Velocity Made Good » Getting Down to Business

Appirio Acquires VMG

2011-04-11T15:08:50Z

It is with great pleasure and pride that I announce that VMG has been acquired by Appirio. Appirio has been a strong partner to VMG since VMG’s founding, and this is a natural evolution of the growing partnership between our two organizations. We are proud to join the amazing Appirio team as it concurrently delivers on the promise and capabilities of the cloud and transforms the services industry in and for the entire technology market.

Just a few short years ago I sat with the VMG leadership team and sketched out our vision for the future of VMG. We designed our angle of attack for growing a business built on the precept that the cloud changes everything, and thus the people adopting that change need to be enabled in the simplest way possible. Since then, we have had the opportunity to work with over 40 unique clients on almost a hundred engagements. We have pioneered innovative and holistic approaches to user adoption and customer success. We have helped some of the leading companies in the world transform their models, methods, and results for customer success, partner readiness, and user adoption. We have leveraged both the newest in social media and the most proven and scalable in traditional enterprise training to create new and more nimble approaches to delivering customer success.

We now have the honor of joining the Appirio team, and continuing to innovate every day on a larger and more diverse business footprint. We are excited to marry VMG’s innovation in accelerating user adoption of the cloud with Appirio’s expertise in accelerating enterprise adoption of the cloud. Given our complementary and highly related business goals and models, we could not think of a more perfect match. We look forward to working together to bring the promise of the cloud to the enterprise.

For more information, please see this post by Chris Barbin, CEO of Appirio.

The SaaS Adoption Manifesto

2010-12-05T23:29:50Z

by Beth Chmielowski, Glenn Oclassen, John Hathaway, and Tom Kraack

SaaS companies are first and foremost product companies.

SaaS products are fundamentally different from traditional on-premise products.

SaaS subscriptions are fundamentally different from traditional product licenses.
- Revenue recognition: Upfront license fees are immediately profitable; a subscription is not profitable until it has generated more monthly revenue than the cost of sales required to attain it.
- Sales approach: Product licenses are longer, larger deals; SaaS subscriptions depend on a land and expand model.
- Time to Customer Value: Product licenses have at least a year to prove their worth; subscriptions must demonstrate their value every month.
SaaS companies cannot succeed without services.
- Services drive adoption.
- Adoption is a prerequisite to retention.
- Retention is a requirement for SaaS revenue and a prerequisite to renewal and expansion.
- Expansion is a critical path for reducing cost of goods sold.
Churn erodes SaaS revenue and delays profitability.

Churn is inevitable, but not immutable.

Successful customers do not leave.
Products must be optimized for customer success.
If churn continues, it is a direct result of failed adoption services.

The key lever to reducing churn is delivering greater and deeper user adoption and customer success.
- Greater user adoption means more users use the product.
- Deeper user adoption means users use more of the product.
- Driving greater and deeper usage hinges on adoption services.
Old-school high-touch adoption services are both too much and not enough.
- They are too much unless you want to dilute company focus and revenues by building a body shop.
- They are not enough unless you want your customers to be forever dependent on your people for their success with your product.
SaaS adoption services can and must be scalable or they will prevent or delay profitability.
- Services do not all need to be provided by the SaaS provider, nor should they be.
- Services can and should extend to a partner ecosystem built from best-of-breed service providers that offer a three-way win: to the customer, to the SaaS provider, and to the services provider.
- Services can and should extend to an opt-in customer community that lets people learn about each other’s experiences, challenges, and success factors.
To be truly scalable, adoption services should be automated, and include a technology-based infrastructure built around knowledge worker needs.
- The diversity of SaaS customer size and types means that many do not have their own infrastructure available to support adoption.
- Adoption services infrastructure should provide always-on access to useful information that is personalized, contextualized, and kept relevant by both formal and crowd curation.
All types of adoption services should be accessible to customers from one place: wherever they want it.

Smart SaaS companies have a unified view of customer success.
- They provide integrated services rather than redundant efforts by disparate teams.
- They define customer success, monitor it, identify potential pitfalls, and have intervention plans at the ready.
Only SaaS companies that make their adoption services as nimble as their products will survive.

7 tips to help your learning go viral

2010-10-19T20:32:09Z

So you'd like to see your training go viral huh? Whether it's for sales, technical, customers, partners or internal to your organization, there are some clear guidelines to make this happen. At VMG, we love the cloud, so I'm going to reference one of the best in the business on helping you to take your training to the next level and get real business results.

Kevin Dobbs runs Montclair Advisors, which is a Software-as-a-Service advisory firm focused on strategy, revenues and product solutions. His blogs (and tweets) are always filled with keen insight into this rapidly growing space which also includes learning technologies of all kinds, from social learning to learning platforms and everything in between.

Kevin's latest post holds some great tips on how you can achieve Facebook, Zynga, and Yammer-like adoption for your cloud solution. As I read this post over again, it dawned on me that it is not that much different for your learning program. With a tip of the hat to Kevin, I offer you seven tips to make your learning viral.

Offer a free version

What better way to gain adoption by making it 'free'. Now this is learning, this version is probably customer focused rather than internal. What kind of training do you give your customers to help them get started? It's not always about getting butts in seats (classroom, webinar, or otherwise). The first thing you should consider is early adoption and usage of the product. People who buy the product and jump into a 2-5 day class are unlikely to know enough about the product to maximize all of that knowledge and those skills that you are likely to impart in that classroom. And there are probably others in the organization that could use small bites of info that don't need a class. Finally, that 'getting started' package can be a prerequisite to the classroom experience, allowing you to make deeper knowledge and skill transfer with a qualified instructor at the helm.

Clear pricing for your product

How many product companies don't list their training prices on the website? It's a registration form or a link to a sales person! Why would you not make it easy? In some cases, especially with cloud companies who sell their own products in a subscription pricing mode, you can align your learning business model and offer subscription (monthly, annual, etc) prices as well. If the customer is buying the product via subscription, it makes it easy for both the customer and the sales rep to add a line item for pricing on ILT, vILT, elearning libraries, office hours, etc. At renewal, drop the training price substantially (say, 60-80% discount) to encourage renewal and allow new users to access the same great training, continuing to maximize the usage of the product.

Trials

How about for your prospects? Maybe the free training (above) is only available through an adoption/implementation portal (e.g. the intranet). Lynda.com offers a great example of how you can use a trial version to sample your training materials and allow prospects to see the whole 'library' of what's there as opposed to keeping it secret behind closed doors (unless you really don't have any training to support adoption, which in that case, you've got bigger problems).

The other key point here - these trials allow prospects to see your learning materials and methodology, understand how easy it is to use, and get a picture of how good your training is so that they can quickly maximize the ROI on their product purchase. When I ran direct training through eHelp (RoboHelp, Captivate) as well as indirect as Macromedia, we found that almost 20% of attendees in the classrooms were prospects - yes, training as a pre-sales tool!

Intuitive interface

Two obvious points here. A really easy to use interface on the product makes it easier to create training that provides higher order value. Instead of low level functional training, you can focus on best practices, workflows, and insights you've gained along the way to help customers get smarter, faster.

If you are creating elearning, an intuitive interface makes it really easy for users to navigate by themselves instead of always having to provide branching and instructions for what to do next. It allows them to choose their own direction and putting that power in the hands of the users will always drive adoption more than force-feeding.

Keep training to a minimum

Kevin is spot on the money here. Given an intuitive interface, training should be kept to a minimum and within context as much as possible. Too many learning organizations try to boil the ocean (usually listening to SMEs and the engineers who try to convince them that every feature needs to have training), burning out resources and burning through budgets. Getting the right amount of training, in the right context, and supporting that with communities and user generated content is the right approach. Think about reusable content, disposable content, and content that you shouldn't create (or have created) in the first place. Use metrics and reviews to identify high value training content, topics, and most of all listen to your customers for what they need and want the most.

Small consumable chunks

Well, duh. After years and years of stories about 'chunking', I still see organizations creating 60min, or even multi-hour elearning modules, webinars, etc. It doesn't matter how engaging the training is if it doesn't fit into their work day. For ILT, chunking means don't make the instructor blather on for the first three or four hours of class before allowing them to get their hands on the product. It means providing plenty of hands-on labs, troubleshooting, deep thinking and collaboration and discussion to get the most not only from their instructor, but from the wisdom of the crowd that makes up the rest of the class. Everyone has something valuable to contribute and share.

Rapid Time to Value

Okay, one last 'duh' moment right? But do you really integrate this into your discussion and strategic planning for your learning program? If you are creating training for any audience - sales, technical, customers, partners...they all want the same thing. To be successful with your product (selling it, using it, implementing it) and bringing value back to their own business. So as you architect your learning solution, make sure you understand who your customers are, how they are measuring success, and how you can get them to seeing results on that metric as quickly as possible. This probably will drive a more longitudinal approach to your learning (thus, chunking) and allow for continued touch points of the customer through the lifecycle of that customer. This is especially key in cloud solutions as the switching costs are low, and adoption, retention, and renewal are key metrics in the business overall.

Kevin summarizes with the following, and I couldn't agree more.

Just to recap, getting a product to go viral requires a lot of thought around how your customers are going to use your product, keeping everything simple and focusing on making sure customers are successful when they use your product.

Thinkin’ big, startin’ small

2010-09-03T23:28:17Z

'Start Small, Think Big, Scale Fast' is a phrase I've heard a few times from our Chairman, Tom Kraack. What happens when a company has already become big? Years of processes, teams upon teams, re-org upon re-org. Can they still start small, think big innovative thoughts, and then take that to scale?

A lot of those big (generally successful) enterprises of our day have built huge learning organizations to deliver training without evolving to understand how to really deliver the critical knowledge and skills to support the business...I mean, those bits are probably in there...somewhere...probably... The problem is that they are simply not nimble enough to meet the challenges they now face. They may be mired in the sludge but it doesn't have to be that way.

The answer lies in redefining strategy, building content standards, infectious change management, and innovating to meet the changes occurring across the high tech landscape.

Cloud companies live in constant beta. They have more shallow but more frequent sprints from release to release (3 or 4/year, or heck, maybe even 3 or 4/month!). From a business perspective, they get to recognize revenue in a better, more stable way (subscription, building fat deferred revenue accounts). The downside being, it's easy to drop your vendor and move on. Sure these folks speak of this thing called training, but it is spoken with the desire to move the business needle.

Dashboards are built around customer adoption and retention, probability of renewals, net new customers, but also customer penetration. Learning departments need to know how to affect these dials. Why the business speak? Because you need to know how your company makes money, profit, and metrics that drive the business.

In cloud companies, the pace of development is built upon a sense of urgency coupled with the passion and willingness to step out of comfort zones, and the light of innovation burns bright.

And guess what? Their training development moves at the speed of light. As with their product development - the processes, standards and templated designs they've built allow them to be nimble, quick to market, and have measurable impact - the concept of leverage is huge. They consider their customers from the start, not every single potential one, but the customers that will drive the adoption and success of their product to cross the chasm to great heights.

They also leverage the crowd, be it end users, partners, or internal folks to fill in a lot of the gaps with crowdsourced or user generated content (UGC). The very nature of this approach allows the team to really focus on specific workflows and learning paths to success, in alignment with a community management approach to pick up the slack.

They might focus on the features and functions that are important to initial adoption of the product, but the end goal is to provide workflow support to drive widespread adoption of a deeper level of features in the product. This in turn delivers that old term 'stickiness', which translates into the nirvana that is customer satisfaction resulting in higher retention and renewals, and evangelism.

These upstarts are picking apart the big guys by their nimbleness and time to market. The 'Four Horseman' of the internet are in trouble, along with every other industry (banks, financials, energy, retail, etc) that are in the sights of this new generation. To survive and thrive in the coming years, they will need to focus on:

- strategy (aligning with the business)
- content standards
- solution frameworks
- agile process development
- measurement and business analytics (via reports and dashboards that are communication vehicles upward and outward)
- social learning and crowdsourcing

This is no time to perfect the irrelevant. The companies that win will standardize in a methodical but nimble way, and be aligned to business goals that albeit may be correlative, will be actionable success metrics.

Marketing for the Learning Org

2010-08-16T17:06:35Z

This is the third post in the series for building the business of learning in your organization. The first two posts covered Innovation and Strategic Planning. This third post is key to winning with any program or product you plan to launch, no matter who the audience might be (sales, internal, customers, partners)

Ok, I’ll start right off by saying, learning organizations in general stink at marketing. Marketing (also including communication and change management) is a key component for success of all learning organizations. Many a learning leader has been taken down not by a great plan, wise ideas, or passion about helping people better themselves but by missing out on the marketing aspects of execution. Chances are you really don’t know how to do this or have tried and not done so well. Certainly this has to fit within the bounds (usually) of the corporate culture (is there a central marketing function, is there a branding police, etc). You may have tried and potentially thought you succeeded, but the reality is that you are likely delusional, ha. (read Seth Godin, he’ll convince you that even most market’eers don’t know much about marketing in the 21st century!)

The sad truth is that no one ever teaches learning folks about marketing, and typically the true market’eers in the organization are busy trying to hit metrics and product launches and stuff like that. Why does the training group need marketing? Ah, but we do my friends, we most certainly do. If more Ed Tech programs required a course in Marketing 101 (fine, call it Change Management and Communication 101), we’d all probably be in better shape – our programs would run smooth, grow faster, have greater adoption and customer satisfaction.
If you are successful enough at the strategic planning (my blog post here), you will find yourself in need of a marketing launch plan to support whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. In the fabled words, if you build it, they will come (actually a misquote, original was “if you build it, he will come”, Field of Dreams, 1989) doesn’t work. You need to have a comprehensive marketing and communication plan that includes roles, milestones, deliverables, dependencies and risks. This needs to be tracked as any project, with regular project meetings (weekly) and status (red, yellow, green works fine in an excel spreadsheet).

As applicable, there could be a whole separate branding exercise that fits in here too, but I don’t have the space or wisdom to share here, suffice to say, if you are branding a product/program, be consistent – get the Creative team involved and let them do their thing.

If you don’t have a template for this, ask your favorite Market’eer for one they use for their product launches. Even if you are launching a ‘program’, you’ll likely get a starting point that you can leverage and build from there. There are plenty of Marketing 101 resources on the web <here and here>, and I’d encourage you to spend some time looking over the processes and ideas that come along with those to drive adoption of your programs, giving you better opportunity to continue to develop further programs going forward.

This kind of idea must have a competitive angle to have even a chance for success. (check out "Tales of the Marketing Wars via Forbes)

The competition we speak of here (from a learning org perspective) is most typically, time. How are you going to convince your audience (employees, customers, partners, or heaven help you, sales) that their time is worthy of your new shiny object?

This should of course, fall back to your strategic planning cycle to allow you to articulate the features, advantages and/or benefits of your program. The case that you built to sell the program to the executive team in the first place now needs different language and supporting structures to convert your audience into ‘customers’. Those same executives also need to be coaches and champions of the program. If they cared enough to approve it, they should stand behind it, physically, verbally, and with gusto.

Every trainer knows about radio station WIIFM, or what’s in it for me. Market’eers know it too. We know that we can’t make the sale unless our prospect is sufficiently motivated for a personal payoff. It’s human nature, and you will just have to get used to it.

Some tricks are to use events to let people know about your program, having contests, rewards programs, and shout-outs (Sally just won for posting her 10th answer on the community!).

To summarize – marketing your product/project/program has four key elements:
- Sell the program (strategic planning, executive level sponsorship)
- Build the marketing launch plan (project planning, branding as necessary)
- Communicate effectively to your audience and customers WIIFM (contests, rewards programs, shout-outs)
- Measure results, get feedback, continuously improve your messaging (and as needed, the program itself)

Have you done any interesting marketing for your learning program? Let us know!

4 More (Busted) Enterprise Learning Myths

2010-08-11T23:19:31Z

I came across this list of training myths on Twitter today (courtesy of Jane Hart - @c4lpt) and I couldn't help tossing in my two cents. So here are four more enterprise learning myths that need to be busted (feel free to chime in with your own) :

Everybody in the ecosystem needs an LMS. Nope. I was recently at a conference where one of the world's largest consumer goods companies said (I paraphrase), "We don't need no stinkin' LMS". They launched e-learning, tracked compliance, got product information out to their ecosystem, and dealt with all sorts of training needs without an LMS and a server farm. Lots of companies I speak with are changing their thoughts about their need for an LMS. They all agreed both that they need technology-enabled learning (I work with a lot of tech companies, so there is a bit of a selection bias here), and that they all need scalable learning solutions. Yet learning technology, learning portals, and learning tools are no longer synonymous with "Learning Management System" (see my previous post- "A learning portal is not an LMS").
Rapid e-learning means it's easy and I don't need instructional design. Wrong - sort of. It's a matter of perspective. Rapid e-learning rapidly exposes two things to the learner:
- Is this just a PowerPoint presentation converted to flash with a voice-over? or...
- Is this course actually giving me knowledge I can use?
My colleague and friend, Jon Lloyd, wrote this great piece about rapid e-learning that really breaks it down. I have led large organizations making global changes toward rapid e-learning, and I learned that
1. I needed a template and standard that everyone my team was required to use
2. I needed to have instructional design embedded in that template
3. An absence of editorial review exposes itself pretty quickly
Rapid e-learning, well planned, can be fast and responsive, but it's not easy, and you better have instructional design baked into everything you do from the moment you start even thinking about it.
VILT is less valuable than ILT. Kill me if I ever hear this gross generalization again. It's like saying "all trucks are less valuable than all cars". To do what? For what purpose? There are certainly times where getting into a classroom is the optimum experience. Yet in this rapidly changing, short attention span theater world, delivering timely information quickly to people is often far more valuable and actionable than the optimum learning experience. We work with a ton of SaaS companies, who deliver at least one major release of each of their products every quarter, and yet building a decent Instructor-Led Training (ILT) course take 3-6 months. Process that through on the space-time continuum: by the time you're done creating the ILT you're already out-of-date. ILT is awesome for processes, hands-on work, role-playing and group exercises, however Virtual ILT (VILT) is great for speed, imparting actionable information, being nimble in response to immediate need, and decreasing the time people spend away from what their real job is.
I need a reusable learning object strategy. Flip that one on its ear. What I need to have completely understood is my rate of content obsolescence. How fast does my content go out of date? I certainly need reusable templates, processes, approaches, graphics, animations, course models, and VILT and ILT delivery standards. I, however, have found in my almost fifteen years of leading both large enterprise training organizations and training lines of business that I rarely actually reuse content. Code? Sure. Structures and models? All the time. But in this environment of rapid change, I have chosen to forget about reusing content and focus instead on scale and simplicity everywhere else. Focusing on scale and simplicity is, in short, just more valuable: it's more important, more fiscally prudent, and, frankly, easier.

What other myths are out there? Our entire industry, and the entire approach to determining need and delivering knowledge to the enterprise, is completely transforming at this very moment. The new normal is that everything changes all the time. Bring it.

Strategic Planning – Be the Windshield

2010-07-16T16:40:55Z

This is the second in a series of posts for the business of learning. In my previous post, I spoke some about innovation and how it applies to the learning department <Learning Innovation, Keep Stumbling> and will save related topics on culture, leadership, and running the function as a business for future posts in a different series.

Strategic Planning

In my experience, training groups are rarely involved in the overall business and strategic discussions happening at the executive level. Sure, many large companies have CLO roles, or top learning executives that get a ‘seat at the table’ and contribute to those discussions. How many are in the driver seat though, building global initiatives from the epicenter of the learning team, rather taking direction from other groups (engineering, marketing, sales) and executing to support their plan?

In fact, I’ve seen very few learning organizations that actually have the opportunity to be proactive in nature, creating a full-fledged annual business plan (hey, that would actually be in front of the budgeting process right?) to support corporate goals as well as their own vision.

Too often the planning process goes something like this:

This makes you the bug, not the windshield. This sort of direction causes you to always be following... catching up... trying to get your head above water....it doesn't have to be that way.

Learning departments are in the midst of great change. eLearning, virtual classrooms and remote labs have nothing on what is happening right now in front of our eyes, changing the very nature of our profession with lasting effects. Strategic planning brings you out of the turbulent vortex.

As this pattern emerges, I think you will see a greater bifurcation of the locations of training departments, with more moving out of HR functions and into departments that have titles such as Customer Success or Client Advocacy, both of which are probably under the umbrella of Sales. Will HR still hold onto internal training and development? I’m really doubtful of that. Even those completely internally focused (and why would you actually ever want that?) organizations will be shifted towards providing management and support (as opposed to content generation and instruction) for knowledge platforms, social learning, informal learning and communities to drive the professional (and sometimes personal) development of their organization.

As talent management practices grow, more emphasis needs to be placed on programs to onboarding people in a dynamic learning environment based on their role, level, knowledge of market and industry, etc in order to minimize the actual ramp time and maximize productivity and engagement in their new organization. This is easily extended to partners, vendors and customers in various ways, thus removing any need to have direct ties to HR.

Strangely, one of the key perspectives missing from most strategic planning discussions is the user. The customer experience should be paramount (customer = internal, customer, partner, vendor). Happy customers are loyal ones - they drive customer satisfaction, product adoption, and better marketing reach than you can ever imagine. Your learning programs should strive to build the same kind of loyalty. Best-selling authors and recording superstars build a rabid fan base that look for new ‘product’ to consume. Your learning releases can build a rabid fan base too!

Strategic planning is about delivering the best solution for your customer within a reasonable budget and timeline, integrating innovative approaches, via a well thought plan. Build the ideal business plan to best serve their needs, whether it includes blended learning, customer success portals, communities of practice, feedback mechanisms to drive continuous improvement, and even defining new roles and responsibilities within your organization. Craft the budget and resources with a keen eye towards scope creep (avoiding, yes, that sounds great, we could also just …). Take baby steps and use your tools to help align the organization: build an Excel worksheet or Gantt chart to show milestones, risks, dependencies and delivery dates. Clearly demonstrate that you are not being ‘wagged’.

For a decidely unconventional way of looking at planning, read this blog from Seth Godin, or listen to him discuss it here.

As new projects come up throughout the year (and they invariably will, in force), you will be able to make objective decisions on how to support the new initiatives and the consequences and impact as it deviates from your plan. Having flexibility is good, being inflexible is career limiting at best.

Learning Innovation – Keep Stumbling

2010-07-08T21:36:52Z

This is the first in a five part series on managing learning teams and how to succeed in the ‘new normal’ of our industry. As the head of a learning function, global education, etc – I see five main components that are the lifeblood of the organization.

- Innovation
- Strategic planning
- Communication/Change Management
- Execution
- Evaluation

Innovation and the Learning team

How much time and effort are you allowing team members to work on innovative projects that might have absolutely no relation to current needs and plans? 3M for the longest time (since the 1950's) has mandated that employees spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing and design.

"Our company has, indeed, stumbled onto some of its new products. But never forget that you can only stumble if you're moving." Richard P. Carlton, Former CEO, 3M Corporation, 1950

Google has followed in a similar light and encourages up to 20% for the engineering resources, which have contributed to many successes and even more failures. The point being, you can win if you don’t try. Failure IS an option, and it is encouraged and celebrated as a means to ongoing learning and success.

That certainly doesn’t mean that all the Google engineers are kicking back on Friday’s playing foosball and thinking about the next Google Reader or one of their green initiatives. Nor does it mean that Monday is for chillaxin’ because of that super World Cup party on Sunday that they can hardly remember. No, Googlers work hard and no one is punching a clock or measuring whether everyone lived up to their 20% this week.

Both Google and 3M understand that this ‘allowance’ is just a key part of their overall corporate culture. Although 3M is more hierarchical and Google so anti-that, the respective cultures foster innovation knowing that in order to stay ahead of the game, they need to spend quality time thinking about the next new thing. Clearly, hitting a few singles, doubles and an occasional homer is good for the bottom line.

Hmmm, okay so what the heck does this have to do with our learning organization?

Well, how is it any different? At my previous company, I instituted a similar policy (targeting a reasonable 10-15%, even 'forcing' it into MBOs on one occasion) for our global education team that created several wins (innovative remote labs for partners, technical training for our SEs via RSS and iTunes feeds for their iPhones/iTouch) and a lot of things that never made it past the drawing board but nonetheless stimulated the team into conversation, discussion and engagement for new ideas that would position us as innovators and thought leaders within the company, yes, the quintessential 'knowledge managers'.

Not to say that it was a perfect match. The culture that I wanted to create in the group did not align with the overall corporate culture based on monthly sprints throughout the organization, which in the end, kept everyone stretched at 80hr weeks leaving little time to foster creativity and an attitude of innovation.

This cultural attitude for innovation does align with VMG’s concepts around learning portals and social learning to generate conversations, connect like minds, and bring together passionate people and killer ideas, all of which is supported by a long term vision of competitive differentiation...because that next brainstorm session or napkin doodling might just be the next Post-It or Google Earth.

How do you innovate at your work? I'd love to hear about it. Send me a note at jon@velocitymg.com.

Nine Ways Learning Portals Improve SaaS Providers’ Bottom Line

2010-07-06T19:27:55Z

SaaS VPs and line of business leaders are increasingly making strategic investments in learning portals, though the companies may not even have training departments. In fact, they sometimes start here, bypassing traditional training technologies and organizations completely. Why would they do this? Two very important reasons: one, learning portals are a strong fit with the SaaS ethos and business model, and two, they make good fiscal sense and offer multi-faceted returns.

Of course deriving value from a learning portal depends greatly upon its design and implementation, which can run the gamut from miraculous to money pit. For the sake of argument, let’s assume we’re referring to a solid and thoughtfully designed portal that has been successfully launched to a company’s client base. Given that, here are nine ways a learning portal can improve the bottom line:

Shrinking margins to grow revenue is not a sustainable business model: as customer base, customer size, and deal size expand, so does customer need and the subsequent demand on services teams. In response, SaaS companies must both operationalize and offload services or find themselves scrambling to maintain customer satisfaction, which often equates to throwing people at problems and eating the costs.

Learning portals can minimize the need for under-priced or comped services, thus maintaining margins in the face of high growth and revenue spikes; by providing both structure and self help, they offer a resource to help services teams as well as customers be more successful.

Scaling the organization does not equal growing the organization: Scaling the organization means replicating your success exponentially; growing it just means making it bigger.

Learning portals allow you to scale: providing the same (or better) level of service with the same (or fewer) number of people. The majority of what people need to know to be successful emerges on the job and in the moment, not in the classroom. Portals provide always on access to valuable content and training without the sunk costs required to administer courses and staff an at-the-ready bevy of trainers.

SaaS is not always as easy as it looks: SaaS apps may be fast to deploy, but they’re not always fast to take hold. Best of breed point solutions sometimes favor features over form, resulting in applications that are robust but not necessarily easy to use or optimize.

Learning portals help drive adoption by getting people over the learning curve and into the value-added functionality. Improved adoption results in improved subscription renewals and upsell opportunities.

Knowledge needs to be as current as the app, and keeping up is costly. When you have a quarterly release schedule (or even more frequent), it’s tough to keep training and content current.

Learning portals simplify content development and maintenance by tapping into a much broader base of potential content authors (the users themselves) along with providing flexible tools for an approval process, as well as for identifying content that needs refreshing.

Technology training isn’t enough: customers often need industry insight and best practices support as well.

Learning portals offer a venue for showcasing thought leadership in the form of insights, best practices, and emergent ideas. Thought leadership leads to leads, and loyalty, and long term revenue.

The best experts and evangelists are not internal: clients want to hear from others who look like them and who have solved similar problems as theirs.

Learning portals let people access testimonials and support from their peers. Content sharing and discussion forums allow clients to connect with people and tap into insights beyond your organization or theirs.
Innovation needs an outlet: Preferably one that captures both institutional knowledge and emergent ideas and makes them searchable and measurable.

Learning portals are gold mines for innovation: discrete, tracked, and tagged content and input from across your client base that can be sorted, aggregated, rated, and reviewed.
Technology revenue offers more consistent margins than services revenue. Fully-burdened staff with bumpy utilization rates subject to the caprices of demand (and delayed revenue recognition) can wreck havoc with a profit and loss statement.

Learning portals offer stable tech costs, predictable tech income, and allow for a streamlined training services org allowing for improved forecasting.

Annuity-based revenue is nothing to sneeze at: regular and reliable income streams, especially if training had not previously been monetized (or well-monetized) converts training from a cost of business to a line of business.

Learning portals can be monetized as a subscription offering that is both ratable and an easy-to-sell incremental cost to a SaaS subscription.

A Learning Portal is Not an LMS

2010-05-18T23:59:52Z

I have been in several discussions recently with clients, partners, and many in the training industry, and I have been hearing a common theme emerge: "I need a learning portal, not an LMS"

What does this mean? Many portions of our industry would say that the concepts of an LMS and a learning portal (or knowledge center, or learning center, or learning site... insert name here) are synonymous. Yet, I would posit, that there are fundamental differences, that such concepts are both independent and often complementary, and that the basis of need for one or the other comes from an entirely separate set of requirements.

An LMS is built with administration, scheduling, and tracking in mind. Whether that LMS be SaaS, client-server, or homebrew spreadsheet jockeying, the primary metaphor of an LMS is to understand who did what when, who can do what when, and whether everybody did the stuff they were supposed to do. Think compliance, think tracking, think completion as the result. This is not a bash - this is a description of the fundamental design metaphor for the LMS sector. Compliance tracking is important stuff to the business world. Many LMS companies have done great work to extend the LMS capability to successfully bolt on a web portal-like front end, however I would suggest that this LMS-driven web front end is (necessarily) more of a user-facing manifestation of the LMS than a web-based learning environment designed, built, and performing specifically with the user's needs, requirements, and experience in mind.

A learning portal is quite different (even if tracking of content and user activity is measured and aggregated under the hood by an integrated LMS). In many cases, such as customer learning, casual learning environments, or short, somewhat disposable knowledge portals pegged to a specific implementation, the best LMS may in fact be Google Analytics, or the results data may in fact be tracked in a Salesforce.com dashboard (for comparison to and within other customer data).

A modern learning portal is a one-stop resource to the user: I can ask a question, get access to experts and a knowledge base, see the latest stuff (courses, lessons, notes, articles, snipits, youtube videos, etc.) from the latest release, interact with both other users, my company, and/or my vendor(s) via Yammer, and just know that I can get the stuff I need to my job- without searching, digging through a wiki, or going through twenty registration steps just to watch a two-minute how-to video. The concepts of 'registration' and formal vs. informal learning both begin to break down. The learning portal is a 'curated,' aggregated, and unique destination where I can go to kick off my training, and then know I can continue to go there to get what I need to know in some simple manner, for as long as I need to go there or as long as applicable to what me and my company are doing (around this initiative, implementation, effort, etc.). These are not one-stop shops for everything I need to know about everything my company does- think of these as a combination of a specific learning path (and its specific content), a facebook page, a subject-specific twitter feed, and searchable, categorized, and curated wiki/repository of information, knowledge, and the latest and greatest stuff. Think context over content, and user over administrator.

A learning portal is, in fact, a lot less than an LMS, quite different from an LMS, and all about the user experience. Usability, speed, context, ranking, and relevance are far more important than a doctrinal approach to learning standards, ID, reusability, and 'artistry in courseware.' A learning portal and an LMS can have no integration (I just spoke to a Fortune 100 company that has never needed an LMS- and they successfully deliver compliance e-learning across the globe...), can be highly integrated, and/or can even act as the opposite sides of the same coin for one another. However a learning portal is all about the ride, while an LMS is all about the right engine and tuning. The goal is to deliver the best ride to the right destination, with the right power train (and no more) to get you there.