We aren’t all Shakespearean wordsmiths or masterful powerbrokers, which makes it hard to write a compelling and robust LMS business case. Ensure yours stands out with a helpful step-by-step guide. For more content like this, check out the full Acorn Resources blog: https://acornlms.com/resources

1. LMS Business Case
How to write a compelling pitch

2. The LMS Business Case
Building a business case is a necessary, yet somewhat lengthy,
process for any enterprise LMS purchase. Our step-by-step guide can
act as your framework and help you build a robust business case
whether you’re ahead of the curve or just getting started.

3. Executive
Summary

4. State the business need
Selecting the highest priority from a wide array of business needs can
be hard. These needs could be cost-effectiveness, better employee
engagement, easy access, improved onboarding or productivity gains.

5. Describe the problem, succinctly
Whichever problem(s) you decide to include, you need to be able to
clearly articulate them so that every member of your buying group or
committee (the decision makers) can easily understand. Less is more
in problem statements.

6. Explain your solution to the problem
Once you have your problem statement(s) down pat, you then need to
clearly articulate how an LMS solves the problem and how the specific
LMS you have in mind has the functionality that will solve your specific
problems.

7. Sell the vision
Influencing from within documentation is by no means an easy skill.
Succinctness and brevity are key in helping decision makers clearly see why
the LMS purchase problem and solution you are proposing works best in the
context of your business. Stories sell more than statistics.

8. Budgetary
Considerations

9. The Price
You need to conduct due diligence before committing to a price point
for an LMS. You’ll want to consider things like user numbers, hosting
requirements, data storage and add-ons.
Your hosting choice can ultimately affect how price works out for all
these requirements. There are 2 options.

10. Cloud-Based Pricing
These are generally based on the scope of your organisation to match
the capacity cloud-based LMSs have to scale. It usually charges per
individual learner, active user or period of usage.

11. Self-Hosted Pricing
These models are usually all-inclusive, at least in the sense you
purchase the software outright and own all the data. But that also
means you burden the long-term costs of maintenance and hosting.

12. Hidden Costs
Some providers hide pricing on their website so that you need to fill
out a form to get it. This usually pulls your data into their marketing
metrics.
But even if you can see pricing, there are often hidden costs you won’t
discover until their proposal. These include maintenance, training and
support, content creation, and implementation fees.

13. Analysing
LMS ROI

14. What is ROI?
Like all company technology investments, you need to give prior
thought to what a good return on investment (ROI) for your LMS looks
like.
Having this clearly defined in your business case means you are more
likely to get it approved. Here’s 4 items that could be considered a
return on investment.

15. Reduced Training Time
A strong LMS has the ability to suggest engaging content based on
the upskilling your employees are looking to do, as well as
automatically build learning pathways based on the capabilities your
company needs. It also allows employees to log on and undertake
training when it suits them.

16. Enhanced Training For Customers
When a system is easy to use, easy to engage with and easily
accessible, it eliminates customer friction and boosts buy-in. Given
customer retention is the key to organisational growth, this outcome is
a no-brainer.

17. Increased Productivity
Not investing in learning actually decreases productivity. By not
investing, you also reduce employee engagement. Disengaged
workers have been shown to reduce productivity by 18%.

18. Increase Sales
The challenge you’ll find when justifying ROI via increased sales with
your LMS is that a significant portion of vendor categories claim this.
Thankfully, your LMS can justify this. One study revealed 84% of
organisations felt training helped them meet their sales goals.

19. Implementation
Project Plan

20. The Vendor
Building a business case should never be just about deciding which
LMS to procure. You need to think about how you and the vendor are
going to smoothly implement the new platform once purchased.
Consider these 10 questions to ask vendors and include their answers
in your business case to ensure you get the project signed off.

22. You can learn more about this topic by
checking out the full article:
https://acornlms.com/resources/lms-business-
case