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July 2010: Five Best Practices to Harness Social Media in Learning
Our Partnership Programs
Consultant Partnership Program Frequently Asked Questions
Below are some of frequently asked questions about the NetSpeed Learning Solutions Consultant Partnership Program (CPP) for Consultants, Trainers and Distributors.
Why should I consider partnering my business with NetSpeed Learning Solutions?
What sort of partnership options does NetSpeed Learning Solutions have?
How does the Consultant Partnership Program work?
What kinds of consultants would most likely be successful in this program?
What are you looking for in terms of Distributor qualifications?
How would I be compensated?
How much income can I realistically expect to generate for my business?
Are my expenses covered?
Do I have to cover the cost of training materials?
Are there any costs to get started?
What if I just want to sell the program and not deliver the training? Why do I still have to be certified?
How often do you conduct certification workshops?
Do I have to be certified annually?
Do I need to be certified before I can begin marketing and promoting NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service as part of my product offering?
I understand you have a customer service training program called Blazing Service. Can I market and/or deliver that program too with my NetSpeed Leadership certification?
Can I represent other vendors' training or management development programs?
What if I have developed my own programs that overlap with some of the NetSpeed Learning Solutions curriculum? Am I restricted from marketing my own competing programs?
Are there "geographic territory" restrictions over where I can promote NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service?
Would I be the only Consultant Partner or Distributor in my geographic region?
How big a Consulting Partner Network are you looking to grow?
How do you avoid two consultants talking to the same client about your training programs?
What sort of marketing or sales support is provided?
Who bills the client, me or NetSpeed Learning Solutions?
I understand you also offer a Learning on Demand platform called NetSpeed Fast Tracks. Can I market that as well?
Is there a separate cost to be certified to be authorized to market NetSpeed Fast Tracks?
If you are a consultant whose focus is on management training or leadership development, supervisory or customer service skills development, or the latest in virtual learning and Learning 2.0, or if you are an independent sales & marketing reseller who has experience selling vendor packaged training programs, then partnering with NetSpeed Learning Solutions can be a strategic way to grow your business without the intense time commitment or expense outlay associated with developing an entirely new product offering all on your own. NetSpeed Learning Solutions provides a comprehensive three-day certification program that provides you with all the tools and training required to effectively market and/or present either of our training programs, NetSpeed Leadership (supervisory, leadership and professional skills training) or Blazing Service (customer service skills training), to your clients, as well as our Learning on Demand solution, NetSpeed Fast Tracks.
For OD/HR consultants and independent trainers, by being certified in either NetSpeed Leadership and/or Blazing Service, you will be able to provide your current clients with the same top-flight leadership and customer service training programs utilized by organizations like The Government Accountability Office, XO Communication, Blistex, Valero Energy, United States Tennis Association and many other organizations which have all made NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service a cornerstone of their professional skills, leadership or customer service training curriculum. And having NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service trainer certification provides you with a way to introduce your business to a new universe of clients, who may be looking for the latest in leadership, supervisory or customer service skills training for their organizations.
For independent sales professionals and resellers, being a NetSpeed Learning Solutions distributor provides you with two innovative, top quality training solutions and a wealth of quality sales and marketing support materials so you have everything you need to get started quickly.
To learn more about how you can incorporate NetSpeed Leadership, Blazing Service or NetSpeed Fast Tracks into your consulting practice or independent rep business, click here . And don't forget to include your resume, electronic marketing brochure or other information about your credentials and experience.
What sort of partnership options does NetSpeed Learning Solutions have?
NetSpeed Learning Solutions provides three different affiliation options:
You can choose which affiliation makes sense for you or your firm. And the compensation offers differ as well. To learn more about how these different affiliations are compensated, scroll to the section labeled How would I be compensated?
NetSpeed Learning Solutions and Blazing Service take the best of classroom instruction and e-learning to provide a fast-paced, economical, and highly interactive, blended learning experience. We provide leadership training in three-hour classroom modules, covering 23 different subjects. For a complete listing of our modules, click here. Blazing Service provides a program of six two-hour modules for front line customer service providers. For both programs, we provide an extremely comprehensive trainer/facilitator guide that makes it much easier - and quicker - for the facilitator to prepare for a training session. And our emphasis on discovery learning and practical skills application make it easier for participants to immediately apply their classroom learning to their work situation.
We follow the classroom experience with a series of electronic reinforcement, tracking and measurement tools: our Electronic Magazine, along with web-based tools for NetSpeed Learning Solutions called NetSpeed Coach© and NetSpeed On The JobTM, (or Blazing CoachTM and Blazing Service at WorkTM for our Blazing Service training program) to help increase retention of the classroom content, maximize long-term behavior change and increase the ability to apply the learning to actual work challenges. And our post-classroom tracking and measurement tool called NetSpeed Administrator© provides a very easy and effective way to track the learning outcomes from the classroom and measure learning retention and behavior change. The response to NetSpeed Learning Solutions’ Consultant Partnership Program has been extremely positive, so much so that we now have consultant partners, trainers and Distributors in over twenty states, Canada, and Europe.
We want to partner with training industry professionals who have their own consulting/training delivery practice and would like to incorporate the NetSpeed Leadership and/or Blazing Service training program series into their firm's product line. We also want to partner with independent marketing & sales professionals who may or may not have experience as independent marketing representatives or resellers in the learning & development space. In either situation, we want individuals who would like to affiliate with NetSpeed Learning Solutions and have a familiarity with vendor packages associated with management, supervisory and/or professional skills training and development, as well as the latest trends in virtual learning and learning on demand.
If you have experience selling or training with products like Zenger-Miller, DDI, Wilson Learning, Vital Learning or other classroom training programs, then you would likely be very comfortable with the NetSpeed Leadership approach to leadership skills training, as we utilize many of the best design methodologies of these programs. Whether your interest is to connect your clients to NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service and to deliver the training yourself, or to act as a distributor of our programs and leave the training to someone else, we can work with you either way. It is not necessary that you actually provide the training yourself, if you would rather have a certified NetSpeed Learning Solutions trainer handle this, but we certify every consultant partner to be able to deliver the training, so they can train if they wish to.
If you are interested in marketing and selling our Learning on Demand platform, NetSpeed Fast Tracks, we can also give you the sales and marketing resources to market this offering as well. This is an e-learning application so there is no actual training delivery involved with this program offering.
If you meet our requirements (and we meet yours) and you become a member of the NetSpeed Learning Solutions Consultant Partner community, we would train you through our three-day certification program and provide you with all the training delivery materials, sales, marketing and product support materials to get you started. You would learn the methodology behind the NetSpeed Learning Solutions approach to training, be given a complete set of facilitation materials for all 23 modules.
Those who choose either the Consultant Partner or Distributor affiliation option would also receive access to a comprehensive online "Sales Tool Kit" with everything you need to begin marketing all of the NetSpeed Learning Solutions program offerings, including such things are marketing brochures and media packets, fully scripted PowerPoint presentations, case studies of successful NetSpeed Learning Solutions clients, white papers and even a series of email templates you can personalize to introduce our program offerings to your customers. We've been told by our consultant partners and Distributors that our sales support literature is some of the most comprehensive in the industry.
As a certified NetSpeed Learning Solutions Consultant Partner, Certified Trainer or Distributor, you would be authorized to represent all of our programs to any client. We would include your clients or prospects (at your option) in a regular bi-monthly email newsletter we send out to clients and prospective clients about NetSpeed Learning Solutions. And we continually keep you updated with the latest developments, product updates, and new marketing and sales support tools. We even have a monthly (optional) Consultant Partner Web Conference Call to keep you updated about our latest product developments and marketing resources for your use.
Consultants and trainers who are most likely to be successful in the NetSpeed Learning Solutions CPP are those that have some familiarity with vendor-packaged leadership or customer service training programs, either from previous sales or training experience with those products, or perhaps from having experienced them as a training participant. If you are familiar with programs like Zenger-Miller, Achieve Global or DDI, then your ramp-up time learning the NetSpeed Learning Solutions blended approach would most likely be very brief. If you are a consultant or distributor who has business relationships with organizations which have a history of working with vendor-based training programs, and might be looking for a new and dynamic training alternative, then you could be extremely successful with NetSpeed Learning Solutions. If you have a passion about providing clients with top-quality training programs to help develop the skills of their managers and supervisors or providing them with innovative learning on demand tools for employee development, you could be very successful partnering your business with NetSpeed Learning Solutions.
All of the qualifications indicated above for Consultant Partners would certainly apply equally to a potential Distributor. In addition, in order to be considered to be a NetSpeed Learning Solutions distributor, we would want to know that you have had a track record of success representing other training, HR or related products or services and have a willingness to make a serious time commitment to NetSpeed Learning Solutions. While we are open to working with Certified Trainers who might only sporadically be engaged with NetSpeed Learning Solutions for an occasional delivery, our expectations for the level of involvement to qualify for our Distributor program are much higher. In return for a significant focus on NetSpeed Learning Solutions, we offer Distributors our highest earnings potential.
How we compensate you depends on whether your relationship with NetSpeed Learning Solutions is that of a Consultant Partner, Certified Trainer or Distributors. In all three cases, the nature of your status is an independent contractor, not an employment, relationship. As such, there is no base salary, since we presume you have your own business and would want to maintain your own autonomy as a business owner. Let’s take the three affiliation relationships one at a time.
Certified Trainers: If your interest in working with NetSpeed is simply to deliver NetSpeed Learning Solutions and/or Blazing Service workshops to your clients and prospective customers, and not to market either of our training programs, then there are two possible scenarios:
Scenario One – Delivering training to Your Client:
If the NetSpeed Learning Solutions delivery is to your own pre-existing client, then you would have full autonomy to determine your facilitation fee, based on your experience level and what you feel the client can afford. And you would simply purchase your participant materials from NetSpeed Learning Solutions for whatever quantity you needed for your workshop event at our regular participant materials pricing.
Scenario Two – Delivering training to a NetSpeed Learning Solutions client:
If the opportunity is one that NetSpeed Learning Solutions originally identified and brought you in to provide the delivery, our trainer facilitation rates are $800 per half-day module or $1,200 per day (for a morning and afternoon delivery of two modules). We do not offer the option for you to set your own facilitation rates if we brought you in for delivery to a pre-existing NetSpeed Learning Solutions customer. Please note that in certain situations, where our facilitation rates to the client are provided at a reduced rate, your delivery fee may be commensurately reduced – specifically any workshops we conduct for the Federal Government under our GSA schedule.
Distributors: If you are only interested in the sales side of the ledger and have no plans to deliver NetSpeed Learning Solutions training workshops – and you meet our requirements to qualify as a NetSpeed Learning Solutions Distributor - then your compensation works as follows:
On New Business:
On Repeat Business: 15% of all NSLS fees received. (“Repeat” business is defined as recurring purchases of the same program offering after year one, so for example, participant workbook re-orders, etc.)
Consultant Partners: If you are interested in both sides of the ledger, marketing NetSpeed Learning Solutions and/or Blazing Service to your customers and prospects as well as doing the delivery, we provide you with two options:
Facilitation Fee Option:
Under this option, you are not commissioned on the sale of materials or licenses. Instead, you receive 100% of the facilitation fee. And you have full autonomy to determine your facilitation fee, based on your experience level and what you feel the client can afford. NetSpeed Learning Solutions invoices you for the participant materials, and you bill the client directly for your facilitation services and participant materials.
When this option makes sense: For Consultant Partners who prefer to set their own facilitation fee schedule and bill directly for their services or for when you are delivering a small 1X or 2X workshop, this plan is the optimal one for you.
Commission Option:
Under this option, you receive a commission as follows:
On New Business: 25% of all NSLS fees received. That means 25 % of all program library fees, participant materials, trainer certification costs, and facilitation fees (whether you handle the facilitation or not) – and 15% of any repeat business. This commission percentage can elevate to 30% for new business sales in excess of $200,000 per calendar year.
On Repeat Business: 15% of all NSLS fees received. (“Repeat” business is defined as recurring purchases of the same program offering after year one, so for example, participant workbook re-orders, etc.)
In addition, if you also handle the NetSpeed Learning Solutions or Blazing Service facilitation, you will receive a facilitation fee of $800 for every half-day module you deliver – or $1,200 per day for a morning and afternoon facilitation. Under this option, NetSpeed Learning Solutions invoices the client and remits payment to you. Please note that in certain situations, where our facilitation rates to the client are provided at a reduced rate, your delivery fee may be commensurately reduced – specifically any workshops we conduct for the Federal Government under our GSA schedule.
When this option makes sense: When the client utilizes its own internal trainers/facilitators, or you prefer to have NetSpeed Learning Solutions handle all the client invoicing, this plan is the optimal one for you.
You don’t have to choose. You can shift between either compensation plan from sale to sale, and apply whichever compensation plan makes the most financial sense for the given situation. So you maintain maximum flexibility on how you are compensated by NetSpeed Learning Solutions.
This depends on how much time and effort you choose to apply to marketing NetSpeed Learning Solutions as a part of your business and/or doing NetSpeed Learning Solutions training delivery. Depending on the amount of time you might devote to NetSpeed Learning Solutions, you could realistically expect to generate between $20,000 and $75,000 a year (or more) for your business. A factor, in addition to the amount of time you would be willing to devote to delivering or marketing the various NetSpeed Learning Solutions program offerings, would be the size of the market where you are located and the nature, extent and decision-making level of the client contacts to which you have access. Someone working fulltime in say, New York City realistically could expect to earn more than someone say in Boise, ID, just due to the size of the markets and number of companies based in each region.
Since the nature of this business partnership is that of an independent contractor rather than employee, we do not normally cover business expenses. In most cases our Consulting Partners or Distributors may be representing other non-competing products or services and it becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible, to separate out and adequately document which expenses a Consulting Partner or distributor incurred in promoting NetSpeed Learning Solutions as opposed to other products they might be representing, or their overall business. However, we are willing to look at special situations on a case-by-case basis, if the potential business that could result from your efforts might warrant special consideration.
No. All costs of production and shipping are handled by NetSpeed Learning Solutions. We handle all production of training materials and bill the client directly for these materials. However, if you are doing the training facilitation, there may be a limited number of facilitator support materials that you would need to provide, or ensure that the client provides.
Yes. For anyone interested in being certified to personally deliver or market NetSpeed Learning Solutions training programs, there are only two costs for getting started:
If you wish to market our Learning on Demand platform, NetSpeed Fast Tracks, in addition to either NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service, there are no additional costs to be authorized to market that program.
Since we are headquartered in Seattle, WA, most of our certifications take place in Seattle. If there are enough people willing to travel to a particular region to be certified, we will attempt to accommodate this by conducting the certification in that region. We need at least five people in a region to move the certification workshop to that region.
Even though Distributors would never actually deliver a NetSpeed Learning Solutions training session, we still ask that they too participate in our three-day certification workshop. Why? Because it is our strongly held belief that in order to sell NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service effectively and with integrity, a Consultant Partner needs to truly understand the product. And to truly understand the methodology and design concepts behind NetSpeed Learning Solutions’ training offerings, it requires participating in the certification process.
This varies, but generally, certification workshops take place every other month, more frequently if there are enough Consultant Partners, Certified Trainers or Distributors that need to become certified. We require a minimum of three paying participants (including any combination of end customers and Consultant Partners, Certified Trainers and/or Distributors, in order to lock a certification workshop date.
No. Only once.
Exception: If a Certified Trainer or Consultant Partner interested in doing delivery goes more than 18 months without personally conducting a NetSpeed Learning Solutions delivery, we would require them to go through a re-certification workshop, but we would waive the standard certification fee. The only cost for you would be the cost to travel to the certification event.
No, you don't, although we strongly encourage that you go through certification as quickly as possible. You can begin marketing and promoting NetSpeed Leadership and Blazing Service – and NetSpeed Fast Tracks - before being certified -- although if your affiliation relationship with us is that of a Certified Trainer or Consultant Partner, then you cannot deliver any NetSpeed Learning Solutions training classes unless and until you have become certified. We will provide you with sales and marketing support materials upon signing the Consultant Partnership Representation Agreement and paying the certification fee. We highly encourage, however, that you make every reasonable effort to go through certification within 90 days of joining up as a NetSpeed Learning Solutions Consultant Partner, Certified Trainer or Distributor, in order to ensure your long-term success representing NetSpeed Learning Solutions and Blazing Service.
Your NetSpeed Leadership certification does not give you authorization to deliver or market our new Customer Service training program called Blazing Service or vice versa. The content of the two programs are sufficiently different that we require Certified Trainers, Consultant Partners, and Distributors to become certified in each program to deliver each one. But we have made this certification process easy to complete and affordable for our Certified Trainers, Consultant Partners and Distributors. If you have already gone through certification for one program, in limited circumstances we can offer a remote certification workshop (via web conference delivery) to become in the second program. These remote certifications typically take roughly six hours (with breaks).
If your interest is exclusively in delivering and/or marketing Blazing Service and you have not previously participated in a NetSpeed Learning Solutions TTT certification event (or vice versa), the standard $1,000 certification fee to become certified to deliver and/or market Blazing Service would apply. If however, you have previously been certified in either program, and wish to become certified in the other program at a later date, the fee to get certified in the second program is $500 additional.
Yes,you can. Our only limitation is that we do not accept as Consultant Partners or Distributors people representing and promoting classroom-based modular vendor package that offers leadership/supervisory, professional skill-building or customer service training programs that we would consider to be direct competitors of NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service. (And frankly, the other vendors probably would not want you selling NetSpeed or Blazing Service for the same reasons.) But if you are representing a vendor package which is not classroom-based (e.g. a strictly e-learning product), or if the nature of the product's content offering centers around issues other than management, supervisory, professional or customer service skills training, this should not be an issue. If you are not clear whether there might be a conflict, give us a call and we will discuss the details and let you know whether we feel it is a competitive conflict or not. We try to be as flexible as we can in working with our Consultant Partners and Distributors around this issue.
No problem. Our goal is not to restrict your opportunity to generate revenue from programs you have developed in your practice. There is one exception to this rule: If you are a Consultant Partner or Certified Trainer, and the training delivery opportunity or sales lead came to you from NetSpeed Learning Solutions - that is, if WE introduced you to the prospective client - then we require that you not do not compete with NetSpeed Learning Solutions by promoting your own product offering to this prospect, as this would be a direct conflict of interest. But with that rather narrow exception, we try not to interfere with your ability to run your business and promote your own programs and services.
The only other issue is theft of intellectual property. While we try not to restrict our partners from marketing their own programs (other than the limited exception stated above), if we find out that a Consulting Partner, Certified Trainer or Distributor has taken our NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service training material and "private labeled" it as their own and attempted to market our content - our intellectual property - as their own, this would violate our copyright, and we would have to bring some nice people who wear pin-striped suits and like to use complex Latin phrases into the discussion. Please don't even think about going there, thank you.
No, there are not and there are no plans to do so either. We have made a conscious decision not to put unreasonable geographic restrictions on our Consultant Partners' and Distributors’ ability to grow their business by partnering with NetSpeed Learning Solutions. If you have clients or prospects in other cities or regions beyond your own "backyard" we have no problem with your representing NetSpeed Learning Solutions or Blazing Service to them so long as there isn't another Consulting Partner or Distributor already working with that client on behalf of NetSpeed Learning Solutions or Blazing Service.
Not necessarily. It depends on the size of your market. If your business were located in a small city, then we probably would not see a value to having more than one Consulting Partner or Distributor in your region (unless you were minimally active with NetSpeed Learning Solutions). But if your business was in a large metropolitan market like, say, New York, Houston, Chicago, or Washington, DC, then there could be more than one Consultant Partner or Distributor in any given larger market.
We have no interest in flooding the market, so in most cases, we are generally not looking to have more than a small number of active Consultant Partners or Distributor in any one major market. But there is no hard and fast rule about this. A deciding factor for us is how much time and attention a particular Consultant Partner or Distributor is devoting to promoting NetSpeed Learning Solutions program offerings in their market area – and how successful they are in their efforts. We would much rather have one or two highly committed Consultant Partners or Distributors in a market than six or seven partners all of whom were marginally involved in marketing NetSpeed Learning Solutions or Blazing Service.
We honestly have no set number of Consultant Partners or Distributors as a goal. Part of the answer to this question depends on the level of activity and involvement these Consulting Partners and Distributors provide. The more active and successful they are in any given geographic region, the fewer we will allow to become affiliated with us in that region.
We invite each Consultant Partner or Distributor to give us a list of clients or prospective clients with whom they have current or past working relationships that they would like to "protect." Generally speaking (with some case-by-case exceptions), we handle these protection requests on a first-come-first-served basis. We then share this "Protected Accounts" list with our entire Consultant Partnership Community so every Consultant Partner and Distributor has access to a list of clients that have been previously protected by another Consultant Partner or Distributor. Of course, if a Consultant Partner or Distributor is not actively working with a client they have previously protected, this protected status is not guaranteed indefinitely, and prospects can be shifted to other Consultant Partners or Distributors if the other person is willing to aggressively work a client and have an influential contact within the organization.
The best! In addition to the in-depth three-day initial certification workshop, we provide a comprehensive Sales Tool Kit, which includes:
And much more. We continually update our online Sales Tool Kit and enhance it with new support materials. Consultant Partners and Distributors can enter their password to access the most up-to-date version of all marketing and sales support materials at our web site.
We provide you with your own NetSpeed Leadership business cards (at your request) as well as other marketing support materials. We also produce a periodic NetSpeed Leadership HTML email newsletter that we send out to over 5,000 newsletter subscribers who represent prospective customers, providing them with articles,insights and ideas around leadership training. In addition, each month we conduct webinars in which we feature a different NSL module each session – a great way to get NetSpeed Leadership in front of your prospects in a low-threat way.
We also feature you on our web site in our “Meet Our Team” section, with your head shot photo, your bio and contact information (phone and email).
For Consultant Partners and Distributors, we provide you with a wealth of additional marketing and sales collateral at no charge (or in some cases, depending on the item, at our cost). We are committed to your success.
In addition, we are willing to work closely with our Consultant Partners and Distributors to help craft email campaigns and personalized proposals that make the most sense for their clients. We email every Consultant Partner and Distributor a monthly Partner newsletter with new product information, pricing updates, new sales tools or any other information that we think may assist you in your efforts to represent NetSpeed Leadership and Blazing Service.
It depends. We bill the client for all program library fees, participant materials and trainer certification costs. For Consultant Partners and Distributors, typically we handle all client billing. If you are a Certified Trainer delivering your own workshop to your client (and the opportunity did not come to you from NetSpeed Leadership originally), the Certified Trainer typically invoices the client directly for their facilitation services and the cost of materials.
Have a question that was not answered here? Call us toll-free at 877-517-5271 or email us atYes, we do. With the increasing interest in Social Media tools (blogging, podcasting, etc.) and the changing learning styles of the younger generations entering the workforce,, we have developed a Learning on Demand platform we call NetSpeed Fast Tracks, which capitalizes on these social media tools to provide a customizable private labeled learning on demand platform for organizations. Consultant Partners and Distributors who are interested in marketing this innovative e-learning offering are welcome to do so. To learn more about NetSpeed Fast Tracks, ask for your own free two-week trial by emailing info@netspeedfasttracks.com.
No. Consultant Partners and Distributors who have been certified in either NetSpeed Leadership or Blazing Service can be authorized at no additional investment to market NetSpeed Fast Tracks to their customers. We will include this in your “Day Three” of your certification workshop (the sales and marketing day) and provide you with sales and marketing collateral to help you present this offering with confidence.
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