Is elearning too costly to implement for your budget?  Are you having a hard time getting management buy-in and funding?

I know of one proven way to get upper management to embrace elearning and put a budget behind it. All you have to do is to demonstrate the bottom-line impact of elearning to your business. 

For instance, more than 1000 sales managers for a global manufacturing client of ours recently revealed in a survey that our courses help lift their sales by as much as 18%. The results for that lift would be more than $2 billion in North America.

Now, upper management already had a strong commitment to elearning. But with an ROI of many, many times the cost of the program, our budget has tripled since we took over that account. And the more learners we engage, the lower the cost per course completion.

 Lesson #1.  Find ways to measure your impact.

We love clients who want to measure the impact of our work. We learn what we can do better, of course, but it also sells management on the level of funding elearning should receive.

New to elearning, so you don’t have data?

Lesson #2.  Don’t focus on budget, focus on strategy and the ROI.  

Recently, a new client of ours approached us with a tactical need and a $14,000 budget for promoting products on their website.  We took a couple of hours to talk, learn about their business and their business challenges, and then proposed a creative business strategy that we believed would give them the results they were looking for.  Our client presented our solution to their boss and suddenly the budget grew by 4x.  Why?  Because the boss realized that our strategy would far out-perform their original idea. He could see the return on his investment. 

We talk about this idea a lot...that is ROI vs budget. But it's almost always true that you get further with this focus than any other. And in an upcoming post, we'll talk more about proven ROI with some of our clients.