I love acquisitions.  They shake things up and restack the competitive deck giving new competitors a chance.  My reaction to Skillsoft acquiring SumTotal Systems has went from "Wow!" to "Hmmm" to "Eureka" to "Yeah!" in a few short days.   Here was my staged progression of thoughts:   Wow My very first thought was I can’t believe Vista Equity Partners was able to unload SumTotal Systems.  Vista is a private equity firm that purchases flailing software companies, implements their significant best practices, turns them around and sells them and that of course was the plan with SumTotal.  However, Vista was never in the LMS and talent marketplace before and they struggled mightily for years until they learned that we’re an odd and very educated breed of buyers that prefer experienced pros to college kids. They also spent a fortune buying and integrating complimentary TM product companies to create an end-to-end talent management suite to compete with SAP and Oracle. They paid a high price but now SumTotal has a modern, powerful, competitive, integrated suite of products.  They also have hundreds maybe thousands of customers on legacy products that they are still supporting.  Somewhat of a nightmare scenario for Skillsoft to inherit in [...] The post Skillsoft Acquires SumTotal: Crazy or Genius? appeared first on Talented Learning.

If you have been reading our blog (thank you), you know that the Cloud LMSs have changed the LMS game.  They were born within the last five years and are fully mobile, social and gamified.  Cloud LMSs have engaging user interfaces, customer friendly license models and they are the ideal solution for the voluntary users of extended enterprise learning. No matter how badly you want to upgrade to a cloud LMS though, many of you in both extended enterprise and internal employee LMSs feel you are stuck contractually or practically in your old-school LMS.  Worse yet, you feel that you are probably paying too much for that paltry privilege.  I don’t doubt that you are, but there is a way out.  First step, take this five-question quiz to find out if you are getting fleeced by your LMS vendor.   #1:  Did You Marry Your LMS Vendor Before 2011-2012? The business models of LMSs has changed with the advent of the Cloud LMS solutions five years ago.  They have made the traditional LMS vendors and their business model obsolete.  Before 2010 longer-term contracts, perpetual licenses, high-cost implementations, poor customer service and no pricing differentiation for extended enterprise users reigned.  Today, consumption pricing, [...] The post Are You Getting Fleeced By Your LMS Vendor? appeared first on Talented Learning.

In corporate America, we have been training our customers for decades.  Buy a new piece of construction machinery and the manufacturer will send out a trainer.  Buy an old school LMS and they will send a trainer out for 3-days to train your administrators.  Want to learn how to grout tile? Head to Lowe’s on a Saturday morning. Over the last few years though customer learning has evolved into the digital and away from live trainers.  The learning management system (LMS) is used as the backbone of the customer learning system delivering eLearning, tutorials, videos and social learning that can be created once and reused countless times. The LMS also has one thing that no other method of training customers has-reporting.  Knowing if your customers have been trained or not gives you the power to measure the return on your investment. How?  Have trained customers purchased more or less than untrained?  Have they called into support more frequently or infrequently?  Have they renewed their subscriptions at a higher or lower rate? In every industry smart organizations invest in providing their customers learning opportunities.  Does yours? If not, you’re missing out on at least five compelling measurable reasons to build your business case for customer learning:   [...] The post The Business Case for Customer Learning appeared first on Talented Learning.

I sold high-end LMSs for 13 years and never dreamed there was so much variety in the LMS marketplace.  As a LMS vendor you get used to competing against the same vendors for the same type of opportunities and it’s easy to ignore the other LMS segments -mainly because the potential segments and opportunities are ignoring you! As an independent analyst I’ve had the opportunity to review 50 LMS solutions in the last nine months.  It’s exhilarating to learn about LMS solutions at a much deeper level than I ever could as a competitor.  I spoke to LMS executives, marketers, sales and technical representatives as well as their clients.  I watched tutorials, webinars and videos and read project manuals, blogs, case studies and websites. I loaded content, consumed content, built curriculums, created business rules, received awards, ran reports, poked and prodded to see what’s out there, how it works, what’s unique and who’s buying it.   I asked every vendor about their target market, unique value propositions, learning technology trends and their top competitors. I was amazed by the large number of viable LMS solutions.  How can 600+ LMS vendors exist with more joining the race every day?  What do they all eat?  Turns out [...] The post Five Types of 2014 LMSs appeared first on Talented Learning.

If our post on The Business Case for Customer Learning got your interest piqued in the benefits of customer learning, this post will show you how to build your business case to obtain funding. When an organization is training their customers correctly they are looking at training as a business.  No content is developed that is not targeted to solve a problem or drive customer behavior.   Every training effort is measured for success by criteria established before the project was approved.  If it does not meet the organization’s ROI standards, the content will be changed until it does or retired.   You can’t be in the business of customer learning unless you are willing to Take a Walk on the Wild Side of Measurable Training. Once you have the ROI process down, you’ll have the executive team on board and access to larger and larger budgets.  Although ROI studies can be big MBA blown affairs, I recommend a much simpler approach to start proving the ROI of your customer learning efforts.  Here’s how.   Find Existing Business Metrics Customer behavior is easy to observe and measure.  Why?  Because businesses already care about and are measuring whether their customers buy more, buy less, buy again or never [...] The post How To Measure Customer Learning ROI appeared first on Talented Learning.

We want to say thank you to all the Talented Learning blog readers.  We founded the Talented Learning blog on March 2, 2014 to be the only independent voice in the world dedicated to Extended Enterprise (EE) learning technology solutions.  The global response has been overwhelming — and humbling.  We knew you were out there and so far you have found our blog over 100,000 times! Also, thank you to so many readers for reaching out and providing the kind feedback.  It is really encouraging.  Many of you have been asking for webinars to dig deeper into the universe of Extended Enterprise — we’ve listened!  Weekly, over the remainder of 2014, I’ll be presenting (or guest presenting) 10 new EE webinars covering industry, business, technical and functional topics.  We invite you to please register for one or all. If you’re interested but can’t attend at the date/time, please register anyway and we will send you the link to the webinar recording.  Thanks again for following Talented Learning and I look forward to meeting you soon on a webinar!   #1:  The 2014 Extended Enterprise LMS Marketplace Overview 11/4/2014 @1pm EST Host: Talented Learning We’ve all seen the countless awards in the industry celebrating dozens of different types of LMS solutions.  Social, mobile, gamified, traditional, NextGen, SaaS, cloud, [...] The post 10 Weeks, 10 New Extended Enterprise Webinars! appeared first on Talented Learning.

How do you get your external sales channel to look, act and perform the same or better than your internal sales team? Best-in-class organizations train and certify their sales and distribution channel using a learning management system (LMS) and proprietary online content.  These organizations have proven that educating their channel provides a measurable return on investment and more importantly a significant competitive advantage.  As a result, these organizations treat channel learning as an ongoing mission critical initiative. Proving the worth of channel learning is simple though.  Use your LMS  to provide channel learning completion reports and compare with channel performance business reports. Here are the most common business metrics positively impacted by channel learning: Channel partner sales, cross sales and up sales Sale of premium "certification" content Cost per training interaction Time to market with new products Time to proficiency for new channel partners and partner employees Cost of customer support Customer satisfaction No wonder channel learning it is such a big business.  At Talented Learning, we’ve collected and reviewed hundreds of case studies during our 2014 LMS vendor reviews and here our Top 10 Channel Learning Case Studies from 10 different LMS vendors.    (There was a 10-way tie for first place so we’ve listed alphabetically.)   #1:  Affiliated Distributors LMS [...] The post Top 10 Channel Learning Case Studies appeared first on Talented Learning.

  Contrary to every other analyst in the learning technology industry, I come at the LMS buying topics from a vendor selling standpoint.  Selling one hundred LMSs gives you a viewpoint much different than if you bought 1, 2, or 10 LMSs.  Believe me, buying is easy, buying well is tougher and selling is the most difficult.  I can definitively say that in my 13 years selling high-end LMSs I have met every type of LMS buyer — dozens of times each including the: Sizzle feature shopper Perennial I can’t get budget moaners I have 1000 critical, must-have requirements time wasters I’m the decision maker and plan to make a selection this month, but I really don’t have authority or budget blowhards Educated, prepared buyers I preferred the latter though unfortunately they were in the smallest minority.  When I was a fledgling LMS sales guy at Click2Learn almost 15 years ago, I was such a wide eyed, glass half full, silver lining sap.  Each and every lead I worked with gusto, jumping on planes to anywhere, answering any RFP, fully believing in my ability to win anything and never considering most shoppers would not or could not buy.  (Unsuccessful LMS salespeople are some of the nicest and busiest [...] The post Define your LMS Requirements Like a Pro appeared first on Talented Learning.

Talented Learning Co-Founders Joelle Girton and John Leh Happy New Year! We co-founded Talented Learning in early 2014 and went on a mission to personally learn and report on the global LMS industry like no analysts ever have. One-by-one, we established relationships with 65 LMS vendors and now officially "cover" them in our research.  In addition to receiving deep-dive product demonstrations with all vendors we had in-depth executive conversations about the LMS industry, technology trends, buyer habits and their business.  We discussed their business model, history, target market, differentiation, competitors, clients and goals going forward.  We consolidate, study and use all this information to help our blog readers and consulting clients find and buy the right LMS for them. Based on all we learned in 2014 and a combined 40 years in the learning technology industry, we humbly offer our top 10 LMS predictions for 2015:   #10 - Improving U.S. Economy Bodes Well for LMS Industry Spend 13 years selling LMS solutions and it is obvious that the LMS market place is cyclically tied to the U.S. economy.  When times are good LMS spending rises and when times are bad the opposite is even more true.  The U.S. economy is gaining steam and gearing towards a new level in 2015. [...] The post Top 10 LMS Predictions for 2015 appeared first on Talented Learning.

We are kicking off the Talented Learning 2015 LMS Reviews with a review of the TalentLMS made by Epignosis. The TalentLMS true is a multitenant cloud LMS meaning all TalentLMS clients access the same LMS via a web-browser and each client has its own secure area and sub areas.   Like most LMSs born in the last 3 years, the TalentLMS is fully mobile responsive so that any type of user can access it from smartphones, tablets and laptops without plugins or downloads and without any panning, scrolling or zooming. I started a free trial without a credit card, set up my own domain and gave it a whirl.  I wanted to know if I could -without any assistance - build my own extended enterprise LMS to house my recent webinar recordings.  I could and it was pretty straightforward to do so. I had access to my own LMS within a minute and I was able to brand the site with my logo and favicon, choose an overall graphical theme, modify all colors, set my preferred language, time zone and currency, enable xAPI as well as single sign on integrations.  Adding my recorded webinars was as simple as selecting my file and entering a title [...] The post LMS Reviews: TalentLMS appeared first on Talented Learning.