The Client
Based in Nova Scotia, Canada, Corporate Training Materials predominantly sells soft-skills materials to global training providers. They offer instructor-led training (ILT) packages in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, as well as SCORM-based e-learning content. Their eLearning materials are either sold directly to clients or hosted through Firmwater LMS.
Course topics include time management, accountability, building confidence, and assertiveness. They are built using Articulate Rise and Storyline, then uploaded to Firmwater LMS for distribution.
Corporate Training Materials serves a wide range of clients, including life coaches, small training teams, and HR departments. End users include front-line staff and mid-level managers who work across various industries. Their clients value their ready-to-deploy content and the flexibility to deliver it under their own brand.
As a Canadian training provider with a growing base of domestic and international clients, Corporate Training Materials chose to partner with Firmwater in 2016 for its reliable infrastructure, proximity, and aligned values.
The Challenge
As Corporate Training Materials began to grow, they saw an opportunity to make a bigger impact in the global training market by offering:
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- Professional soft skills content that’s immediately ready for delivery
- Branded training platforms for coaches, consultants, and teams to deliver under their own name
- Flexibility for clients to personalize the learning experience by combining Corporate Training Materials’ content with their own
To bring this vision to life, they needed an LMS partner that could help them overcome four key challenges:
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- Delivery Model Transition: As the popularity in online training grew, they needed to help clients transition from in-person workshops to asynchronous eLearning. In doing so, they needed to support both internal learners and external training resale models. This challenge was magnified during COVID, when organizations had to pivot quickly from in-person to digital delivery.
- Branding & Customization: Clients wanted to self-brand the training they purchased, so a white-labeled platform was required. This included the ability to add custom logos, colours and domain names in addition to branded certificates and emails.
- User Experience: Clients often lack LMS experience so they needed a platform that was easy to use and quick to onboard, with minimal training required.
- Content Flexibility: They needed to deliver access to a 140+ course library without duplicating effort, while still allowing clients to upload their own SCORM files, videos, and documents.
How Firmwater Helped
White-Labeled Platform for Every Client
Corporate Training Materials’ clients wanted to deliver the courses they purchased under their own brand identity, so they needed control over visuals and communication.
Firmwater’s multi-tenant LMS enabled Corporate Training Materials to create fully branded LMS portals, known as ‘Client Sites’ for each client. Each Client Site acts as a stand-alone LMS with it’s own users, courses, logos, colours, domain, email templates and certificates. Further content flexibility within each site allows clients to build custom courses and deliver them to users as they see fit, whether it’s through course assignments, learning paths or Shopify eCommerce integration.
This level of customization positioned CTM as more than just a content provider. It made them a scalable training solution for growing businesses.
“We have tonnes of clients who buy white-label training so that they're able to provide their own training platform with their own logo, their own branding, and their own scheme. And they can provide the training to their own users under their own platform. So that's just a huge part of how you guys help our business grow.”
Zack Myers, Operations Manager, Corporate Training Materials
Delivering a Full Course Library Without Extra Work
The second challenge was two-fold: Provide clients with access to a library of over 140 off the shelf courses while also allowing them to upload their own content. This needed to be done in a scalable way.
With Firmwater’s centralized content management approach, Corporate Training Materials only needed to load their entire course library into the LMS once and then grant access to new clients as needed. There is no need to upload and build brand new courses for each client as the content is already loaded, saving admin time and accelerating the onboarding process. As an added benefit, an update to a single course module in the LMS is automatically reflected for all clients who have access to it, again saving hours of admin work.
Once set up with their own client site and course library, clients are then able to load their own content like SCORM files, PDFs, or videos. This flexibility makes Corporate Training Materials an attractive partner for trainers who want a ready-to-use solution with room for personalization.
Quick Setup, Smooth Onboarding
They also needed a platform simple enough for non-technical clients to learn quickly.
Firmwater’s clean interface and efficent setup allows for a quick and smooth onboarding process. “Clients love the ease of the LMS, that’s the biggest thing,” recalls the company’s Operations manager, Zack Myers. “I can have somebody trained to use the LMS within 30 minutes.”
This ease of use removes barriers for clients and enables Corporate Training Materials to scale their offering without bottlenecks.
Flexible B2B Integrations and Domain Control
As they continued to grow, Corporate Training Materials realized they needed access to specific B2B functionality to attract and meet the needs of larger training providers. Many of these prospects had an established brand and a large user population so needed seamless access control and branding flexibility. Others wanted access to Corporate Training Materials’ course library for internal training, but already had their own LMS.
Firmwater supports Single Sign-On, so their clients’ users can access the LMS with the same set of credentials that they use for everything else. Additionally, Firmwater’s external LMS integration allows Corporate Training Materials to host and control their courses on the Firmwater side, but allow their clients to launch the content from their own LMS. And lastly, a custom LMS domain lets clients access training through their own branded URLs. According to Myers, clients love the ability to have their own custom domain. “...it allows them to protect their brand and to make sure that it's exactly the way they want it to look. It's great to have the custom domains.”
Ultimately, Firmwater’s B2B functionality helped Corporate Training Materials reach larger enterprise clients and resellers.
Reliable Support from a Trusted Partner
CTM works with a wide range of customer types, from solo coaches to large HR teams, so they need to support diverse learning goals and technical needs. They therefore need a reliable partner in their corner who can navigate everything from hands-on setup to complex technical questions.
When CTM partnered with Firmwater in 2016, Firmwater had been in the eLearning space for 15 years. They knew what worked and what didn’t across training industries. Firmwater acts as an extension of the CTM team to help brainstorm solutions, help with client siteup and troubleshoot technical issues. CTM has a dedicated Customer Success Manager and direct access to the support and development team via email and phone.
“My favourite is just having you guys in our back corner. The support that you guys provide is amazing, and we wouldn't be here without you guys. Just even trying to bounce ideas off of you guys or when an issue comes, you guys are always quick to solve them.”
Zack Myers, Operations Manager, Corporate Training Materials
Business Outcomes
- 140+ soft skills courses available for global client use
- 100+ active white-labeled client LMS sites
- Fast onboarding: Clients trained in under 30 minutes
- Scalable platform now used by solo coaches, small businesses, and enterprise teams alike
- Differentiated offering due to content flexibility, ease of use, and white-labelling features