Smart companies know that a well-trained workforce is a competitive advantage. These organizations are not content with qualitative analysis of their learning program. They want a quantitative understanding so they can intelligently expand the initiatives that drive growth with their internal employees as well as their extended enterprises.
Determining the return on investment of a training program is a challenge that is made more difficult without business data. Any learning management system will tell you how many people completed your training courses, but what does that prove? It shows that you may have an engaged learning community, but unless your business objective was just to engage your staff, then you may have done your company a disservice by claiming that your e-learning program is a success.
Having a defined goal, like increasing sales or reducing customer support, and combining your training data with your business results is the best way to determine the effectiveness of training. Did sales go up after the training occurred or did customer support costs decrease? Getting the training data is easy with an LMS. The business data doesn’t exist inside the LMS, so combining the two sets to paint a ROI picture could involve complicated spreadsheets and formulas and is a big reason why training leaders and managers are challenged with justifying their costs.
Many learning solution companies are now offering integrations between their LMS and Salesforce, so that your learning data exists where your sales data lives. Using the powerful reporting that comes with Salesforce, you can easily create dashboards and run reports that demonstrate success and highlight opportunities for improvements or expansion. Here are a few scenarios that demonstrate how an integration between Salesforce and a learning management system can improve your businesses and more than justify the investment in online training.
Sales managers can track their team’s engagement (or even that of their external representative agencies) in specific courses, certifications or training tracks. Correlating this information with sales numbers will show where your training program is having an impact. You can answer questions like, “Do the learners who complete the training sell more? Is there a course that is having a major impact on product sales that you could offer to a larger audience and further increase revenue?”
Does your organization offer varied levels of customer support based on a user’s training? If you provide a higher level of service to people who have completed a set of online courses, your help desk or support staff can instantly determine the type of service to provide to a caller with this information in salesforce. This gives your support teams the information to be more efficient without having to provide direct access to your learning platform. You can calculate the improved response time, and the cost savings that come from that, compared to your training expenses and determine the return on that investment.
Companies that utilize a Salesforce integration experience the following benefits:
- Calculate the relationship between training and sales
- Gain greater insight into individual learners and organizations by analyzing the courses they take, completion rate and competencies achieved
- Easily track the training activities that are required of partners to earn SLA or other reward incentives
- Provide access to LMS data to those who do not need direct access to the learning management system
Are your sales driven by external installers or dealers? Providing training on your products via your LMS and then awarding incoming sales opportunities to those who have completed your courses can increase engagement with and preference for your brand. This is simple to execute using Salesforce with your learning platform data integrated, and will justify the cost of that dealer training program.
