All-in-One LMS: Fact or Fiction?

Learning is at the center of every great organization. Proper training and employee development are essential for employee success and satisfaction and to retain top talent.

Learning is also important for your partners and customers to help them get the most out of your product or service. This is why 57 percent of learning and development (L&D) professionals say they spend more time with online learning than they did three years ago. Learning is a growth engine, empowering teams and propelling businesses forward.

But investing in learning software for every team and use case can be expensive and complicated. So is it possible to find one learning platform to suit all your teams? This is where an all-in-one learning management system (LMS) can be beneficial.

This article will outline the components of an all-in-one learning platform, debunk common misconceptions about all-in-one learning solutions, and share how the right LMS can help your employees, customers, and organization thrive.

What does “all-in-one” mean in an LMS?

An all-in-one LMS empowers you to create scalable training content that can be used both for internal team members and customers and partners. In addition, you can share learning content with employees, customers, and partners from one platform to create a collaborative learning environment that works with your entire tech stack.

An all-in-one learning management system is optimized for:

• Learning and development
• Employee onboarding
• Compliance training
• Sales enablement
• Support training
• Compliance training
• Customer education
• Partner training

Because this solution allows you to create and manage learning content for various teams, it must be able to support the other tools and software that help your teams to do their jobs. For example, an LMS can’t replace your sales team’s CRM, but it should be able to integrate with your sales team’s tools. 

When doing your research, make sure to learn about LMS features and integrations to make sure the platform works with the applications and tools your team members need.

Common misconceptions about all-in-one learning platforms

Because the phrase “all-in-one” can mean different things to different people, there are some misconceptions surrounding the idea of an all-in-one LMS.

Myth #1: All-in-one doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all

If you’re new to using an LMS, you may be apprehensive about using one because you fear it will be difficult for your team to adopt. In addition, you may wonder if all-in-one means one-size-fits-all for admins?

These concerns are valid; building a training program on a new system may seem complicated, but many all-in-one platforms have the resources to help create a fantastic user experience.

Done correctly, an all-in-one LMS can be used across departments and for many different use cases. For example, the Learning Cloud from WorkRamp is purpose-built. We build the best LMS for each of our audiences: L&D professionals, customer education, and sales enablement. 

For our sales audience, we offer features specifically for your sales program, like Challenges that you can refer back to during and after training.  

Challenges allow you to choose a type of certification–live, recorded, or written. You can assign Challenges to reps and their managers. In addition, you can include customer scorecards that can help you measure performance across team members to evaluate the effectiveness of your training. 

With WorkRamp, you can create customized learning content for your team’s specific needs vs. a one-size-fits-all training module. This functionality lets you create more effective training materials.

WorkRamp’s content authoring tool has drag-and-drop functionality that allows editors to customize courses quickly. So when the team at GRIN needed to revamp its sales onboarding process, it used this feature to create training guides with multiple learning objects, knowledge checks, and question types. WorkRamp also offers a content marketplace with pre-built, templated course material.

We also provide on-demand assistance in case you need help building your programs; we offer a dedicated Slack channel to every customer. The GRIN team says the custom Slack channel is a huge help.

“I like the fact that I can reach out to anyone on the WorkRamp team through Slack; it’s an easy way to communicate since emails often get lost.” 

 

-Angela Walker, Senior Manager of RevOps, Enablement, GRIN.

#2: All-in-one learning platforms don’t work across different learning styles

Because adapting to a new platform and process can be a challenge, some people worry that an all-in-one LMS may be difficult to adopt for team members with different learning styles. But this isn’t usually the case. You can create course content for various learning styles with the best LMS options. 

WorkRamp’s tools are designed to keep people engaged in their learning—leading to quicker customer, employee, and partner outcomes. In addition, training comes with options for gamification, assessments, and certifications.

We understand that not everyone learns in the same way, and we have created a learning ecosystem that can be used across learning styles and types. We offer something for everyone, including a mobile app for on-the-go use and options to allow learning in the flow of learning.

The team at MikMak used WorkRamp to remodel its employee onboarding and training experiences. Sabena Carim, Director of Effectiveness and Enablement, said the team enjoyed building the online courses. “Employees were excited to use WorkRamp,” Carim said. “Everything is self-serve, which made it easier for people to fit the training into their schedule, and they were able to get up and running with the platform quickly.”

#3: An all-in-one LMS is just one more tool to add to the long list of apps and resources

An all-in-one learning platform helps you create and deploy engaging online training for learners, but it’s not like the other tools you have in your arsenal. An all-in-one LMS can amplify your tools and applications, creating a more powerful, effective, and robust tech stack for your team. 

A learning platform like WorkRamp can integrate with sales applications like Salesforce, Gong, and Zendesk, as well as HR tools like BambooHR or Workday and content management tools like Guru and Box. When your LMS can integrate with the tools you already use, it can help you create learning and training content and use the analytics features of these tools to measure the ROI. For this reason, an all-in-one LMS isn’t something you add to your toolset, it’s a platform that enhances and amplifies your existing tech stack.

It’s essential to find a learning platform that works with these resources. WorkRamp integrates with the ones we just mentioned and many more.

Benefits of an all-in-one LMS

The most common misconceptions about all-in-one learning platforms come from a lack of knowledge about their benefits. The right LMS will allow you to create consistent, centralized training material that will help you manage your teams’ learning needs.

Use an all-in-one LMS to reduce, reuse, and recycle

An accessible location for learning and training materials is essential in a world trending toward remote and hybrid work. An all-in-one LMS can ease the burden associated with the upkeep and management of multiple, disparate learning technologies. 

Reduce time and costs by providing learners with access to resources when and where they need them. You may have global customers and partners even if your organization isn’t locationally distributed. Knowing where to find information streamlines workflows both internally and externally.

For example, cloud communication provider 8×8 uses WorkRamp to support its growing internal and external enablement initiatives. “A unified learning management system is the future of enablement,” Patrick Russell, Director of Product Marketing, said. “With a consolidated training platform like WorkRamp, we can train anyone, any time, anywhere–knowing that the content is there and ready to be deployed into a training module in seconds.”

Consistent training, messaging, and branding for employees and customers

An all-in-one learning platform standardizes your training along with your brand narrative. So everyone gets the same experience, regardless of what or where they’re learning or their job title.

When Quantum Metric was building an educational platform for over 1,800 customers and partners, it used WorkRamp to ensure this consistency: “[It’s] critical for our business because we’re establishing a shared understanding of our product among all of our internal and external learners,” Director of Enablement Chauncy Cay Ford said. “We’re all talking about our product the same way internally and externally, which allows us to better evangelize our product and company vision with our customers.”

If you have learners who require different workflows, an all-in-one LMS allows you to create additional learning paths based on someone’s role. People in a particular role, like employees being onboarded at a given time, will have consistent training experiences. The ease with which you can assign learners these high-quality training experiences makes it easy to scale your program.

Prove the ROI of learning

An all-in-one learning experience eliminates the confusion of using multiple platforms for different teams. When you can consolidate your learning tools and integrations, your team can focus on a single platform for learning and development. An all-in-one LMS provides quantifiable benefits of learning at a personal, team, and organizational level.

The value and emphasis on learning is more imperative now than ever. Some 59 percent of Human Resource leaders say that building critical employee skills and competencies is a top priority for 2022, and 87 percent of HR leaders say their employee learning and development program will be critical to retaining talent in 2022. 

Learn More: 7 Learning and Development Statistics You Should Know

But beyond employee retention and engagement, learning and development can empower your sales team to meet revenue goals and help you turn partners and customers into brand advocates.

“We use WorkRamp not only to onboard our new hires but to also train our tenured AEs. We’ve really leaned into continuous learning capabilities of WorkRamp to double our revenue YOY and increase the average deal size by 15 percent.”

 

-Mark Riley, Senior Sales Enablement Manager at Handshake

Centralize your LMS and CMS

A sales content management system (CMS) helps your enablement team organize sales content assets to make them easily accessible for training. Reps can also access a CMS to use appropriate sales enablement content to help them answer questions and support prospects at various stages of the buying journey.

Many organizations have separate tools for their LMS or CMS or use Google Drive or an internal wiki to organize sales content.

With an all-in-one LMS like the Learning Cloud, you don’t need to manage disparate systems or vendors. WorkRamp CMS is a unified LMS + CMS for all your revenue enablement and learning content.

With a unified system, employees, reps, and admins always know where to go for the most up-to-date training. This improves efficiency and reduces complexity, empowering your team to close more deals, improve performance, and drive more revenue.

Where can you find an all-in-one LMS?

WorkRamp prides itself on being an All-in-One Learning Platform, offering dynamic learning experiences for employees, customers, and partners on a single platform.

Interested in learning how your teams can leverage an all-in-one solution? Contact us to schedule a free demo.