I’ve owned an eCommerce-focused agency for the last 10 years, and I’ve always been keen on exploring different avenues for increasing our recurring revenue. One of the fastest-growing industries is the learning management technology industry. Everywhere you go, companies are setting up online training, online courses, and onboarding new employees faster thanks to learning management systems.
Digital agencies everywhere can take advantage of the shift to remote working by adding online course software or online training portals to their list of services. We recently developed and launched our very own learning management system and it’s been one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made.
If you’re thinking ‘what can my clients possibly use an LMS for?’, there are four main reasons companies use an LMS: employee training, online courses/coaching, employee onboarding, and membership management.
No matter what niche you work in, whether it’s self-published authors or multi-national banks, selling an LMS service to your clients can not only bring you a regular income in, but it’ll also make your clients’ lives so much easier.
So, how can you add an LMS to your list of services, and how should you market it to your clients?
The benefits of adding an LMS to your services
Before we get into how you can sell an LMS as a service to your clients, let’s first talk about the benefits you can get from selling a whitelabel LMS service, or selling online courses/training programmes as a service to your clients.
Most learning management systems, like the LMS my company created, are set up for white labeling. This means you can resell a completely done-for-you service, which means more money for less stress. The best part of choosing a whitelabel LMS is they can handle all your customer queries for you.
From your clients’ perspective, you can also wrap their dashboard and user interface in their own branding – enabling them to provide a professional, seamless user experience for their customers, clients, students, or staff. We recently signed up a client who needed to onboard over 400 new staff. We wrapped their dashboard in their own branding, customized their functionality, and now it looks and feels like a completely custom LMS to their team.
Now let’s look at four ways you can sell an LMS as a service to your clients!
1. Developing online courses
You can start selling an LMS as a service to your customers by showing them how it can be used to develop online courses. They can use online courses to educate their employees, sell to their customers, and offer it as a service themselves.
A learning management system is a perfect tool for online courses because it can provide your clients with everything they need to run a successful online course in their niche.
Creating an online course with an LMS enables your clients to:
- Organize and store all their information in one place
- Update their courses whenever they like
- Easily track and monitor their learners’ progress
- Provide learners/students with 24/7 access to materials
- Add new courses, materials, quizzes, and tests whenever they like
- Set up an online community so learners can chat amongst themselves
- Get feedback on courses to help improve them
If your clients’ courses are based on a monthly payment, your clients will be able to get a form of passive, recurring revenue every month too, and they’ll have you to thank for it!
2. Improving employee training
Employee training can take up an awful amount of time, especially for companies within the health sector or construction industry.
Health and safety seminars, manual handling seminars, and others take hours of your clients’ time. The time spent training new and current employees is exhausting. But with the help from an LMS, your clients can breeze through their training issues and start spending more time on their business.
Employee training works similar to online courses. You can show your clients that they can make detailed online training seminars with pre-recorded videos or slides that their employees can do in their own time.
No longer will they have to spend hours repeating the same training, they’ll be able to do it once and automate it with a bit of help from your LMS.
3. Speeding up employee onboarding
Onboarding new employees can be an absolutely painful experience. For some of your clients it takes days, if not weeks, to onboard new talent, and unfortunately, the employees might not even work out in the role they’ve been hired for. This leaves your clients with a lot of time wasted trying to get new employees sorted. Time they could have spent time on what matters: selling and growing their business.
An LMS can help your clients save time and money when it comes to onboarding employees. They’ll be able to take all their details digitally, put them into the system and provide them with the needed introductory training sessions with just a couple of clicks of a button.
Having a streamlined, easy onboarding process can actually improve employee retention by 82%, meaning your clients won’t be losing out when it comes to employee retention.
With an LMS on hand, your clients can keep their company standards consistent because every employee will be undergoing the exact same onboarding process. Plus, your clients can track any employees’ performance to ensure they’re actually following the proper onboarding procedures.
4. Enhancing membership management
Membership management can be annoying to keep track of, especially when your clients are already trying to run their business! So what would make membership management easier? That’s right, an LMS.
Learning management systems can be used by your clients to keep track of their members. They can make sure membership dues are paid on time, track what courses or content is being consumed by each member, and get access to detailed analytics.
Using an LMS for membership management has a few advantages, including:
- Saving your clients time and money
- Creating a personalized experience
- Improving communication
- Provided an enjoyable learning experience
How do you know what LMS to use?
There are hundreds of learning management systems on the market. To figure out what the best choice is for you, I suggest you drill down into a specific service you want to offer. Trying to offer everything to everyone will only result in stretching yourself too thin.
First of all: are you customers all in one industry or type of service? If you work with health coaches, you could specialize in online learning portals. Work with large industrial manufacturers? They might need help onboarding staff quickly and efficiently.
One you know what you’re focusing on, you can explore what features are the most important. Do you need the ability for your clients to add new courses themselves? Do you need multi-language functionality? Do you want different users to have access to different things?
Once you know what functionality is the most important to you, you can take a look at a few different LMS options. Most offer free trials, so try them out! If they offer free how-to training, sign up!
There is always the option of developing your own LMS, but speaking from experience, it takes months of time and effort to build a fully-functioning LMS. If you’re not tech-savvy and don’t want to pay somebody to create it for you, I suggest trying out an off-the-shelf option.
Ultimately, you want an LMS that has the ability to scale with you. So when your business or your clients’ businesses grows, it can easily onboard more employees, offer more courses, or deal with more members.
Nick Butler
Nick Butler is the founder of LearnRight, a whitelabel learning management system. He’s partial to a good whiskey (Irish, of course), a meat-filled BBQ, and a good hot tub session, not necessarily in that order.
