Quest Software’s performance-based, technical sales enablement program earned them a 2024 Brandon Hall Group bronze award for “Unique or innovative L&D program.”
Challenge
Create a scalable technical education solution that efficiently supports the development and validation of partner skills around the world.
Solutions
Leverage Skillable to quickly develop new training content, integrate learning experiences into the flow of work and create live environments for hands-on practice, skill validation and Performance Testing.
Results
- 183% increase in partner-led sales
- 85% reduction in certification costs per candidate
- 244% increase in partner training consumption
- Freed high-cost resources from manual tasks
- Earned a Brandon Hall Group “Unique or innovative L&D program” award.
Keep scrolling to read more or download the case study.
How do you reskill and certify more than 1,000 partners, validate that they’re job ready and increase sales velocity in less than 12 months?
That’s what Quest Software, a leading software development company, had to figure out.
Quest Software helps its customers secure and manage their IT environments. Alongside their robust partner network, they support more than 100,000 organizations, including 97% of the Fortune 500. When Quest acquired BinaryTree, a cloud migration company, in 2020 to bolster its product offering, they had to reskill and certify that these 1,000 new partners could implement and support their products.
Mergers and acquisitions are known for navigating the unknown, but the team at Quest found themselves in a perfect storm of circumstances:
- The transferrable skills between the companies’ solutions were incomplete. This was a serious problem because to implement Quest solutions, partners must be certified or they lose their partner status, which threatens revenue streams for the partner and Quest.
- Training was only available in instructor-led training (ILT) formats. The logistics and sheer volume of classes was going to be extremely difficult and costly to facilitate around the world.
- The COVID pandemic was at its peak, rendering the ILT training impossible for an unknown period.
- They had a limited resource pool of experts to turn to for any sort of virtual training.
If they didn’t train the partners well on the respectively new products, there would be longer sales cycles, potential declines in customer satisfaction (CSAT), higher operating costs and risks to their brand reputation.
To keep business moving, Quest needed to find a scalable technical training and certification solution that could:
Increase sales velocity by reskilling and certifying a large volume of on-the-go professionals across their partner network to effectively sell and implement Quest solutions.
Reduce the risk of potential customer satisfaction issues for both channel partners and Quest due to troubled implementations, which would require Quest to deploy high-cost technical teams to stabilize implementations.
The team responsible for finding the technical enablement solution was Quest’s Professional Services delivery team led by Joe Tobias, Director of Professional Services, Luke Buckley, Senior Advisor of Technical Training Development, and Andrew Lubchansky, Customer Technical Training Advisor. They were responsible for partner enablement and training, ensuring that their partners were fully equipped with the knowledge, skills and abilities to represent, sell and implement Quest solutions.
They needed time to be hands-on with the tech.
Quest’s process improvements with Skillable
Scoring performance and issuing certifications before Skillable
7-step process with turnaround times up to 3 days
With Skillable
3-step process with immediate turnaround times
- Partner completes lab
- Skillable platform immediately automatically checks work and issues pass/fail with feedback to Quest CMS via Integration
- Credential issued
Course sign-up process before Skillable before Skillable
6-step process with turnaround times up to 3 days
With Skillable
4-step process with a 95% decrease in support tickets
- Partner enrolls in a course directly in the partner portal
- Channel team alerted
- Channel team contacts partner and creates training order
- Order is completed, automation instantly issues lab with all materials within 12-24 hours using integrations
Lab support and troubleshooting before Skillable
5-step process with turnaround times of 2-4 hours
With Skillable
3-step process saving 2-4 hours per issue
- User has an issue and clicks “Support”
- Support can log into their specific instance and provide personalized support
- Student is updated via support ticket with Root Cause Analysis and next steps
Find out how they built a performance-based training program at scale.
Skillable can help you implement a robust technical sales and partner enablement solution that builds your learners’ confidence and validate skills. Click the button below to learn how.
