Udemy for Business

How to Sell Learning to the C-Suite

August 29| 10:00am PST

Speakers

Paula SpearsSenior Director of Global

Talent Management & Employee Development

Cylance

Brent BoeckmanCEO and Founder

Rising Strengths Consultingformerly Head of L&D at

Malwarebytes

Shelley OsborneHead of L&D

Udemy

Agenda

1 5-step process to get key stakeholders on board

2 Case example: Malwarebytes

3 Case example: Cylance

4 Q&A

5-step process to get key stakeholders on board

Challenge: proving the value of learning

• Traditionally challenging to show ROI of learning in ways C-Suite understands

• How can L&D pros drive this statistic up and get more business leaders on board with learning?

Sales

Only 33% of business leaders think the L&D function

impacts business outcomes

Source: CEB

33%

5-step process to get key stakeholders on board

1 Act like a consultancy: Your employees’ ROI is your ROI

2 Get crystal clear on your company’s decision-making process

3 Assemble your dream team

4 Speak in numbers – build your business case

5 Pick good use cases and easy wins

• Don’t start with your bells & whistles, start with their concerns

• Understand the needs of the team or company

• Be reactive rather than prescriptive

Act like a consultancy: your employees ROI is your ROISTEP

1

Act like a consultancy: your employees ROI is your ROISTEP

1

Connect your training to your employees’ ROI

• Sales team: If goal is to increase sales deals by X%, that’s your ROI

• Customer service team: Soft skills training ROI is to increase customer service satisfaction scores

• Software development team: Tech training ROI is to increase time to productivity of new hires and bring products to market faster

Get crystal clear on your decision-making process

• Understand how major decisions are made at your company

• Align on priorities across departments

• Know where your budget is coming from

• Create a working timeline

STEP

2

Assemble your dream team

• Be a door-to-door salesperson

• Identify an active sponsor

• Find out who’s on your side

• Align priorities across finance, legal, HR and IT departments

• Integrate L&D with all facets of your business

STEP

3

Speak in numbers: Build your business caseSTEP

4

Speak in a language that resonates with execs• Start the conversation

with metrics• Weave numbers into a

bigger story• Be concise and give

context

Do your groundwork• Talk to referrals• Benchmark• Gain access to key data• Create metrics where

you don’t have them

Speak in numbers: Build your business caseSTEP

4

Put your numbers together

• Impact on the business: lost revenue, excess costs, lost productivity

• Budget, resources, timeframe

• Alternative cost scenarios

• Expected outcomes: improved revenue and efficiency

• Alignment with business goals: profit generation, business growth, revenue increase, operational efficiencies, risk mitigation

Pick good use cases and easy wins

• Consider the point of need and time

• Pick the right pilot audience

• Be agile

• Manage realistic expectations

o Case example: Udemy Feedback is Fuel program

STEP

5

Case example: Malwarebytes

• Make it about the individual department

• Your managers ROI is your ROI

• Don’t have separate goals, adopt the team’s goals

• If team goal is to increase sales deals by 10%, that was my ROI

• Get to know the different processes of each department

STEPS

1-2 Act like a consultancy & understand your decision-making process

Assemble your dream team

Be a door-to-door salesperson:

• Sell vision of what is possible: share course collection—what would your team take?

• Questions to ask: What does training mean to you? How do you envision developing your people?

• I spent 5-6 months talking to managers, leaders, and execs about their issues and goals

STEP

3

Assemble your dream team

Use a change management process

• Identify who’s on your team and who’s not

o Find an active sponsor to help win over C-level stakeholders

o Focus on naysayers who you need to educate more on the initiative

• Recruit learning champions at team-level

o Identify team who has an ROI objective that L&D could help achieve

STEP

3

Assemble your dream team

Integrate L&D with all facets of the business

• When rolling out Udemy for Business, success based on integrating learning into performance reviews:

o In quarterly goals, one goal related to personal development

o Allocated 20 hours per quarter for employees to invest in learning

STEP

3

STEPS

4-5 Build the business case for learning & pick a good use case

CHALLENGE

Sending the QA team to on-site Python training would incur high travel and training costs.

SOLUTION

QA team to take on-demand Python courses through Udemy for Business.

RESULTS

Entire team trained in 30 days vs. 6 month goal.

Substantial savings in travel, training, and labor costs.

Entire production calendar moved up which resulted in shipping product releases and updates ahead of schedule.

STEPS

4-5 Build the business case for learning & pick a good use case

ROI of learning for Malwarebytes

$2,340Savings per employee

11QA Engineers

$25,740Total savings

Case example: Cylance

• Identified the training needs of business leaders & managers

• Constituency needs: More just-in-learning, less classroom instruction

• Understand who the key decision makers are in the process

• Key lesson learned: align priorities early on with Finance, Legal, HR and IT departments

STEPS

1-2 Act like a consultancy & understand your decision-making process

Assemble your dream team

Identify an active sponsor and have them test it:

• Our CEO took a course on Udemy for Business and became an instant champion

Find people who are already engaged in learning:

• Asked employees taking courses on Udemy on their own to share why they loved it

STEP

3

Assemble your dream team

Align with your finance, legal, and IT departments early on:

• Biggest takeaway: Didn’t spend enough time educating them early in process

• Should have done product demo for them

• Finance looked at overall cost, not cost per person

• Legal contract language also a hold up in process (e.g. privacy, liability issues)

STEP

3

Assemble your dream team

Integrate L&D with all facets of the business:

• At Cylance, we build learning into onboarding from Day 1

• Employees sign on to Udemy for Business and start taking courses during onboarding

• Creates a stronger alliance with L&D and HR

• Demonstrates how much company cares about employee development

STEP

3

Build your business case for learning

Demonstrated cost savings to win over my CEO:

• Calculated ROI using cost per employee

• Compared cost of individual employees already reimbursing Udemy courses vs. subscription for entire company

• Graphed break even point: amount we previously spent reimbursing employees vs. annual subscription

• Showed would spend 4x less using subscription

STEP

4

Build your business case for learning

Once purchased, continued to show CEO monthly metrics:

• Adoption metrics

• New users and popular courses

• Our tagline: “We don’t care what you’re learning—just learn”

• People were learning more and it cost less

• Added benefit: people could learn without others knowing they didn’t know something

STEP

4

Pick good uses cases and easy wins

Cylance Management Essentials Program:

• Blended learning: gave them more direction & structure

• CEO & Executives co-facilitate

• 5 management competencies tied to Udemy for Business courses

• 15 online courses

• Monthly discussions on each topic

• Capstone project

• Certification at end of 6 months

STEP

5

Q&A

Paula SpearsSenior Director of Global

Talent Management & Employee Development

Cylance

Brent BoeckmanCEO and Founder

Rising Strengths Consultingformerly Head of L&D at

Malwarebytes

Shelley OsborneHead of L&D

Udemy

Thank you