Building an LMS

Business Case
How Smart
Learning Leaders
Get Their
Organization
Onboard

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 1
Introduction

As a learning leader, you know when the time has come to invest in a
learning solution. You’ve done your homework, or maybe even used a
couple before. Either way, you know the benefits it can bring to your
organization, but do the decision-makers know the value too?

Without a clear understanding of the solution’s benefits, the C-suite

and purse string holders can find it difficult to justify the investment.
That means it’s up to you. You need to show them the bigger picture
and craft a powerful case to get it over the line.

We’re going to help you do just that. This guide will show you how to
build a business case for a new LMS by identifying what’s really im-
portant to your stakeholders.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 2
State your case: What’s
your business need?
Typically, most software needs business approval. But with a laundry
list of stakeholders each with their own agenda, it’s often a challenge
to get buy-in, especially if it’s your first time investing in a learning
solution. So, how do you win them over?

Many people will focus on the software itself, stating how it’s modern,
best-in-class, and so on. But we don’t agree. In fact, we think
this quote from Degreed hits the nail on the head:

“If you’re sitting there trying to build

your business case based on tech alone,
stop. Step back and think about the
organization. What direction are you
going in and what skills do you need?”
—
Global Head of Learning and Development, Imperial Brands

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 3
We suggest you switch your focus and talk about one big thing: busi-
ness needs. Usually a pressing problem you have to solve. But how do
you determine the business need? Look at the goals your company
has (where you need to get to) and also at the current challenges the
business is facing. As a learning leader, you’ll have a unique insight
into problems that will become more acute as you scale. Having the
foresight to solve these problems will help support your business
case.

Here are some examples of common needs that a learning solution

can help with:

You’re a fast-growing SaaS company. With more and more cus-

tomers signing up, the pressure is on for your customer-facing
teams. So, there’s a need to find a more efficient way to onboard
new customers as hand holding each one is becoming difficult to
scale.

Your organization is experiencing high employee turnover as

your people aren’t seeing the potential for growth. So, there’s a
need to help them develop and skill up in your organization.

Your organization has multiple learning solutions across differ-

ent teams and audiences. With inconsistency and an inefficient
budget spend, the need is to have one consistent way to deliver
cost-effective learning programs.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 4
Shape your team
As head of the LMS search team, you are the driving force behind
crafting the business case. So, to build legitimacy, you’ll first need
to outline who should be involved; who needs to be consulted, and
whose help you will need to implement. Let’s call them your new LMS
champions. A team of subject matter experts who will help prepare
and sign off on your proposal.

It’s always worth connecting with your finance team or budget de-
cision maker early in the process, even before you consider buying
software. What matters to them? What are the criteria for demon-
strating ROI? How have they evaluated systems in the past?

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 5
To show the value that the business will get from the investment, you
should also include an organizational leader (or leaders) who sit out-
side the L&D team to champion the initiative. This “selection commit-
tee” (often includes IT, procurement, and HR) will ensure that every-
one agrees on common project goals.

You can build champions among your leadership team by outlining

the benefit their teams and managers will get from having a new LMS.
By showing them the art of the possible, and also surfacing any con-
cerns, you can build a much stronger business case as well as excite-
ment.

If your company is new to an LMS, try to find a leader who has used
one before and found value in it. They can advocate for the value of
introducing new software into the business.

There are so many tasks involved in LMS selection, implementation,

and maintenance. This is why you should assemble a team and clearly
outline their responsibilities in your LMS business case. If stakehold-
ers know who is responsible for what, and that understaffing won’t be
an issue, they’ll be more inclined to sign on.

“Consider including a senior leader outside of Learning &

Development to champion the initiative and funding request to
bridge the gap between the business and L&D.”

Brandon Hall Group, Winning the Business Case

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 6
Know the ROI of your
investment
“Focus on identifying what skills are
lacking in your organization. With that
alignment and clarity, L&D can create a
skill-building program that’s in lock-step
with your business strategy.”
—
Lori Niles-Hofmann, Senior EdTech Transformation, NilesNolen

Once you have your needs established and your team onboard it’s
time to work out the return on investment (ROI). Strategic thinking
is led by a focus on data and metrics, so by having an in-depth under-

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 7
standing of an influential metric like ROI, you can demonstrate how
impactful your new learning solution will really be.

It’s worth considering what ROI will mean for your department ver-
sus your finance team. There’s a clear connection between LMS usage
and things like improved learning, employee engagement, customer
satisfaction, and training efficiency. There is less clarity on how an
LMS will affect productivity, revenue, and profit, the three things that
matter most to the people in charge. Meeting learner outcomes and
creating a great experience may be more relevant to the L&D de-
partment but it is likely your finance team will want a defined set of
success metrics to show the ROI. Their question is whether investing
in this system will be profitable in the long run, so explain with hard
figures.

You need to paint a picture where improvement in one area results in

improvements in others, ultimately increasing the bottom line. Let’s
continue with the previous three examples:

Example 1
You’re a SaaS-based software company with 3,000+ customers. You’re
growing rapidly and your customer facing teams are finding it diffi-
cult to onboard the customer base.

First things first, you’ll need to get your team involved and research
how much time is spent individually onboarding customers and how
much the company is spending on it. Then estimate the numbers of
what the ROI will be using a learning solution.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 8
 CUSTOMER ONBOARDING

Reduce customer $510,000 in estimated

Primary goal
onboarding time by 40% annual revenue

Pre learning solution Post learning solution

Metric to measure
implementation implementation

Customer onboarding by
50 days 30 days
number of days

Training results

Convert % to revenue
40% $510,000
number

Learning solution cost $186,000

ROI calculation $510,000 - $186,000

Return on investment
$324,000
from learning solution

By implementing an LMS, you’ll enable customers to quickly access

on-demand training materials, when they need them. You’ll also be
able to quickly deliver and maintain learning materials so that cus-
tomers can get ramped up as quickly as possible.

Example 2
We’re looking at a company with 400 employees, with a high annual
employee turnover. With no learning solution in place, this has been
identified as an area where an LMS can help. Therefore, the training
team has set a goal to reduce employee turnover by 21% within 12
months of implementation.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 9
 EMPLOYEE DEVELOPMENT

21% reduction in $240,000 in estimated

Primary goal
employee turnover annual revenue

Pre learning solution Post learning solution

Metric to measure
implementation implementation

Employee turnover 86% 65%

Training results

Convert % to revenue
21% $240,000
number

Learning solution cost $148,000

ROI calculation $240,000 - $148,000

Return on investment $92,000 in addition to a 21% reduction in employee

from learning solution turnover

By investing in employee training, employees are able to see the po-

tential for growth, making them feel valued and in return, increasing
productivity. This provides them with a greater level of job satisfac-
tion, which means they are less likely to move on. Developing your
staff, with the help of a learning solution, contributes towards holding
on to top-performing employees.

Example 3
For our third example, we’re looking at a provider of hardware and
software products for IT and cloud security, with approximately 9K

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 10
employees, partners and customers trained annually. They current-
ly have a scattered and manual training process with no consistency
and an evolving product suite.

With such rapidly growing training audiences, they can no longer

support 1:1 training. Therefore, the L&D team has been tasked with
finding a single, yet scalable training solution for multiple audiences.

TRAIN MULTIPLE AUDIENCE

Increase course completions $680,000 in estimated

Primary goal
by 40% in 1 year annual revenue

Pre learning solution Post learning solution

Metric to measure
implementation implementation

Course completion rate 40% 70%

Training results

Convert % to revenue
30% $680,000
number

Learning solution cost $280,000

ROI calculation $680,000 - $280,000

Return on investment
$400,000
from learning solution

By implementing a single learning solution, the organization is

able to scale by delivering more growth-driving learning, including
third-party training.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 11
All in all, you’ll need to show how the proposed learning solution will
help improve business outcomes, drive revenue, and save on costs:

Improve business performance: Enabling your employees, cus-

tomers, and partners to learn increases productivity, communi-
cation and strategic thinking. Ultimately, leading to a more effi-
cient and better customer experience.

Drive revenue: Most business decisions are based on whether a

product or service will generate revenue. An LMS will help your
people and business grow by turning your learning programs into
a revenue-generating operation.

Save on costs: Learning through an LMS can save your compa-

ny money when compared to traditional, in-person training, but
the skills and knowledge gained can also help your company cut
costs in other ways. Therefore, offsetting the cost of the LMS.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 12
How we help solve
this need
Back to the earlier question: how do you win them (the decision mak-
ers) over? You select a solution that delivers learning that impacts
what matters: performance, retention and growth.

How we get your business results

Put the learner Centralize how Drive results

first training is managed through partnership

Create an easy, engaging, Streamline how you create, Work with our expert
and enjoyable experience manage, deliver, and track Customer Experience team
that makes learner goals training, within a single to create a personalized
simpler to achieve. solution. strategy for success.

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 13
Again, let’s take the three previous examples to demonstrate how a
simple, learner-centric solution can help you.

1. Customer training

Improve customer retention

• LearnUpon’s customer training solution helps you onboard and educate

your customers so they’ll stick around for the long-term.
• Maximize product adoption by showing off the value of your product
with a training solution tailored to your customers’ success.
• Make learning about your product easy, while increasing engagement
and staying top of mind with your customers.
• Empower your customers with engaging and enjoyable learning that
improves their experience and perception of your brand.
• Create a customer academy to establish your brand as a leader in the
minds of your customers.
• Increase retention and reduce customer churn with a learning solution
that turns your customers into experts and advocates.

ENGAGE CUSTOMERS
FROM THE GET-GO

“We have customers that are highly engaged early on with

LearnUpon. When somebody is a champion for really believing in
education and training, you’ll see those people logging in and you’ll
see the logins increase.”
—
Sandra Karlovich, Learning Consultant, Upstream Works Software

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 14
Scale support

• Reduce support tickets and allow your customer-facing teams to focus

on more strategic initiatives.
• Provide a positive onboarding experience for new customers from day
one with quality training programs.
• Track and report on customer progress/performance metrics to
understand where customers face barriers to learning and adoption.
• Use courses to cover the essentials so your customers and support
teams can spend more time focusing on what matters.
• Create a more knowledgeable and self-supporting customer base – let
them drive their own training path with on-demand training delivered
via LearnUpon.

SCALE CUSTOMER SUCCESS

VIA AUTOMATION

“LearnUpon has automated onboarding for many of our customers,

and drastically reduced the admin time and effort.”
—
Paul Faure, Customer Support Manager at Leadfeeder

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 15
2. Employee training

Retain employees

• Make your new employees’ experience a positive one with training

designed to teach them your company’s culture, processes, policies, and
more.
• Get your employees up to speed faster so they can feel productive and
engaged from day one.
• Deliver required learning to new employees, while enabling them to self
select other training that interests them.
• Save your team’s valuable time by automating training workflows,
tracking learning and engagement, and getting a full picture of
employee data when you connect LearnUpon to your people tech stack.

REDUCE COSTS
BY TRAINING ONLINE

“If we tried to do training without the LMS, it would have cost us

probably £100,000 in just meeting time, people hours, organizing
- all the stuff that you have to do. Now that it’s all online, we no
longer have to spend that time and cost.”
—
Lisa Slack, Head of Product Development at Hillarys

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 16
Fill skill and development gaps

• Attract, nurture, and keep top talent by giving your people the tools
they need to excel.
• Encourage employees to develop skills that help them be happier, more
inspired, and more productive at work.
• Give employees another reason to stick around long-term by providing
ways for them to level up their skills and learn new ones.
• Do more with less, by understanding your employees’ skills and putting
them to use in the most efficient way.

REDUCE EMPLOYEE TURNOVER

THROUGH LEARNING

“We are at less than half of the industry average for turnover, which
can be as high as 70%. That’s because we have a big emphasis on
retaining employees and growing our own.”
—
Douglas Bryant, VP of Talent Management, Training
and Recruiting at Sonic Automotive

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 17
3. Extended enterprise training

Increase training efficiencies and reduce costs

• Scale operations through customized, engaging learning experiences by

delivering training globally.
• Enhance customer service and reduce compliance risks by providing
online support resources, tracking training goals with analytics, and
providing online support.
• Improve the effectiveness of those connected to your organization as
well as offering better value to your customers.
• Maximize the ROI of training by removing the knowledge gap between
internal and external users.
• Deliver in-person training online, avoiding manual processes, travel
restrictions and costs.

EXPERIENCE EXPONENTIAL
GROWTH

“We’ve experienced exponential growth over the last 2 years using

LearnUpon, and we’re now training more than 10,000 people a year.”
—
Scott Edwards, Director of Netskope Academy at Netskope

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 18
Grow the business through learning

• Ease the onboarding process by making each individual across the

organization feel welcome and informed.
• Lower demand for your support teams.
• Using LearnUpon for online training will support your brand’s growth,
leading to a higher revenue.
• Offering multi-audience training can help strengthen your brand and
spread awareness.
• Empower your audiences with an easy self-service system and pre-
defined learning journey with minimal input from you.

GET CONSISTENT RESULTS FOR

CLIENTS AND YOUR PEOPLE

“With LearnUpon, our training not only ensures we get consistent

results for our clients, but we also see how growing a learning
culture positively impacts our employee turnover, performance,
and happiness.”
—
Jennifer Hovestadt, Senior Training Manager
at Premium Retail Services

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 19
Conclusion

There you have it, all the information you need to build your LMS
business case. Using these points will help you package up your pro-
posal and put your vision into context.

Despite the challenges that come with demonstrating learning ROI,

there is a business rationale to be made for an LMS; higher certifica-
tion rates, better trained employees, and the greatest ROI of all, in-
creased customer satisfaction. Investing in your team to deliver the
best customer experience isn’t just good for your customers, it makes
sound business sense as customer experience is now an increasing-
ly important differentiator for organizations. And an LMS is a crucial
part of that process.

Ready to craft your business case?

We’ve created two fully customizable templates to help you get
started:
• Present Your LMS Business Case
• The CFO Business Case Letter

LearnUpon | Building an LMS Business Case: How Smart Learning Leaders Get Their Organization Onboard 20
About LearnUpon
Founded in 2012, LearnUpon’s mission is to partner with businesses that believe
delivering great learning is essential to achieve great results. The company’s
learning management system (LMS) is powered by leading technology and pro-
vides companies with a centralized hub to easily create and manage learning
programs for every audience in an engaging, learner-friendly way.

LearnUpon partners with over 1,300 customers to champion simple, learner-cen-

tric experiences for over 13 million learners across over 30 countries globally.
With over 290+ employees and offices in Dublin, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Bel-
grade, and Sydney, LearnUpon LMS makes it easy for businesses to deliver learn-
ing that impacts what matters: performance, retention, and growth.

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