Digitizing Training: Present A Plan With Figures, Be Convincing, And Make Sure You’re Ready
In the first part of this article, we explored how to identify your managerial goals and find the right partner when digitizing training content.
In this second part, we’ll show you how to calculate the ROI of your project, how to build your presentation and make it convincing, and, of course, how to prepare a budget and a specific backward plan of actions to undertake before attacking your project.
Step 3: Present Plan With Figures
Show concretely how your plan will meet your business objectives by generating income or saving money.
A training digitization plan has a direct, positive impact on organizations. Yet, while it is very easy to calculate the cost, it is not always easy to clearly model all the benefits it can offer. To help you, we have listed the main categories in which digital training has a direct financial impact. All you have to do is apply them to your organization and perform an estimate of costs.
Deployment Costs
This is the major cost you’ll have to consider in this study. At this stage, it is important that you properly model and understand all the costs you will have to face. Especially:
- Cost of infrastructure
- Cost of content creation
- Cost of deployment
- Cost of support
Onboarding And Talent Retention
Onboarding is a very costly process for the company. Digital training will have a highly positive impact on it. Once the training has been created, all collaborators can train and become familiar with their own profession without the need for training teams to intervene. Digital training is also a way to develop talents and thus decrease turnover within your company. This is a priority for HR teams! You’ll then need to work with HR teams to model the costs induced by these elements and determine the extent to which you can cut them down.
Gains In Training Efficiency
A digital structure will allow you to make your training department much more efficient and free up time to embark on ever more ambitious projects. Depending on your organization, there are plenty of sources of revenue here:
- Trainer and learner travel costs
- The costs incurred by the company for lack of collaborator or partner training (unavailability of training resources)
- Physical costs of delivering the training (documentation, brochures…)
- Opportunity costs (projects that are not launched by lack of resources)
New Revenues
Developing a digital training structure can also allow you to grow your income by acting on many functions of the company. Here’s a list of elements that could be affected:
- Customer retention rate
- An increase of partner and franchisee efficiency
- Sale of contents
- Increased team efficiency
- New contracts secured thanks to a digital training offer
- Sale of training support to your customers
Once you have listed and costed all these elements, it is quite simple to model the digital training transition’s return on investment. This is a key asset to give credibility to your action and show how a learning organization can help all the company’s collaborators to fulfill their objectives.
Step 4: Be Convincing
The best way to convince is to foster open dialog with your managers by showing them how your plan will meet their issues. After hearing their issues, offer them solutions via a convincing presentation.
You now have a clearer vision of your project and the impact it will have on your organization. It is time to share it and build a presentation to win the support of decision makers. This phase is crucial. Indeed, it is often on the basis of this presentation that the decision will be made to allocate a budget to your project. This guide is intended to help you build a compelling presentation and answer most of the objections you may encounter.
Know Your Project Pitch By Heart
It is crucial that you are able to not only demonstrate the financial interest of your project for the company, but also quantify it precisely and to support the solidity of your draft.
Aim Simplicity
While a transformation plan is an ambitious and complex enterprise, it is paramount that you are able to present it simply. Only keep the most important elements. You’ll have to identify the moments when it is necessary to delve into detail and those when it is not if you want to keep your audience’s attention.
Do Your Research
Your discussion partners will not hesitate to ask you to support your claims with solid evidence. To be convincing you will need to have accurate data and to be able to justify use cases on the subject. Here are some sources that could help you in your research:
- Whitepapers
- Expert reports
- Specialized websites
- Testimonies and practical deployment cases of the LMS you intend to work with
Arm Yourself Against Objections
Transforming learning in your company is an ambitious undertaking. Any change brought to the company will come with its lot of reluctance. Be aware of this, and arm yourself accordingly by preparing to answer such objections expressed by your interlocutors.
Repeat Over And Over Again
Your presentation is ready and the hardest is behind you-but you’re not quite ready yet. Indeed, even the best content in the world has no chance to convince its audience if the presenter’s performance is not up to par. So, prepare yourself! Feel free to learn by heart and prepare your effects to make your plan shine with your performance.
Structure Proposal
- Slide 1-5
These slides are the most important and must show how necessary it is to digitize training in your company. They will be decisive to establish the credibility and merits of your project. - Slide 6-7
After outlining your vision, you need to base it on a quantified assessment of the benefits it will bring to the business. You will have to present a solid case because it is often at this moment that objections are the most numerous. - Slide 8-13
These slides will show you how the partner you have chosen is the right one.
Possible Objections
- Objection 1
- The objection: “We already have an LMS!”
- The answer: Your company may already have an in-house LMS to host its training content. While these have been an excellent solution in the past, they are no longer able to guarantee the development of a learning organization. Especially because they no longer offer social functions. Furthermore, in choosing a SaaS-based solution, you’ll save money all the while bonding with a scalable tool that always guarantees your up-to-dateness with cutting-edge technology. Indeed, the market’s most advanced tools can easily be integrated into your HR suite.
- Objection 2
- The objection: “Why spend more money on this tool?”
- The answer: Requesting a larger budget is often risky. To meet financial objections, it is essential that you have a very clear vision of your project’s quantified impact to demonstrate a positive return on investment.
- Objection 3
- The objection: “Deployment will be a long process, and this transition will have a negative impact on the company”
- The answer: Unexpected scenarios are often a source of costs and inefficiency for the company. Therefore, deployment will be monitored vigilantly by your discussion partners. Fortunately, companies that have chosen the SaaS-based model allow fast deployment while opening up new learning opportunities. For example, 360Learning offers a mobile application so that your employees may be trained remotely.
- Objection 4
- The objection: “We didn’t receive a return on our investment in the former system. Why would things be any different this time?”
- The answer: Training ROI is rarely calculated in companies. This is an opportunity for you! If you’re able to present a compelling analysis and a clear vision of the indicators that you will follow, then you will be in a position to sway the decision.
Step 5: Are You Ready? How To Successfully Set Up The Platform?
Once these steps have been completed, would you be ready to pitch if your plan was accepted? Prepare a budget and a specific backward plan of actions to undertake before attacking your project.
Well done! Your plan has been accepted and you are ready to start transforming your business into a learning organization! After intense negotiations internally and the construction of an ambitious project, this step may seem secondary, but it is particularly strategic: it will allow you to have a clearer vision of the steps and the time needed to successfully implement your LMS.
Week 1: Kickoff Meeting
This is the first meeting with the Customer Success teams of the LMS you have chosen. This will allow you to clarify your educational ambitions and build an implementation plan that will allow you to reach them.
Week 2: Handling The Solution
As a project leader in your company, it is essential that you have a thorough knowledge of your LMS to fully leverage all the solution’s features. Make sure this is the case before moving to the next step.
Week 3-4: Deployment Of Trainings
Once you perfectly master the solution, it means it’s time to create the first training modules. In the case of 360Learning, you can use the training content you already have (the platform is compatible with the SCORM format), or create it quickly using the integrated authoring tool.
Week 4-6: Making The Tool Available
This step is particularly important because it is at this point that your employees will make their first impression of the tool you have chosen to use. It is often at this moment that the company’s employees decide whether or not they should adopt the LMS. This is why is it paramount that you control this first contact with the platform.
Week 6-10: Building Vocational Schools
In a learning organization, learning is shared concern. Indeed, in this type of structure, all collaborators must be able to share new techniques and elements that can improve their knowledge of their own profession in the company. This decentralization of content production cannot be done overnight, we must be able to set up clear processes and ensure that they are adopted by and applied to the company. Your role will be to ensure the quality of the content and allow the experts to make the teaching techniques their own, which is necessary for adequate knowledge transfer.
Week 20-30-40…: Analyze The Results And Adapt
This last step is fundamental and should be repeated regularly. It consists of following and analyzing the data collected on your LMS such as the rate of commitment, completion, or interactions between members. Indeed, we can compare a learning organization to a living and independent organism. Like a biologist or a doctor, the trainer must work to understand it and allow its growth. You will, therefore, have two objectives here: the development of interactions between learners and the constant improvement of training content quality. This agile state of mind, made of tests and constant adjustments, is an increasing necessity. It is through this mechanism that you will learn, improve, and develop your learning organization, month after month.
It is urgent that you transform learning in your company. Indeed, in a growing knowledge economy, one has to learn constantly to be able to innovate and develop oneself. The best way to do this is to transform your business into a learning organization that will naturally create and disseminate knowledge among its members. This involves the decentralization of vocational schools, the development of social interactions at the heart of training and the willingness to work flexibly - this is where digital training comes in.