Understanding the Role of Training in the Extended Enterprise

May 15, 2025 | Articles, Customer Training and Customer Experience Design

Key Takeaways:

  • Extended enterprise training strengthens relationships with external stakeholders and enhances the overall customer experience.
  • Sharing knowledge within the extended enterprise requires careful consideration of what can and should be shared to protect proprietary information while promoting collaboration.
  • Different types of training, including partner, contractor, and customer training, are crucial to empowering external contributors and driving enterprise success.
  • Focusing extended enterprise learning on the total customer experience ensures seamless and personalized interactions that foster customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

There’s much talk about the “extended enterprise” today. Folks are recognizing that links between suppliers, partners, customers, and other stakeholders extend business relationships beyond the traditional boundaries of the organization.

 Consequently, organizational responsibilities also extend those boundaries. One of the responsibilities that does so is learning and development (L&D). Your external partners are an important part of your enterprise, which is why they should be trained to provide your customers with the best experience possible. 

What is the ‘extended enterprise’? 

Simply put, the “extended enterprise” represents your supply chain. However, this isn’t the most nuanced way to look at the extended enterprise, since it doesn’t account for relationships that don’t look or act like links in the supply chain.

Instead, it may help to think of your extended enterprise as everyone outside the boundaries of your enterprise who helps you achieve your business goals. This can include vendors, partners, subcontractors, customers, and suppliers. It might even include some of your vendors’ suppliers.

This whole group acts as an extension of your organization. The stronger your relationships, the stronger the enterprise. Offer training and development solutions to your partners, and your enterprise will flourish.

The classic example of this dynamic? Japanese auto manufacturers in the 1970s and ‘80s. Rather than the typical hands-off relationship most manufacturers had with their supplier at the time, companies like Toyota worked with their supply chain to make their vendors more effective. The automakers shared their approaches to success and collaborated with their suppliers to make better cars. It was about learning together. 

The result was a booming Japanese automotive industry. 

Sharing knowledge within the extended enterprise

Knowledge sharing in the supply chain isn’t unusual. Organizations often provide learning resources about their products and services to their partners. These partner training programs run the gamut from marketing efforts (free product training) to revenue streams (paid certifications). 

Learning in the extended enterprise goes beyond training, however. It’s more about sharing knowledge. This doesn’t always mean the knowledge flows one way, either. You’re not always sending training to your partners; they also share important learning with you. Ideally, the entire extended enterprise is learning together.

The challenge here is to figure out what elements of organizational learning can and should be shared. This might go beyond just product or service-related information. If some partners have excellent business practices and the others that could be shared. Doing so may improve the overall extended enterprise.

Not all partners will be open to training or knowledge sharing. It may be seen as an intrusion by some. However, it’s worth trying to collaborate. By improving as a group, your offerings and the customer experience will be better. It’s good business. And of course, it’s better to offer training that some partners don’t take than it is to not have training when many of your partners are craving it.

What types of learning fall into extended enterprise training? 

Because your extended enterprise can include so many different kinds of stakeholders, there are several types of training you might offer that fall under the extended enterprise learning umbrella: 

  • Partner training: It’s probably important to acknowledge that “partner” is an intentionally vague word that can be used to describe several types of relationships within your extended enterprise ecosystem. “Partners” can be resellers, suppliers, distributors, franchisees or any other external individual or organization that helps you make or sell your product. The goal of partner training is to equip your partners with the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively represent your brand and sell your company’s offerings, to drive revenue and ultimately strengthen the partnership itself. Because many of your partners are the face of your brand, it’s critical that they know how to offer a top-quality customer experience that is consistent with your standards. 
  • Contractor training: This one can be tricky. Contractors provide an important source of labor for your enterprise, but they’re not employees. In many places in the world (such as the U.S.), this means you can’t require contractors to take training. However, contractors can benefit from onboarding and other types of training, with some even craving the opportunity to learn on the job. Contractor training usually focuses on topics like compliance or the tools they’ll be using to complete a job. However, your contractors might benefit from more detailed learning, such as a demo of a client’s product or an explanation of an enterprise’s business goals. The key is to offer the opportunity for learning rather than to attempt to make training mandatory.
  • Customer training: Your customers are also a part of your extended enterprise, and they can certainly benefit from training. Customer training is a structured educational program or collection of resources that you provide to your customers to help them understand and effectively use your product or services. It can take various forms, but the primary goal of all customer training is to empower customers by providing them with the knowledge and skills needed to maximize the value of their purchase. This not only builds customer satisfaction and retention but also reduces the burden on support teams by minimizing common user errors and confusion.

How to start training the extended enterprise

Building your own strategy for training the extended enterprise requires several concrete steps: 

  1. Know your extended enterprise: Define the scope of your extended enterprise. Know who your stakeholders are, and what’s at stake for each when it comes to the customer experience. 
  2. Know what learning is already available: What already exists? What specific skills have been developed and what knowledge about the contribution to the enterprise has been documented? Also, what exists in your partners’ libraries? This should be done internally and in conjunction with the other groups in your extended enterprise.
  3. Know what learning you need: After you know what you have, it’s time to take stock of the knowledge you need — information that would be valuable but does not yet exist. Again, this should be conducted both internally and in collaboration with partners.
  4. Know what can be shared: Sharing knowledge is important, but that doesn’t necessarily mean everything gets shared. Protect the proprietary knowledge you need to protect. (The Toyota mantra was “share intensively, but selectively.”)
  5. Create a strategy for sharing knowledge: A collaborative approach should be taken about what’s to be shared, and how to share it. What platform or platforms can be used? How will permissions be handled? How will schedules and messaging be coordinated? You’ll also have to take business questions into consideration: is this an investment, or are there revenue opportunities? Are there credentialing or certification opportunities? Who pays for what? What is the business case in terms of savings and revenue?

There is considerable effort in this exercise, but there are also significant benefits: effectiveness, efficiency, as well as agility. 

You may also want to incorporate learning content that helps your partners learn about collaboration, active listening and related soft skills. This may ease some of the concerns partners have about sharing information with you and other members of your extended enterprise.

Ultimately, extended enterprise learning is about the customer

When you develop a strategy for training the extended enterprise, it’s useful to focus on the idea of the “total customer experience.” Everything you build is geared toward the customer’s success, and that includes learning. You might be training the customers themselves, or you might be creating learning for the franchisee who sells your product to the customer, but all learning is about the customer.

Customers are aware of this. They are increasingly sophisticated and have high expectations when it comes to their experience with your brand — no matter who provides that experience. They notice when you’re investing in their success. 

Training your extended enterprise can help you provide the seamless, personalized experience that your customers expect. 

It’s your job (and the job of your extended enterprise) to ensure the customer’s success with your product, any information you have that can help achieve this should be inventoried, used, and shared. Understanding this aspect of the business, is part of the role of contributing to organizational success. That’s a valuable understanding for L&D to offer.

Ready to take your extended enterprise training to the next level? Discover how Litmos LMS can help you streamline and enhance your external training efforts. Empower your partners, contractors, and customers with the knowledge they need to succeed and watch your enterprise flourish. Contact us for a free live demo today to get started!