PODCAST - how to choose best lms in 2026
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Now, let's dive in.
There is more technology out there than ever before. Clients have been coming to me for years because they're overwhelmed by how much e-learning technology there is out there. What LMS should I use if I select that wrong? LMS? What's gonna happen? Why are some LMSs hundreds of dollars per month while others are tens of thousands per month?
Why do some organizations spend millions of dollars per year while others only spend. [00:02:00] Three or four or 5,000 per year. Well, today on the show I'm gonna share with you how to select the best LMS or E-learning technology for you and your organization in 2026. I have a simple three step process that I take.
My enterprise learning accelerator partnership, clients like CoStar Group s and p 500 data analytics software company in the commercial real estate space to ensure that you and your organization aren't overspending and that you are getting as much ROI or return on investment, your time integrating, implementing the system into your organization and your money, what you're actually spending on the platform.
By integrating these three steps, you could save five to 200 x on your e-learning technology, your LMS investment. What I find is that you and I can fall into the trap of looking [00:03:00] at features. What am I getting out of this system? What am I getting out of this product when we are making purchase decisions?
Really what we need to do is take a step back and step one, we need to define what ROI means to you. What are you going to use this system for? What are your e-learning programs, your online courses, your learning experiences being built for? We need to establish this well before selecting the best.
E-learning platform for you, the best, LMS for you. Now, there are three pillars of e-learning, technology, content and distribution, and I talk about these three pillars and how you can stop wasting your time and energy, building the wrong e-learning programs so you can actually get a return on investment.
On what you currently have and what you are going to build in the future. In my free masterclass, I highly [00:04:00] recommend that you sign up for my free masterclass linked in the description below. In order to define what ROI means to you, I wanna share with you what ROI could mean to you. And your organization.
When we look at an e-learning program, an online course, a training program, learning experience, whatever you wanna call it, when we look at how you are serving your organization, you can really implement a program in two different ways. You can either implement it internally or externally. When we look at internally, we are talking.
About serving your teams, serving your employees, and when we're looking at externally, what are we doing serving? Your customers. Now, you can do both of these things with your e-learning program, and I highly recommend that you do both of these things because by [00:05:00] integrating an internal and an externally facing E-learning program into your organization, I talk about this even deeper in my free masterclass.
You are giving yourself more opportunities for a return on your investment. So how can we integrate both of these things internally and externally into our organizations? Well, when we're looking internally, what this means is that we are. Looking at increasing the effectiveness of our teams, of our employees.
Effectiveness means doing the right things. What we wanna do is we wanna create a program that empowers your team members to know what the right things are and to do them. Then what we want to do is increase their efficiency. Which means. [00:06:00] Doing things right when you combine these things, when we take doing the right things in our business and empowering our teams to know what they are and to do them properly.
We are able to create a return on our investment in e-learning in the LMS that you are creating. Now, it's important to know what the primary focus of your e-learning program is in order to select the right LMS. Because if you are looking to serve your team members, and this is really your number one goal, then there are specific technologies that are going to empower your team.
To become more effective and more efficient. On the other side of things, there are different technologies, different technologies than the internal technologies. When we look at serving your customers and when we're looking at serving your customers, we can really do that in [00:07:00] two different ways. The first one is selling.
Your knowledge, selling your programs as a product, as an educational product, as a system, you are selling a system that you are packaging up and selling to your learners that they can use to implement into their businesses and or their lives. So that's the first way we can serve our customers. We can also serve them by educating them.
Now we're educating in both ways. I get this, you're selling education and then once they buy your product, then they're gonna be educated. But what I mean by educating is we can educate our customers on our products, on our services so they can get more value out of them. One of my clients, s and p 500 company, CoStar Group, their core product is a data analytics software for the commercial.
Real estate space. They basically sell access to their software to [00:08:00] empower commercial real estate professionals across industries worldwide to create value in the commercial real estate space. What we have done together is create certifications that we sell to our customers and. With these certifications, we are educating our customers on how to use, how to get the most value out of our core product out of CoStar's core product.
Well, by doing this, you're not only creating a new revenue stream by selling the course and getting paid for it or selling a certification, getting paid for it, you're also increasing adoption. And retention on your core product? What is retention? What is adoption? What is retention? Well, adoption is you get more people using your product.
So you're not only selling courses, you're educating people on how to use your product. So then more people [00:09:00] will use your product. Well, when people know how to get the most value out of your product, then they tend. To retain a customer of that product, they're a customer of yours for longer. So when you are looking at selecting the right LMS for you and your organization, you need to decide, are you starting from an internal value creation strategy or an external value creation strategy?
Or now that I've shared both of these, maybe you're thinking, Johnny, I wanna do both of these things. Great. We still need to decide what the primary focus is here, and when we decide the primary focus, this empowers us to select, are we going to start with a more externally focused LMS or are we gonna start with a more internally focused LMS?
Now that we've defined what ROI means to you and your organization, we need to make sure that it is aligned with the ROI that our learners. [00:10:00] Need that our learners want. So step two is define what ROI means to your learners. What we're really doing here is if you have these business goals, these goals for your program, for internally serving your employees or externally serving your customers, now we need to figure out how do we create value for our learners in either of these boats.
Let's say that we're focusing internally. If our goal is to internally increase the effectiveness and the efficiency of our employees, then what we need to do is figure out what our learners want. What do they want, what incentivizes them to actually want to increase their effectiveness and efficiency?
Maybe they want less stress dress that. Is something that you can really create value in your organizations. These days. People are so stressed out. So if you can create a [00:11:00] program that is going to make people more effective and efficient at their job and in turn decrease their stress, guess what? Your employees, your team members are gonna take that program.
Maybe you create a program that gives your teams the opportunity to increase their pay. Now I have incentive. To complete this program, if you want your team to become more effective and more efficient at their job, there needs to be something in it for them. And it's not necessarily learning the skill.
It is the outcome that they get by learning the skill. So decreased stress, increased money, maybe it's increase. Time off. So if they're more efficient, effective at their job, then they may not have to work as much. Maybe it's less hours. So another way of saying this is let's decrease. The hours worked, or this could be looked at as [00:12:00] not even decreasing overall hours, but maybe you decrease the hours of your employee's least favorite tasks by just getting rid of.
Tasks that your employees don't like By making them more efficient and effective at it, and they're spending less hours there, then they can spend more hours doing things that they like more, most likely creating more value for your organization. Now, let's look at this externally. So this is customers, remember, so this is employees or team members.
This is customers. When we're looking at customers, this is where, when someone makes the purchase decision to buy something from you, what is in it for them? If they buy from us, are we going to have our program decrease their stress? Great. That is a result that people will pay for. Will it increase their income?
That is a result that people will pay [00:13:00] for? Will it increase their time? Give them more time. Time is exponentially more valuable than money, so if you can sell them something, sell your customer something to produce more time in their life. That is valuable to them. So this is step two. Our goal is to align what our vision for ROI at our organization is with what the vision for our learners, ROI, by investing their time and their money potentially into the programs that we are creating for them.
And that brings us to step three. Without doing step one and two, you can't. Complete step three, which is an 80 20 analysis on your business, the needs that your business has for an LMS, for an e-learning platform. So how do we do this? Well, we take the ROI that you came up with [00:14:00] for yourself, for you in step one and.
We take the ROI for your learners that you came up with in step two. And we figure out where it overlaps. Wherever it overlaps is where we need to conduct our 80 20 analysis in order to select the best, in order to select the best LMS for you in your organization. When we find an overlap, and maybe it's a much bigger overlap than what we have here, but even if.
This is the only overlap that you have. This is where you get exponential results. Let's look at the 80 20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle. The 80 20 rule states that 80% of [00:15:00] results are achieved from 20%. Of efforts and vice versa, 20% of results are achieved or created by 80% of efforts. So this is why in step one, we define what your organization looks at as ROI.
And in step two, we looked at what your learners look at as ROI. Because there's a lot of things we can do and there's a lot of different platforms you can invest in. But by focusing on the platform that best serves your ROI needs and your learner's ROI needs, this is how we create exponential value in your business because we're gonna focus on the 20% that creates 80%.
Or I like to take my clients one step further. What is 80% of 80%? 64% and what's 20% or 20%? 4%. What does [00:16:00] this mean? This means that 4% of efforts create 64% of results and vice versa. 64% of efforts create 4% of results. So the more specific we can get. With what the value we need out of our e-learning programs, the better the results, our results become exponentially better.
So what I want you to do is now ask yourself, what do you actually need to achieve the ROI for you and the ROI for your learners? What is that? What is the simplest version of that? And that is how you select the best LMS for you in your organization. And I have a tool for you to take what we just did, and in a matter of seconds, you're going to be paired with the best high value LMS for you in your organization, and you are going to save five to [00:17:00] 200 x.
Because you went through these three steps and now you're gonna check out my e-learning platform finder linked in the description below. If you're watching this on YouTube, it's also in the show notes. If you're listening to this as a podcast, or go to eLearning partners.com/e pf to get matched with the best fit learning management system for you and your organization in a matter of seconds, avoid.
Spending the million dollars a year that I see organizations do all the time and instead say five. To 200 x. Just because the platform is the most expensive doesn't mean that it's the best. The first computer that was commercially available for you and I to buy what came out in the 1950s and it was priced at $1 million in today's dollars, that is $12 million.
Well, last time I checked that computer couldn't even barely fit in a room. [00:18:00] And our computers that are much more, exponentially more powerful fit in our pocket, and it's also exponentially cheaper. It's the same thing here. When you figure out the ROI that you need and your learners need, you do an 80 20 analysis and you check out my e-learning platform finder, you'll be saving your organization multi six figures, if not seven figures per year on your e-learning LMS investment.
I'll see ya in the next episode.
Thanks for tuning in to Learning Transformed Now, if you're designing a transformational learning experience and wanna skip the overwhelm of trial and error. Check out our e-learning platform finder. Just answer a few simple questions and we'll match you with the right platform plus an extended free trial.
And as a bonus, you'll get free access to a course that walks you through building your learning [00:19:00] experience on your matched platform. Click on the link in the show notes or go to www.elearningpartners.com/elearning-platform-finder. I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or drop a comment on our YouTube channel.
Thanks for listening and I'll catch you in the next episode.
AI is rising and so are.
