’s obviously a time and a place for it. Especially in partner education, product knowledge shouldn’t make up the majority of content. For partner-focused learning experiences, content should be learner-centered. For example, what partners actually want is to sell more, close more deals, and build more pipeline. Learning content should help them do that.
Our approach to content starts with capabilities mapping: beginning with the desired business outcome, mapping backward to value drivers, then to capabilities, then to individual skills. Every piece of content is tied to a specific skill gap. Nothing gets created or converted just because it exists.
The result is a learning program that’s genuinely relevant because it’s designed from the learner’s perspective, yet still fully aligned to business objectives.
Technology: Let Strategy Drive the Platform Decision
In too many organizations, the LMS is purchased before a learning strategy exists. In the absence of a clear vision, the tool ends up defining the program—a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.
Instead, platform decisions should follow strategy ones. This is admittedly easier said than done. But if a target learning experience is defined first, technology options can be evaluated on their ability to configure and customize to meet it. A clearly defined strategy helps to narrow the field and make building consensus easier. Critically, the learning platform should enable data flows that allow teams to measure not just learning activity, but the correlation between engagement and real business outcomes like deals, revenue, NPS, and market share.
Operating Model: Give the Program a Product Owner
The most telling red flag in any extended enterprise learning program is a skeleton team of two to five people trying to serve tens of thousands of customers and/or partners, borrowing headcount from marketing, IT, and sales, running on goodwill, and with no real authority to make decisions. Of the four get-rights, this is where we see programs stumble most often: organizations hesitate to put the requisite people behind the strategy and tech.
World-class programs are led by someone with a product owner mindset and backed by dedicated headcount, real budget, clear governance across all four get-rights, and a continuous improvement loop. The program gets better every month because there’s a system designed to make it so.
Effectively enabling partner ecosystems with strategic partner training
For many enterprise organizations, 70-90% of revenue is derived from partner ecosystems. Training offers an underutilized opportunity to influence these partners–to build skills, deliver value, and capture mindshare–with significant revenue implications. Effectively utilizing this growth lever requires successfully executing across all four get-rights. To see this in action, check out our partner training and customer education case studies.
