With John Leh, Brett Strauss, and Himansu Karunadasa

EDITOR’S NOTE: This Executive Briefing has been adapted and published with permission from the Talented Learning blog.

John Leh of Talented Learning:

Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of The Talented Learning Executive Briefing Series. As I always tell you, this is my favorite series of content because we get to travel the world virtually and meet with the best learning technology solutions in the world.

Today is no different. We’re here with NetExam, from Dallas, Texas, and we’re going to learn all about the LMS for partner and customer education. The NetExam LMS is one of the leaders in the industry and a perennial winner in The Talented Learning Award series.

I’m excited to see the updates from Brett Strauss, the CEO of NetExam.

Brett Strauss of NetExam:

Great, thanks, John. I’m going to start with a little bit of background on NetExam.

John:

Twenty years ago, everybody else was knee-deep into employee Learning Management Systems. You and Himansu _ began building the NetExam LMS to focus on the extended enterprise before anybody else and have been out ahead leading the thought leadership in this sector. So this is always one of my favorite demonstrations and briefings to get.

Brett:

To your point, John, we made a conscious decision 20 years ago to forego all the HR LMS opportunities and concentrate just on extended enterprise training. That includes the training of partners and customers, the people outside of the brick and mortar shop. And as you know, our product has benefited from that by allowing us to concentrate on function and features that only affect that group. So we aren’t divided, trying to support large numbers of different disparate types of users and use cases.

A little bit of background on our company: we were founded in 2004. Our headquarters is in Dallas and we have an office in New York and a development office in Sri Lanka.

Quick Look at NetExam

NetExam provides AI-driven virtual, social, and classroom learning management. We primarily focus on customer, partner and association training, the extended Enterprise, all the people you want to train that don’t work for your organization. 

NetExam Customers

We’ve been doing this for quite a while. We have some good client names with a couple of notable ones: 

• McAfee has been working with our company for 18 years. 
• Oracle at their peak had 145,000 users on our platform. But we’ve made an effort to build an Enterprise-level quality system that will allow them to do that type of customer and partner training, tracking, and management.

Integrations

We have over a hundred different integrations. Here’s some of our more primary ones that are used by most of our customers everywhere from CRM, PRM to Virtual labs to mobile gifting, proctoring, SSO security, all sorts of different Integrations necessary to offer up a product that integrates with the organizations that we work with. 

And really, to some degree, our product is private-labeled. When you log in and do training at a company like AT&T, you never see the NetExam brand. We reskin our product to look exactly like your portal. And our goal is to not be noticed by the end users.

As you said earlier, we’ve been recognized by your group, Talented Learning, for a number of years. We do appreciate that. We love the in-depth review of the product that you do. 

NetExam has a few differentiators when it comes to the world of channel partner training. 

We are built around organizations and not individuals. We’re there to help groups of individuals reach certain goals together, like a channel partner organization growing from two million to five million revenue in 18 months. 

Tying Training to ROI

You can do that through training and through measuring training to ROI and the learning impact analysis. 

• What was the benefit? 
• What was the cause and effect of the training I delivered? 
• How did it benefit my organization? 
• And how do I justify the budget I spent on developing that training content?

CRM Integrations

NetExam has deep Integrations with Salesforce, Oracle sales cloud, and Microsoft Dynamics. This is critical for this type of training delivery. This allows you to do things like track training results with lead-generation opportunities through reduction of customer tickets through support systems.

It allows you to tie together the cause and effect between the training delivered and the outcomes that you’re expecting.

Exam Engine

We have a very advanced exam engine that’s built-in with proctoring support for high-stakes exams along with psychometric reporting. So we can do some pretty deep analysis, not just of the individual’s results, but even down to the question level: Which missed question was answered the most? 

You can create exams where questions get more difficult as the questions are answered correctly so the exam gets customized to the individual.

And we built an entire experience around implementing global customer training. We’ve been doing this for two decades. We’ve seen a lot of different organizations, worked with a number of different rollouts and CRM Integrations. This has given us a lot of experience so we understand what people are going through.

AT&T Case Study

If you want to sell particular AT&T products, you have to get certified before they allow you to sell. And that’s what our system does. It tracks what the users have completed and makes sure they’re keeping up with their requirements. 

Not only that, but for certain individuals who achieve higher levels of training, they can get increased commissions on sales opportunities. 

Royal Canin Case Study

Royal Canin is a global pet food seller. They use training up and down their organization. They train their veterinarians who they partner with, the doctors, and their best store employees. 

They train everyone who comes in contact with their product. And of course, by understanding who’s reached certain goals, who’s met certain training goals, they can alter the way they work with those organizations: whether it’s better margins, better benefits, marketing dollars, and things they can earn by reaching certain goals.

Sabre Case Study

If you’ve called a travel agent, they’ve used the Sabre software to book your travel. 

Sabre has had a great relationship with NetExam for a number of years. They use our product to train their travel agents, who are their customers, on how to use their product. 

And they push out updates because of our integration with Salesforce. With this customer, we can automate the onboarding process for their customers and they can push out training updates and track when they are in our platform, and also, within the Salesforce platform.

Reporting

There are a number of different reporting features within the platform. The above image shows self-service type reporting for managers and customers. They can come in and see what goals have been met, whether it’s along product lines and understand whether each organization is reaching the goals that have been set for them by the manufacturer. 

On top of that, we have a deeper level of reporting that is for what we would say are the CAMs and NAMs that want to go down to the individual level to find out what certifications have been obtained. But this is about understanding a better sense of the health of their training goals across the organization. 

So they can organize this by different types of industries, by individual companies, and by individual people within those companies. 

It allows them to have a better understanding of what’s been achieved and where there are gaps that need to be filled. It’s an overall analysis of where they are globally with their training down to the organization and individual levels.

Learning Advisor

The learning advisor is very helpful for organizations with large libraries of content and large numbers of products. It’s a little bit like your high school counselor where you can come in and tell the software what your role is, what products you focus on, what Solutions you’re selling, and what you want to be capable of. 

It’s about building out a plan of where you want to be, and then the system takes all that into account and pushes out an entire training syllabus for you to reach your goals.

It allows you to have a customized training program for each individual instead of the manufacturer trying to assume what everybody wants or needs. At the end of the day, that always leaves some gaps.

Rapid Content Creator

We have a new tool which is our rapid content creator. This is an AI-driven course development tool that allows you to launch courses in minutes. And that’s not an exaggeration. We use large language model technology to create the course, We auto translate it into multiple languages and auto create questions.

We don’t just create the questions, we actually create the wrong answers within the questions, which obviously have to be realistic for the quality of the question to be decent. It also tags content for SEO,

You can allow your subject matter experts, your customers, your partners, and even your customers to come in and create their own courses.

Contextual Learning

We have contextual learning, which is where you embed small icons within your own software applications. And then when a user is in your software application, they can click the icon and it’ll pop open a window where they’ll be able to consume training related to that specific item.

That way they’re not forced to go through an entire course, they don’t have to go through a number of PowerPoints. They can just consume and answer the one question they’re struggling with when that question arises.

You can embed these same little learning widgets within other tools, it can be within your marketing collateral, it can be within your support documents, and your help files. The idea is you don’t have to go to the LMS to learn anymore. We can pepper the contextual-related topics within the areas where the people already are.

Mobile Apps

We have a number of different mobile apps available. The mobile apps are all customized, custom branded for each of our customers. We have a learner app, an exam app, and bills evaluation. We also have a conference app we developed so individuals can get credit for attending conferences and conference breakout sessions.

The idea is that there’s a lot of knowledge that gets transferred that doesn’t fit into a lesson and a learning objective in a course or in a quiz. But we have a way to actually credit individuals with consuming that content outside of the LMS and earn points towards their education.

Informal Learning

We started developing tools for Informal learning when one of our customers, Stanley, was looking to do ride-alongs where their new-hire salespeople would ride along with the more seasoned veterans and spend a week learning what they do. They needed a way for those veterans to be able to credit the individual for the training. That was the catalyst for developing the app.

But it can be used in a number of different places: mentor meetings, conference check-ins, team meetings. Maybe someone hears someone do a great sales call standing next to them and gets credit for that. 

Informal learning allows you to track the things that are going on in the real world. The nice thing is that you don’t have to create new content. All you’re doing is creating recognition for content that’s already being created and learning that’s already being transferred.

MicroLearning

Our customers love our microlearning tools. Not only is it helpful to pepper the learner with opportunities to earn points, but it also creates a little bit more stickiness so people will come back in. Maybe you want to answer a few questions every few days and engage with individuals as opposed to sitting through a longer course. 

Video sales pitch

This is also very popular also. Individuals use their phone or their laptop and record themselves giving a sales pitch, which is great when you’re a partner and if I’m a manufacturer. I don’t have any control, but I can at least see the way that they’re representing my company when they’re speaking about our products and representing my company.

And there’s a number of different ways those can be recorded. They can be recorded by a manager that can log in and see all the sales pitches by all of their people. They can give feedback. They can tag each one of them. They can rank them. It’s great about making it clear who’s good at speaking about your product or your service.

Himansu Karunadasa is the Co-Founder and CTO of MediaDefined, the makers of the NetExam LMS (Learning Management System). Himansu holds a Master of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from Texas Tech University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from Connecticut State University. Connect with Himansu on LinkedIn

John Leh, CEO and Lead Analyst of Talented Learning, is an independent market analyst, blogger and podcaster that covers the LMS and customer education market. Connect with John Leh on LinkedIn

Brett Strauss has been leading the way in customer and partner education since its early days. He’s the Founder and President of NetExam. Connect with Brett Strauss on LinkedIn

Learn More from Brett Strauss

Want more of Brett’s customer education wisdom ? Check out these Talented Learning productions:

• Talented Learning Show Podcast #58: Inside a Channel Training LMS with Brett Strauss
• Customer Ed Nuggets Podcast #2: Top Customer Ed LMS Integrations
• Blog: Expert Tips to Educate Dealer Franchises by Brett Strauss

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