SaaS LMS: How to Choose + Key Features For Employee Training

Globally, the SaaS market is expected to grow annually at a rate of 7.33%, meaning that by 2028, the global SaaS market is expected to hit $374 billion USD. Additionally, research shows that by 2026, 39% of business apps will be SaaS-based at even the most traditional companies. At companies embracing technology that number shoots up to 99%. 

As the demand for SaaS solutions increases, so does the need for a talented and knowledgeable workforce to help build products and services that successfully solve customers’ problems.

That’s why it is now more critical than ever to invest in a SaaS learning management system (LMS) that offers education and training opportunities to your employees and customers. A SaaS LMS is an important L&D investment that can drive business growth, enable professional employee development, and equip your workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their roles.

What is an LMS?

LMS is software that enables the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational courses and training programs. It helps organize and deliver learning content to employees and includes features to track progress, assess performance, and facilitate collaboration. 

What is a SaaS LMS?

A SaaS LMS is a cloud-based learning platform where the service provider hosts the application and lets users access it online via a subscription. This eliminates the need for organizations to install and run applications on their own devices or data centers. This reduces the cost of hardware acquisition, provisioning, maintenance, installation, and support. 360Learning is an example of a SaaS LMS.

3 reasons to use an LMS for your SaaS business

A well-chosen SaaS-based LMS makes company-wide learning more accessible and is an essential tool to scale your organization’s internal and external training, as well as upskilling programs. It also plays a key role in customer education and onboarding.

1. A scalable LMS grows with your company

The employee onboarding process should be designed to set your new hires up for success. But it’s one thing to successfully onboard one or two new hires at a time, and another to onboard 30 new people on the same day. A scalable SaaS LMS can continue to meet your organization’s increasing employee needs, as it grows from the startup phase to enterprise. 

Compared to live in-person training, online learning programs have no limit to the number of times you can reuse and refresh each training course. They can also be distributed to exponentially more learners simultaneously, and more content can be added whenever needed, without any downtime.  

Many LMS solutions also automate the initial onboarding process and manual tasks like reproducing training plans for new hires, saving significant resources for HR and L&D departments. 

2. An LMS upskills and builds a future-ready workforce

Upskilling employees with a SaaS-based LMS is one of the best ways to equip them with new skills to help them become more competent in their roles.

With an LMS, you can create personalized learning paths to equip every employee with new relevant skills. Some of the most in-demand skills in the SaaS industry are: communication and teamwork capabilities, compliance skills, and security and data management. Conduct a training needs analysis to identify whether your employees lack any of these skills, and then design customized training programs to close skills gaps based on the goals and needs of each learner.

3. Customer training reduces time to value and increases product adoption 

Before your new customers become regular active users, they need specific training to understand and learn how your SaaS product provides consistent value. This process usually takes longer for more complex products that require a high-touch onboarding model (e.g. several calls and in-depth 1:1 training with a customer success manager). In fact, 33% of SaaS companies with high-touch onboarding models had an average onboarding period of at least one month. 

An LMS can help reduce this customer time to value (TTV) and increase product adoption rates by educating them on how to use your product, its major benefits, and providing them with specific resources and support. You can also help existing customers get more from your product with ongoing customer training, increasing the likelihood of clients renewing their SaaS subscription period.

You can set up your LMS to integrate product education into the onboarding experience. This can include:

• An online academy with gamification or microlearning courses to break down technical aspects and encourage completion
• Personalized learning paths to create a training process that fits each customer’s unique needs
• Blended learning opportunities to support different learning styles

This kind of personalized, self-directed learning helps build a robust user experience that promotes customer loyalty and engagement.

Free resource: Download our handy checklist for new client onboarding

Key features of an effective SaaS LMS

Built-in authoring tool makes content development quick and easier

As your SaaS company grows, you’ll need to keep up with a growing demand for more training materials. In addition to internal training, this includes supporting your customers’ educational needs. A comprehensive, built-in authoring tool enables your team to easily create courses with various content options and assessment types to meet different learning needs and goals. 

Without an authoring tool, creating engaging online learning content with diverse media formats can often require coding skills or an in-house developer. But with an LMS-powered authoring tool, you don’t need to manually create dynamic courses or training content. Instead, course creators can simply drag and drop components to make a course from scratch. You can make changes and publish new content far more easily and quickly, compared to manually updating course material every time.

An authoring tool can either be stand-alone or built into your LMS. With a stand-alone tool, you must create content in the authoring tool and then export it to your LMS. On the other hand, built-in authoring tools are integrated directly into your LMS, so you can create new courses without ever leaving the platform. With the latter, you don’t have to worry about compatibility issues when exporting content.

An LMS with built-in authoring capabilities makes course iteration easier and allows you to offer alternative learning methods for increased accessibility and variety. Users can add images, text, videos, and interactive elements to create engaging and dynamic training material. For example, you can create:

• In-app tutorials to walk new customers through the onboarding process
• Video tutorials to highlight product updates
• Micro-courses and gamification to keep employees engaged

Co-authoring tools for collaborative learning 

SaaS companies often need to work cross-functionally with many different departments (e.g., sales, product, customer success, etc.), so having a centralized system to create, iterate, and deliver training is key. Co-authoring tools democratize the learning process by enabling all employees to build and share online courses and leave feedback. This helps organizations foster a culture of peer learning and collaboration among teams. 

With a co-authoring tool, multiple users across different teams can collaborate simultaneously on course creation within the LMS. For example, with 360Learning’s built-in co-authoring tool, authors can view course progress and evolution in real time, add comments, make changes, implement revisions, and seamlessly review and edit their peers’ contributions. These capabilities help build a flexible learning culture, where peers receive valuable feedback from each other to identify areas for improvement and share expertise that expands their learning environment.

Relevance scores to keep SaaS training up to date

According to a 2023 Forbes article, 59% of employees claimed they had received no training. But to stay competitive, SaaS companies cannot afford to ignore skills gaps. The industry moves quickly and companies frequently have new product releases and updates–which all require the latest knowledge and skills to achieve. So it’s important to ensure that your training content is always up-to-date and relevant for employees, customers, and partners. That’s significantly easier to do when you have an LMS that automates processes to track and update training materials.

A crowdsourced relevance score uses learner feedback to assess whether your course content is up-to-date and relevant. This metric gives you deeper insights into what and how to customize learning content that helps employees and customers meet their current training goals and needs.

SaaS training platform to fill employees’ skills gaps

Traditional annual or biannual training needs analysis is no match for the rapidly growing and expanding SaaS industry. By the time you’ve completed a manual analysis, your employees could have a whole new set of unmet learning needs. An LMS’ built-in learning needs tool saves time with automation and keeps your L&D team aware of new training needs in real-time throughout the year. It puts learners in the driver’s seat by allowing them to quickly and easily declare their training needs–turning this into a proactive, rather than reactive, process.

An automated learning needs tool enables you to get continual input from your learners about which areas they need the most help in–and how you can address these learning needs. This helps companies identify internal subject-matter experts and upskill employees more effectively, with less effort. 

With 360Learning, a learner can proactively declare a learning need as it emerges, and share it directly on the platform at any time. No need to wait until company leadership identifies a skills gap to conduct a formal training needs assessment.

For example, let’s say a developer wants to learn a new programming language to complete a project they’re working on. They can share this goal with teammates on their learning platform, who can upvote the learning request if they also want to learn that skill or see value in it. Internal subject-matter experts on this topic can respond directly and create relevant training content, without having to jump through administrative hoops. This also creates a collaborative learning culture in which teammates learn from their peers, and subject-matter experts within your company share their skills and transform their individual knowledge into institutional knowledge.

Choosing the right SaaS LMS for your business

When assessing a SaaS LMS for your organization, it’s crucial to consider the overall user experience. How intuitive is the platform? Does it offer a clean and easy-to-use interface? Does it integrate with your existing tech stack?

These are some areas to consider. To help with your search, check out our list of 16 best learning management system examples for 2024.

Key criteria for evaluation

Focus on the platform’s core capabilities. Aside from basic functionality, does it deliver engaging, interactive learning experiences that keep users involved? How well does it scale to accommodate your organization’s growth? Consider its customer support. Is help readily available when you face issues? Lastly, assess the cost-effectiveness of the training solution to calculate potential return on investment. 

SaaS LMS integrations and support

A robust SaaS LMS should offer seamless integrations with your existing systems. These may include HR, payroll, CRM, IT, etc. A seamless integration ensures a smooth flow of data across platforms and enhances efficiency. 360Learning’s integration hub has 50+ partners to help transform fragmented processes into automated workflows. 

How to choose the best LMS for SaaS startups

As a SaaS startup, the focus should be on finding a SaaS-based LMS that is scalable, cost-effective, and intuitive. Scalability is crucial as these organizations seek to grow quickly. Cost effectiveness is key when designing an L&D budget that will last through early stage growth.

Successful LMS implementation in SaaS companies

Implementing a LMS in SaaS companies smoothly depends on several key processes. Here are a few examples of how we have made this a reality for a diverse range of SaaS organizations.

1. MangoPay: This payment solution provider created a culture of collaborative learning with 360 Learning. They successfully onboarded 450 employees at speed, enabling them to continually upskill at their own pace.
2. Aircall: This cloud-based call center SaaS provider leveraged our platform’s efficiency to the fullest, onboarding 40 new hires within a month. This becomes more impressive when you realize they only had a single full-time L &D manager.

1. Yousign: This e-signature SaaS company revamped its sales efforts at an impressive scale, training over 200 employees using 360Learning. After one year, an impressive 82% of new sales reps met their targets during the critical ramp up time.
2. Connectwise: This software company looks to help its clients succeed. However, that often means their help-desk technicians need to train frequently. After working with 360Learning, the organization reduced the time needed to build, ship, and update modules from 1-2 months to 1-2 weeks. Additionally, Connectwise boosted user adoption of the LMS by reducing the average length of their employee training module from 30 minutes to 12 minutes. That’s microlearning in action. 

Lessons learned and best practices

Here are key lessons and best practices from the above case studies for implementing a SaaS LMS successfully.

• Promote a culture of learning: Encourage employees to own their learning journey. This helps foster a culture of continuous learning and development.
• Leverage collaboration: Use collaborative features of the SaaS-based LMS to facilitate knowledge-sharing and peer learning.
• Keep your content up-to-date: Frequently update training content to ensure it stays relevant and valuable.
• Scale with your business: Choose a scalable LMS that grows with your organization and accommodates increasing numbers of learners.
• Focus on user experience: An intuitive, user-friendly SaaS LMS can enhance learner engagement and improve training outcomes. 

The right LMS sets you on the path for continued success

Choosing the right SaaS-based LMS significantly impacts the effectiveness of your training programs. By considering your specific needs you can find a solution that not only delivers engaging training, but contributes directly to business success. The best LMS for your business is one that aligns with your training objectives, integrates with your existing systems, and adapts easily to organizational changes.   

If you’re looking for a powerful SaaS LMS powered by collaborative learning, find out how 360Learning fits the bill with a personalized demo today.