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.

By guest expert Jason Silberman Onboarding new customers to your software can seem like a daunting task, especially in the era of ever-growing customer expectations. If onboarding is slow, unattended customers will wander off to competition, and optimizing customer risk management is key. Obstacles such as these are compounded by the fact that customers expect to get a product that is tailored to their needs, works properly every time it is used, and is backed by adequate customer support. Though there are strategies in place for dealing with the challenges of customer onboarding, many are unfeasible or have proven a failure. Below are six onboarding mistakes you should avoid if you want to convert your early adopters to permanent customers.   1. Making Promises your Product Can’t Keep Your product took a lot of time, effort, and thought to develop, and it’s easy to fall into the temptation of using adjectives like "groundbreaking", "revolutionary", and "life changing" that might not be entirely accurate. Beware of falling into the trap of overpromising, as if your customers don’t experience the same value that you do, they probably won’t stay onboard long. Consider finding a neutral third party to read your copy and [...] The post 6 Customer Onboarding Mistakes to Steer Clear of appeared first on Talented Learning.

Getting final LMS budget approval is kind of like pushing over a Coke machine — it usually takes a few tries.  The LMS buying cycle for a new or an upgraded LMS averages 12-24 months and can easily take much longer.  The elongated buying cycle is almost always due to the challenge of obtaining executive budget approval for the purchase and ongoing maintenance. Once you have your budget requests submitted, there is really nothing else to do other than hope and prepare.  Despite having the available time, most LMS buying organizations don’t take advantage of the calm before the storm and are woefully unprepared for their LMS implementation once they have the approvals to proceed with a purchase. There is a perception that the implementation process is the time to figure out the small details of the project, but you should define as much in advance as you can to streamline the implementation and maximize your odds of success. Even if your LMS budget gets delayed for a year or two, any preparation work you do will be leveraged at that time and you’ll be stronger because of it.  Preparation is never lost.  What should you do while waiting for your LMS budget approval?  The below five activities will be valuable no matter what LMS vendor [...] The post What to Do While Waiting for LMS Budget Approval appeared first on Talented Learning.

At 27 years, Gyrus Systems has been in learning management longer than any other vendor I have reviewed.  The current product, GyrusAim LMS, is a fifth generation product meaning this is the fifth complete rewrite of the application with each version adapting new technologies to the old theme of training management. GyrusAim is a global, enterprise-strength, administratively-focused LMS with core strengths of in-depth instructor led classroom (live or virtual) management, certification, role configuration and reporting. Gyrus Systems leveraged the best practices learned from 400+ client implementations to provide admin heavy training organizations with the deep configuration flexibility they need.  First time LMS buyers will not appreciate the level of administrative sophistication because they have never encountered all the unsaid downsides of most administrative LMSs. Examples of Gyrus functionality that are not found in most cloud LMSs include robust wait list management, enrollment rules configuration, organizational seat reservations, resource scheduling, granular role management, administrative dashboards and audit trail reporting.  The GyrusAim LMS also includes robust skill and competency management and they go to the next level of multi-level skill acquisition tied to training completion. The GyrusAim LMS includes ecommerce capabilities to facilitate the sale of content to organizations or individuals. Group based pricing, discounts, credits, coupons and PayPal integration are all [...] The post LMS Reviews: Gyrus Systems appeared first on Talented Learning.

  The Digital Ignite Crowd Wisdom™ LMS is a pure extended enterprise LMS and is extremely cool.  They have left employee learning management behind with the other 599 LMS vendors and they focus on measurable learning technology solutions for extended enterprise audiences.  100% of research, development and associated professional services are dedicated to providing one of the world’s best solutions for channel, customer, associations and training providers. Crowd Wisdom™ is designed with the tools to attract voluntary learners, build a community of learners and facilitate the growing of a training business.  The learner interface looks great and is as non-LMSey that I have seen in my 88 reviews.  It is clean, easy-to-use with no hint of HR speak for users to get confused by.  The LMS is mobile responsive, meaning that it can be accessed effectively on any device or computer browser from any corner of the world in 17 languages.  Crowd Wisdom™ has strong ecommerce features to support the selling of content to both individuals and organizations. Social learning is germane to the Digital Ignite Crowd Wisdom™ LMS strategy and they incorporate social features like forums, popular content, discussion groups, content recommendations, polling and surveys into all aspects of the application from LMS interface, MOOC content or any content assembled in the LMS. Also the user profile is [...] The post LMS Reviews: Digital Ignite Crowd Wisdom LMS appeared first on Talented Learning.

  LMS demonstrators have it tough.  They are not running the sales cycle but rather get brought in at certain points of many sales cycles.  They are expected to get up to speed quickly on every account and deliver a tailored, business impactful demo based on client requirements.  If they do great, some salesperson gets the commission and credit.  If they do poorly or even average, then they are the goat. I recently wrote a post offering demonstration advice and tips to LMS vendors to improve their win percentage.  The tips are based on my personal experience of presenting or receiving over 2200 LMS demos in my career as a former LMS sales guy and now as an independent LMS analyst.  The response from readers and LMS demonstrators was fantastic and fun as demonstrators worldwide came out of the woodwork and offered up additional stories and advice from their experiences.  I quickly came to the conclusion that the "LMS Demonstration Community" didn’t exist and if it did informally, it is an unrewarded and neglected group of professionals. As an industry of buyers and sellers of LMS, I believe it is high time we stop ignoring the most important person in the [...] The post Top 10 LMS Demonstrators in the World appeared first on Talented Learning.

Extended enterprise learning is all about business.  The business of training your non-employees.  The business of making money, accelerating growth, furthering your reach, streamlining your processes and achieving competitive separation. Extended enterprise learning is a business weapon wielded by the wise to build communities of customers, partners and resellers and provide them learning interventions to measurabley change behavior.  The measurable change results in more sales of your primary products and/or your content and happier customers. To push out and manage training to external audiences you need an extended enterprise LMS which is a special kind of LMS that does most of what an employee LMS does but also much more.  Mobile focused, NextGen user interface, social learning, ecommerce, gamification and marketing automation are just some of the key features needed to support external audiences. So what are some ways to drive profit with an extended enterprise LMS?  Here are ten good examples: Sell Content - If there is one thing that an extended enterprise or training for business LMS must do - it must be able to sell content to individuals and/or organizations. Continuing education, assessments, aggregated content, proprietary content, books, kits, conferences, instructor-led, webinars or guides can all be sold [...] The post Ten Ways to Drive Profit with an Extended Enterprise LMS appeared first on Talented Learning.

You need to attract more prospects, train your customers and external sales channel and you heard that this LMS thing can solve your problems.  You Google "LMS" and you find 600 LMS companies, countless advertisements and hopefully a few of my articles. When reviewing the LMS vendor websites, you find it is difficult to discern a difference between the LMS companies and their offerings. You have been tasked to find qualified LMS options for your organizations but it is impossible to qualify all 600 solutions in any reasonable time or cost effective manner.  I know, I’ve tried.  In the last nineteen months, I have only been able to review 90 of the 600 LMSs.  Here is what I found though.  Each of the 90 has met some business need uniquely and a bit better than the other 89. Unique LMS differentiation is based on varying combinations of the LMS vendor’s experience, services provided, regional focus, industries served, functional capabilities, technical sturdiness, license approach, and ongoing support provided. The best way to prepare for the vendor community and find viable solutions efficiently is to have your ducks in a row before you start knocking on LMS vendor doors.  Once they have you [...] The post 3 Tips to Finding the Best Extended Enterprise LMS for You appeared first on Talented Learning.

By Gauri Reyes, frequent contributor to the Daily Mindflash blog Online training is an effective way to arm your partners and value-added resellers with knowledge. It’s scalable—you can train thousands at once while retaining your own corporate brand in the training materials. A highly trained, extended sales force can increase your revenue through increased sales of your products and services. And, you can sell your online training courses themselves to your partners and resellers, should you choose to do so. When creating an online training program for your partners and resellers, consider the following topics:   Convey the Company Culture Your partners and resellers are effectively an extension of your sales force. As they are often in front of your end customers and are effectively representing your products and services, expose them to your company culture, norms, behaviors, values, beliefs, and vision. The more you align your culture with theirs, at least when it comes to reselling your products and services, the more you can ensure a unified, positive experience to the end customer.   Opportunity Registration & Dispute Resolution If you work with multiple resellers, your resellers could potentially compete for the same opportunity with the same end customer. Avoid [...] The post 9 Must-Consider Topics When Designing Partner or Reseller Training appeared first on Talented Learning.

Teaching With Technology Part 2 Most students and teachers take the traditional classroom environment beneficial for learning Why? Because they can interact with the instructor and their schoolmates. Particularly for people who learn better through cooperative actions and group study. The possibility, of asking questions and receiving immediate answers, is significant. I need to learn how to teach with technology. I am taking the course Teaching with Technology to improve my educational skills. The post Teaching With Technology Part 2 appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

What Are My Needs As An English Language Teacher? Teaching and learning in the 21st Century. I need to learn how to teach with technology. I am taking the course Teaching with Technology to improve my educational skills. I do not have sufficient computing knowledge, training and skills in graphic design, computer programming and authoring multimedia courseware. The post What Are My Needs As An English Language Teacher? appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Google Images: A Great Source of Images for Your eLearning In the Google Images: A Great Source of Images for Your eLearning video I discuss a great free source of your images to be used in your eLearning designs. The post Google Images: A Great Source of Images for Your eLearning appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Adding a Timer Using a Learning Interaction In the Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Adding a Timer Using a Learning Interaction, I demonstrate how you can add two different types of timers to your Adobe Captivate project using learning interactions. The post Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Adding a Timer Using a Learning Interaction appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Display a Letter Grade on Your Quiz Results Page In the Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Display a Letter Grade on Your Quiz Results Page, you will learn how you can display letter grades on a customized quiz results page in Adobe Captivate The post Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Display a Letter Grade on Your Quiz Results Page appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Use Dropbox to Share eLearning for Review I often find myself in the situation where I’m not ready to put my projects on a learning management system, but I need to share my work with someone like a stakeholder or a subject matter expert for review purposes. In the Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Use Dropbox to Share eLearning for Review, I show you how I use a Dropbox account to share your published projects with others. Here is where you can download the Dropbox application that is appropriate for your system: https://www.dropbox.com/downloading Here is where you can sign up for Dropbox using my referral link (Full disclosure - I get extra storage space for referring you to Dropbox): https://db.tt/GnbtcHn The post Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Use Dropbox to Share eLearning for Review appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Round-tripping with Adobe Photoshop In the Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Round-tripping with Adobe Photoshop, I show you how you can "roundtrip" your photos in Adobe Captivate to Adobe Photoshop, edit them update them and then send them back to Captivate with all your changes. The post Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Round-tripping with Adobe Photoshop appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Embedding Video into Your Project In the Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Embedding Video into Your Project, I show you how you can embed a video into Adobe Captivate, as well as convert your videos for size and format using Adobe Media Encoder. The post Adobe Captivate Tutorial: Embedding Video into Your Project appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.