Solutions
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External Training Platform
One platform for every external training program
Customers, partners, and resellers can all only succeed if they’re properly trained on the ins and outs of your products and services. Thinkific brings external training into one branded, scalable platform — no matter who your target audience is.
External training lowers churn and scales revenue
Tackle common business challenges like product usage drop-off, failing affiliate programs, or unhappy partners before they happen with external training on Thinkific. Proactive, structured education enables your business to scale without constantly responding to support requests or partner emails.
According to a Forrester study, 86% of companies with formalized customer education programs have seen a positive return on their investment.
The many use cases for external training
With Thinkific, you can support every external training audience from a single platform.
Customer education
Streamline onboarding, increase product adoption, reduce churn, and boost the lifetime value of your customers with customer education. Whether courses, community experiences, live events, or all of the above, Thinkific allows you to train customers to drive their success. With learning path recommendations, CRM integrations, and your very own branded learning mobile app, you can meet your customers where they already are.
Companies with formalized customer education programs report an average 38.3% increase in product adoption. Source: Forrester
Partner enablement
Standardized training is key to any successful partner program. Whether you’re working with resellers, distributors, or channel partners, they need to know your products as well as you do to quickly close deals without additional support. Thinkific offers integrations into the systems you’re already using to manage partners, advanced analytics to track their progress, and certifications to help them succeed in market.
Keap switched to Thinkific Plus and reduced partner onboarding time by 30% Read their case study.
Extended enterprise training for franchisees and multi-brand ecosystems
As you bring on a new franchisee, acquire a company, or launch a new brand, proper training ensures quality standards and increases your likelihood of success. To maintain consistency as you scale your business, you need a learning platform that scales with you. Thinkific delivers, with multi-site management, volume enrolment, role-based permissions, progress tracking and certification, and so much more.
Identifies new revenue opportunities
Thinker suggests additional learning content at the perfect moment — when learners are most engaged and ready to invest further.
External training is complex. Thinkific makes it simple.
Get the advanced features you need to make external training stick with Thinkific Plus.
White-label, branded academies
A custom domain, logo, colors, and CSS mean your learners see your brand, not ours.
Multi-site management
Run separate learning environments for every audience you train, all managed from one central login.
SCORM
Import interactive content from any authoring tool, then track completions, pass rates, and scores with analytics tools.
CRM integrations
Native Salesforce and HubSpot integrations sync enrolment, progress, and completion data straight to your customer records.
Enterprise SSO
Connect Okta, Auth0, JumpCloud, Active Directory, AWS Cognito and other OpenID Connect identity providers so external learners sign in with their existing credentials.
Thinker: Thinkific’s AI teaching assistant
Learners get instant answers from an AI assistant trained on your content, cutting down on support load as you scale.
Thinkific is the future of external training
Commerce
Commerce is the core, not an afterthought. Customers on TCommerce — our built-in payments and checkout solution — see a 31% higher average order value. Sell hundreds of seats in a single transaction with group orders, drive more revenue with order bumps, and never lose a sale with automated abandoned cart emails.
Support
Award-winning support comes standard, including access to a dedicated team every step of the way. With a dedicated launch specialist, migration support, and solutions engineers, launch within 90 days and prove the ROI of your learning program faster.
Analytics
Measuring the return on your learning investments is no longer a challenge. Use advanced analytics to deliver key metrics like enrolments, engagement, quiz scores, completions, and more. Feed learner enrolments, progress, and completions straight into your GTM stack thanks to Salesforce and HubSpot integrations.
What external training on Thinkific looks like in practice
These organizations built scalable external training programs on Thinkific.
The results speak for themselves
We don’t ask you to take our word for it, we let the data do the talking. Our awards are fuelled by 400+ real-world reviews, making Thinkific one of the highest-rated learning platforms on G2.
How teams win with Thinkific
LearnTourism united a complex, fragmented industry, partnering with destination marketing organizations to educate more than 60,000 employees and earning 100% partner retention year over year.
Keap — a combined CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, payments, and analytics platform — reduced reseller partner onboarding time by 30% by making the switch from a legacy LMS to Thinkific Plus.
European retailer Anita solved international retail partner training with Thinkific, using bundles, a branded mobile app, and peer-to-peer learning communities to train thousands of employees at more than 500 client stores.
Frequently asked questions
What is external training?
External training is structured education delivered to people outside the organization, including customers, partners, resellers, and affiliates. It can be used to drive product adoption and revenue, scale enablement, and reduce support costs. Some of the most common features essential to external training programs are white-labelling or custom branding, multiple instance management, bulk selling tools, and advanced analytics.
How does customer education reduce churn?
Customer education reduces churn by increasing success. When a customer is quickly taught how to successfully use your product or service, they’ll achieve milestones faster, see returns faster, have fewer support needs, and more fully adopt the product, leading to lower churn down the line and higher customer lifetime value.
What is the difference between customer education and partner enablement?
Customer education is focused on training users or clients so they get more value from your product or service. Partner enablement is typically focused on increasing the knowledge and comfort level of resellers, distributors, affiliates, or other partners so that they can sell or support your products and services. Thinkific can be used for both, covering multiple use cases and specific features needed for success in either use case.
Does Thinkific support multi-tenant external training?
Thinkific supports multi-tenant architecture, which means organizations can run separate learning environments for different audiences — customers, partners, and resellers — from a single admin panel, the Plus Portal.
How long does it take to launch an external training program on Thinkific?
With a dedicated launch specialist, Thinkific customers can launch in under 90 days (the average being 64 days). Other LMS and training platforms commonly take 6 to 12 months.
Can external training programs generate revenue on Thinkific?
Yes. Thinkific is built with commerce in mind. From our native payment processor TCommerce to course subscriptions, bundles, group orders, and one-time purchases, you have everything you need to treat external training as a revenue stream.