You’re sold on eLearning for your company. You know your company needs to invest more in training and you’ve done the research that lets you know a learning management system is just the way to do that.

Facing the Challenge: How to Sell eLearning Internally

You’ve realized it’s cost-efficient and your company’s return on investment is going to be substantial.

There’s only one thing standing in your way – other people in your organization.

Facing Resistance

There are a number of reasons people may face challenges when it comes to introducing the concept of virtual learning within their organization.

One of the primary reasons is an overall resistance to change. This resistance can come from other organizational leaders or it may also be coming from your workforce itself. They may be unable to see why you should change your corporate training and development model and it becomes your job to convince them of the merits of moving to a new way of doing this aspect of business.

So how do you do that? We can help.

Market Multimedia Learning

If you want to revolutionize the way your organization handles its training and development, primarily by shifting to virtual learning, you’re going to have to market, market, market.

Just as you would work to convince a new customer of why your product is worth their time, you’ll have to do something similar to sell this new concept of training and development.

  • Identify and explicitly define a problem. If you approach others in your organization and offer a different way of doing things they’re likely to wonder why they should rock the boat. It’s up to you to clearly identify a problem within your company—most likely a skills or performance gap—and use that as the basis of your internal marketing. When you’re defining a problem that is going to lead to goals and objectives, the more specific you’re able to be, the better. It also needs to be a problem with objectives that are going to be measurable. If you present such an abstract problem there’s no real way to determine whether or not eLearning works as a viable solution, you’re not likely to gain much traction in your sales process.
  • Seek some consensus on the problem. This is where you’re going to work with company leaders and you’re going to lay out a problem and then you have to convince them it exists and it’s holding your organization back in some way. If everyone isn’t on the same page that there is in reality a problem, they’re not likely to embrace a solution.
  • Position eLearning as the solution to the very problem you identify. Again, you’ll likely have to refer back to the objectives and metrics originally defined, and show in realistic terms how multimedia learning is going to directly provide a solution. Try to keep it as narrowly tailored as possible when first introducing the idea of implementing training and development solutions utilizing an LMS. For example, if your problem is too much waste on the manufacturing floor, be prepared to show how training can address that problem and then how the success of the new training can be measured and will also have positive results for the business overall.
  • Along with the previous step, there needs to be a clear showing of the ROI for investing in a new type of learning technology. This often becomes one of the easier steps for people internally marketing an eLearning solution, because it is so much more time and cost-effective than traditional forms of training and development.

Ultimately, as with marketing anything, whether internally or externally, convincing your organization to be innovative with your training and development efforts relies on your ability to become a problem solver, and position eLearning as the ultimate solution, which is something more and more companies are finding holds true.