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This is not your father’s Sales Certification. Real feedback from HPE partners on the FY17 Sale Cert

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Contributing Author: John Woodrow

Sales certifications of old can evoke memories of endless product specs and acronym soup.

That’s why over the past few years, we’ve made a concerted effort to develop sales certifications designed to help partners discuss business outcomes and not just product specs.

For FY17, the HPE Sales Certified - IT Business Conversations [2017] certification we specifically designed it to focus how to engage decision makers in conversations about the critical role IT must play in making a business successful. The training is also positioned within the framework of hybrid infrastructure—a key HPE focus.

What you might not know is that we piloted the FY17 Sales Certification with HPE partners just like you. Actually, we do this for every new course and exam prior to releasing them. It’s part of our commitment to bring relevant, useful and high quality certifications and training to our partners.

Back in October 2016, we piloted the course and exam for the FY17 HPE sales certification. As a result we received great feedback. Here’s just some of the input:

Variety throughout

When you take the course one of the things you will notice is that we purposely inserted different types of learning checks throughout to help keep your attention.

One of the best courses I've taken; enough unique reinforcement that it didn't feel repetitive; interesting positioning of learning checks so it mixed it up; learning reinforcement methods were different so kept me interested.

Alignment with internal sales training

The team that develops learning and certification for partners was merged with the team that develops sales training in late 2015. As a result sales training for partners is more tightly aligned to sales training for HPE employees.

The sales certification training is great. Excellent view and structure. I like the images you used. Content is great. Very much linked to the training programs we are providing to our internal Sales. Overall great work.

FY16 vs. FY17 HPE Sales Certification

We’ve shared previously how the FY16 HPE Sales Certification differs from the FY17 sales cert. More than 80% of the content is new and content that is a repeat is easily skipped.

I thought it was GREAT to remind them of last year's content and specifically point out what is new.

Access to other resources

We worked to include access to whitepapers, websites and other resources throughout the FY17 HPE Sales Certification

I appreciated the links to whitepapers or other websites where resources could be found. I clicked on a number of these and bookmarked them to read in their entirety or to reference with my own work.

Earn the FY17 HPE Sales Certification today!

The new HPE Sales Certified - IT Business Conversations [2017] certification helps Partners focus on becoming conversant in the language of the Hybrid Infrastructure computing model. The certification also supports partners’ sales pipeline growth by engaging in higher value conversations that focus on outcomes and not just products.

The training is designed especially for on-the-go HPE partner sales teams and split into 30-40 minute modules. A study guide is available for free as a download in the Resources section of the web-based training. The new FY17 Sales Certification- IT Business Conversations is available now and is part of the FY17 Partner Ready requirements for Silver, Gold or Platinum Partner organizations.

 John WoodrowJohn WoodrowMeet John Woodrow,  Senior Program Manager for HPE Partner Ready Sales Certification and Learning.

About the Author

SarahA

I’ve been in marketing in high-tech for 20+ years.