Training the Extended Enterprise Team: How an LXP Can Elevate Your L&D Strategy

November 28, 2024

Discover why training your extended enterprise team builds consistency, teamwork, and brand strength; and how an LXP can help drive success.

Let’s face it: developing skills, adapting to generational differences, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) for learning are huge challenges affecting learning and development (L&D) today. 

To be successful in training and development, businesses must leverage every available resource. Yet, one essential resource often undervalued is educating the extended enterprise team. These are the people involved in your business who aren’t on the payroll.

Why?

Because training these teams ensures everyone is on the same page and equipped with the knowledge to use, share, and market your products correctly. This training fosters consistency in messaging and brand representation and enhances teamwork and trust across networks. 

Discover why training your extended enterprise team is vital to your L&D strategy. Explore the challenges L&D teams face when training external colleagues and learn how a learning experience platform (LXP) can help you overcome them.

What is the extended enterprise?

An extended enterprise is a network of businesses or individuals which includes these key groups:

  • Customers. The end-users that need to know how to use your products or services without getting stuck in the tutorial!
  • Stakeholders. These can be external board members, affiliates, and service providers who promote, sell, and service your products or services.
  • Distributors. Those who move products from manufacturers or producers to retailers, wholesalers, or directly to consumers.
  • Suppliers. Direct or indirect, these folk provide raw materials, components, finished products, or services.
  • Marketing agencies. External firms that help promote products and services and reach broader audiences.
  • Employees’ family members. Those with direct relationships with employees, such as a partner, husband, wife, and children.
  • Technology providers. Companies that supply software, hardware, or IT solutions that help with running operations, communicating, and managing data.

The benefits of training the extended enterprise team

L&D is under constant pressure, often doing more with less resources. With 53% of those working in L&D roles reporting increased workloads, training the extended enterprise team may feel like an additional, low-priority task.

While it may feel overwhelming to add yet another job to that never-ending list, investing in the training of your extended enterprise can save time and resources in the long run. In fact, the strategic advantages of training external colleagues far outweigh the initial effort. These benefits include:

  • Maintain consistency across touchpoints: Without proper training, external teams may not fully understand your brand values or product details, leading to mixed messages that confuse customers and dilute your brand identity. Extended enterprise training ensures brand consistency across all external touchpoints.
  • Navigate change effectively. Insufficient training can hinder communication and collaboration between your organisation and external teams. Well-prepared teams, however, are equipped to manage change, overcome challenges, and provide valuable insights that benefit all parties involved. 
  • Transitioning into international roles. When employees are relocated for global roles, organisations support family members in adapting to new cultures, languages, and environments, ensuring their success in their new roles.
  • Make informed decisions. Skilled external partners have different views and expertise that can lead to better decision-making and spark innovative solutions. For instance,  a technology pro might identify gaps in your current processes and suggest new IT systems that streamline L&D operations.
  • Stay cost-efficient. Working with trained partners can reduce operational costs through shared resources and joint marketing efforts, leading to significant savings for both parties.
  • Meet compliance and certification requirements. Training external teams on important rules and standards helps reduce risks and keep your company safe. Extended enterprise teams who don’t receive proper training might not know these requirements, resulting in hefty fines and a damaged reputation.
  • Improve customer experience. Well-trained external teams provide a positive customer experience by having a strong understanding of your products or services. This helps build trust and strong relationships with both new and existing customers.
  • Revenue growth. Untrained teams may take longer to complete tasks or make more mistakes, decreasing efficiency and operational costs. Extended enterprise training can lead to better partner performance and profitability for the business. 
  • Improve relationships. Without a shared understanding of goals and expectations, relationships with partners and customers can become strained, leading to mistrust and conflicts. Teams working on the same page can communicate openly and tackle challenges head-on.

As you can see, training your extended enterprise team isn’t just about sharing knowledge; it’s a strategy that maximises your time and achieves the best return on investment.

What gets in the way of high-quality extended enterprise training?

First, external partners have different levels of expertise, training needs, and expectations. According to KPMG, 37% of organisations report technical barriers, such as incompatible systems, as obstacles to sharing third-party information across the enterprise. Tailoring training programmes to meet these diverse needs can be complex and time-consuming.

Second, keeping external learners motivated and engaged can be challenging since they aren’t directly accountable to your organisation. If training programmes aren’t engaging or interactive, external partners might not prioritise the learning, remember the information, or use it in their work. Without ongoing support and reinforcement, they may struggle to apply what they’ve learned, reducing the effectiveness of the training. This highlights the importance of making external enterprise training an ongoing process rather than a one-time event.

Third, 55% of employees are dissatisfied with the number and quality of relationships within their professional networks. Language differences, access to IT, cultural misunderstandings, or poor communication channels can affect knowledge transfer and best practices. Teams spread across different time zones, such as deskless workers, may struggle with rigid learning formats that aren’t easily accessible, limiting their ability to participate and retain knowledge effectively. 

Finally, while it may seem cost-effective to reuse old content or stick with outdated training methods, the long-term costs of ineffective training for extended teams can be substantial. Poorly trained external colleagues may need additional support and take longer to familiarise themselves with your work ethic and product – increasing operational costs. 

Tackle these challenges with a learning experience platform (LXP)

An LXP is a powerful enterprise platform designed to build a stronger, smarter, and more effective organisation. The thing is, it’s more than just a training tool — it’s a strategic asset that offers comprehensive features to streamline workforce development and optimise operational management, driving efficiency across the entire organisation.

Blossom is a future-proof LXP solution for your perennial L&D challenges (and so much more!). The platform can tackle the challenges of training your extended enterprise team with all the features and functionality you need to empower and engage your extended enterprise colleagues, no matter the size, complexity, or L&D maturity of your organisation.

Personalisation for diverse learners

Move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and boost partner engagement by offering personalised learning paths for your extended enterprise team. An LXP can tailor training to each individual’s role, skills, and partner type, ensuring they receive relevant content that meets their (and your) goals.

AI-driven content recommendations enhance this by suggesting learning resources aligning with different partner requirements, including formats like videos, podcasts, and user-generated content to cater to diverse learning preferences.

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Platforms like Blossom use AI to recommend courses based on the user’s current position and skill requirements. This means extended enterprise teams can easily access relevant training resources, saving time and ensuring skill development without the hassle of searching for the right materials. They can also avoid unnecessary training sessions that don’t apply to their roles.

Pro tip: Consider involving external teams in the design of your training programmes. When partners contribute their unique insights, it boosts their buy-in and helps them see how the learning content is relevant and beneficial to their work.

Scalability

When a business is looking to scale, one of the most critical aspects is ensuring that all members of the extended enterprise team are equipped with the necessary skills and knowledge. 

An LXP plays a pivotal role in this process by offering a scalable training solution that can adapt to your organisation’s growing needs. Unlike other learning platforms, Blossom grows with you as your business expands into new markets. Its modular flexibility and pricing allow you to start with the essential features to train your extended enterprise team and easily add new modules when your L&D team needs them.

Not only that, but because an LXP’s standout feature is its cloud-based infrastructure, organisations can access a highly customisable yet scalable solution that enables seamless updates, enhances collaboration, and provides real-time data insights, ensuring that training materials are always available from any location.

Blossom provides a complete set of essential LXP capabilities, along with a range of optional features you can add as your needs evolve. This flexibility enables genuine, organic growth supported by a single platform.

Collaborative learning

With almost half of all employees feeling enthusiastic about their jobs, collaborative learning provides an antidote to isolation and disinterest by creating interactions and engagement among learners. This high-impact, low-cost approach promotes a sense of belonging and community across internal and external teams.

Learning in a mixed group of external and internal individuals allows them to share ideas, ask questions, and get quick feedback, making the experience richer for everyone. Whether through group projects, discussions, or peer mentoring, collaborative learning helps people develop critical thinking and communication skills and appreciate each other’s roles. 

  • “[Blossom] platform is agile and allows Yozmot to evolve with the challenges that the education sector brings with it. We can add more and more content and features to develop a real sense of community among all the users.” –Enon Landenberg, Yozmot Group

An LXP offers collaborative features that bring in different viewpoints, lead to a better understanding of concepts, and spark new ideas. This collaborative learning approach provides a more engaging and effective learning experience that meets individual needs while also strengthening teamwork and company culture.

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What’s more, an LXP gives external colleagues the power to create and share tacit and explicit knowledge and access a centralised “source of truth” knowledge repository to ensure consistency of messaging and reduce information accuracy loss.

Analytics and reporting

Data and analytics tools can help ensure that all extended enterprise teams complete mandatory training, track compliance rates, and generate reports for regulatory purposes. Since assessment tools are crucial for identifying skill gaps, reporting tools provide insights demonstrating the return on investment of your L&D efforts. 

However, getting data and feedback on extended enterprise teams’ learning experiences can prove challenging.

Sending follow-up emails, trying to reach external colleagues by phone, and coordinating schedules for in-person meetings can be time-consuming and often result in limited responses. 

Let’s set the scene.

Meet Becky, the training manager at a large multinational corporation that collaborates with various external partners, including vendors, distributors, and contractors. As the organisation expands into new markets, compliance training has become increasingly critical to ensure all partners understand industry regulations and product protocols.

The challenge:

In the past, Becky relied on traditional methods to ensure that external teams completed their mandatory training. This meant sending endless follow-up emails, making countless phone calls for updates, and scheduling in-person meetings to discuss training effectiveness. It was a time-consuming process that often yielded limited responses and scattered data.

The solution:

Becky and her team implemented an LXP to streamline the training process. With this technology, Becky collected immediate feedback from external partners right after training sessions. No more waiting for email responses or chasing people down on the phone; real-time insights were now at her fingertips.

Centralised tracking features allowed Becky to see a dashboard displaying completion rates across all external teams. One glance revealed that 90% of partners in Europe had completed their training, while only 30% in South America had done so. This data allowed her to quickly implement targeted follow-up training initiatives for the South American partners to improve completion rates.

Feedback from the LXP revealed that external partners appreciated interactive training formats but found some content outdated. With this insight, Becky collaborated with her extended partners and content development team to enhance training materials, ensuring they remained engaging and effective.

The impact:

With these improvements, Becky saved valuable time and enhanced the learning experience for external teams. Compliance across the board became easier to maintain, and data-driven decisions improved training programmes. Becky could now demonstrate the value of investment in the company’s training and development initiatives.

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Extended enterprise in real-world action

Bezeq International is a technology company that provides reliable connectivity solutions worldwide. It owns and operates an extensive communications infrastructure that connects Europe to the Middle East. It is a market leader in various fields, including communications solutions, internet services, telephony, IT and cloud services, hosting, and cybersecurity.

Bezeq’s starting point

Bezeq aimed to adapt training delivery methods for a young, geographically dispersed mobile workforce. They struggled to track the adoption rates of training streams and measure the programme’s impact. Bezeq’s team wanted a solution to provide detailed reports demonstrating the ROI of training to leadership.  Plus, documenting team training levels was crucial due to clients working in highly regulated industries like government and banking. Yet, the training programme had to be modified to fit their technology partner ecosystem and service delivery network.

How Blossom LXP tackled these challenges

  • Blossom enabled Bezeq to accurately track their training delivery levels, which is essential due to working in such highly regulated sectors.
  • The scale of Bezeq’s business model required unique functionality from their software solution, which was only available from very few providers. The fully remote workforce is geographically dispersedmaking in-person training challenging. Blossom’s development cycles and continuous improvement programme ensured a solid digital platform to meet their needs.
  • Blossom’s self-learning features enable any technology distributor worldwide to study their courses.

Jazz Vershinin, Director of Learning & Development at Bezeq International, said, “Blossom’s communication with our team is flawless. Their proactive approach to both software updates and custom platform development always happens without any issues or concerns. Due to this, Blossom’s functionality is always relevant and geared up to meet the needs of our widely dispersed and remote teams, as well as those of our distributors

Elevate your partner training experience

The future of learning extends beyond corporate boundaries. By investing in developing a knowledgeable external workforce, forward-thinking companies enhance operational efficiency and foster stronger relationships with partners and clients. 

This proactive approach to learning creates a competitive advantage and ensures that your team is skilled, compliant, and well-connected, regardless of their roles within or outside your organisation.

Get started on your journey to smarter training for your extended enterprise team.

Schedule a demo today.