Nine Ways Learning Portals Improve SaaS Providers’ Bottom Line

SaaS VPs and line of business leaders are increasingly making strategic investments in learning portals, though the companies may not even have training departments. In fact, they sometimes start here, bypassing traditional training technologies and organizations completely. Why would they do this? Two very important reasons: one, learning portals are a strong fit with the SaaS ethos and business model, and two, they make good fiscal sense and offer multi-faceted returns.

Of course deriving value from a learning portal depends greatly upon its design and implementation, which can run the gamut from miraculous to money pit. For the sake of argument, let’s assume we’re referring to a solid and thoughtfully designed portal that has been successfully launched to a company’s client base. Given that, here are nine ways a learning portal can improve the bottom line:

1. Shrinking margins to grow revenue is not a sustainable business model: as customer base, customer size, and deal size expand, so does customer need and the subsequent demand on services teams. In response, SaaS companies must both operationalize and offload services or find themselves scrambling to maintain customer satisfaction, which often equates to throwing people at problems and eating the costs.
   
   Learning portals can minimize the need for under-priced or comped services, thus maintaining margins in the face of high growth and revenue spikes; by providing both structure and self help, they offer a resource to help services teams as well as customers be more successful.
   



2. Scaling the organization does not equal growing the organization: Scaling the organization means replicating your success exponentially; growing it just means making it bigger.
   
   Learning portals allow you to scale: providing the same (or better) level of service with the same (or fewer) number of people. The majority of what people need to know to be successful emerges on the job and in the moment, not in the classroom. Portals provide always on access to valuable content and training without the sunk costs required to administer courses and staff an at-the-ready bevy of trainers.
   



3. SaaS is not always as easy as it looks: SaaS apps may be fast to deploy, but they’re not always fast to take hold. Best of breed point solutions sometimes favor features over form, resulting in applications that are robust but not necessarily easy to use or optimize.
   
   Learning portals help drive adoption by getting people over the learning curve and into the value-added functionality. Improved adoption results in improved subscription renewals and upsell opportunities.
   



4. Knowledge needs to be as current as the app, and keeping up is costly. When you have a quarterly release schedule (or even more frequent), it’s tough to keep training and content current.
   
   Learning portals simplify content development and maintenance by tapping into a much broader base of potential content authors (the users themselves) along with providing flexible tools for an approval process, as well as for identifying content that needs refreshing.
   



5. Technology training isn’t enough: customers often need industry insight and best practices support as well.
   
   Learning portals offer a venue for showcasing thought leadership in the form of insights, best practices, and emergent ideas. Thought leadership leads to leads, and loyalty, and long term revenue.
   



6. The best experts and evangelists are not internal: clients want to hear from others who look like them and who have solved similar problems as theirs.
   
   Learning portals let people access testimonials and support from their peers. Content sharing and discussion forums allow clients to connect with people and tap into insights beyond your organization or theirs.
   
   
   
7. Innovation needs an outlet: Preferably one that captures both institutional knowledge and emergent ideas and makes them searchable and measurable.
   
   Learning portals are gold mines for innovation: discrete, tracked, and tagged content and input from across your client base that can be sorted, aggregated, rated, and reviewed.
   
   
   
8. Technology revenue offers more consistent margins than services revenue. Fully-burdened staff with bumpy utilization rates subject to the caprices of demand (and delayed revenue recognition) can wreck havoc with a profit and loss statement.
   
   Learning portals offer stable tech costs, predictable tech income, and allow for a streamlined training services org allowing for improved forecasting.
   



9. Annuity-based revenue is nothing to sneeze at: regular and reliable income streams, especially if training had not previously been monetized (or well-monetized) converts training from a cost of business to a line of business.
   
   Learning portals can be monetized as a subscription offering that is both ratable and an easy-to-sell incremental cost to a SaaS subscription.

~ posted by Beth Chmielowski on 6 Jul 10
   tagged as: business of learning, learning portal, SaaS, SaaS Training

 

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