3 Reasons to Integrate Your LMS & CRM

Customer training rarely exists in a vacuum. If you want to engage the right customers at the right time, you likely need support from different teams, which need access to the same data set. How can you make this process as easy and painless as possible?  In this blog post, we’ll walk you through three ways customer training teams can address this issue by integrating their LMS with their CRM.‍

1. Recognizing your revenue

‍Does your team charge for training? If so, you may need to coordinate with your Finance team and other external partners. This can be an inefficient process, if not managed effectively.You shouldn’t have to dig to demonstrate the ROI of your training program. With an LMS-Salesforce integration in place, you can find the data you need - without switching between disparate tools and technologies.To give one example, a Salesforce-LMS integration makes it easy for external partners to check when and how your team provisions access to training. This is crucial because the sooner you can provision access codes, the sooner you can complete the annual recurring revenue (ARR) cycle. On a similar note, your Customer Success team can quickly tell which accounts have registrations that go unused, and then make a proactive effort to reach out.

‍2. Centralizing your data

‍Traditionally, learning management systems have been separate from other business systems. So while training teams can review metrics, such as registration and completion rates, there is little visibility into how their work impacts the organization as a whole. This is a huge problem, given how often they collaborate with other customer-facing teams.If your Sales or Customer Success team wants to know who has taken training, they should not need to wait for you to pull a report for them. These teams rely on your customer relationship management (CRM) software as their primary point of record. Wouldn’t it be convenient if this information could be found there?  With an LMS-Salesforce integration in place, you can automatically export training data into Salesforce. Different stakeholders throughout the company can then pull reports to see who has completed courses - directly in Salesforce. This allows you to increase organizational efficiency and dissolve information bottlenecks.

‍3. Marketing your training

‍No customer training program is complete without a strategic marketing plan. Think about it this way: your customers don’t know what they don’t know. In order to drive a high number of registrations and completions, you need to make an active effort to promote your content.Of course, this can be time-consuming. So rather than relying on word of mouth alone, some teams are utilizing a combination of marketing automation and other tools to streamline the communication process.To increase student urgency, you can create drip campaigns by combining the power of an Salesforce-LMS integration with your marketing automation system. For example, when someone registers for a course, they might receive a welcome email. After one week of inactivity, they would then receive a reminder email. And a few weeks after that, they would receive another notification about the status of their coursework.