New Research: Key Findings on the State of Education-Led Growth
Blog Post

5 Signs It’s Time to Replace Your LMS

Dave Sliwinski
June 13, 2025
Black illustration in Black for 5 Signs It’s Time to Replace Your LMS

Whether your go-to-market strategy is product-led, sales-led, or community-led, education is the through line. The data shows that education done right drives meaningful business impact, including revenue and retention.

And it’s not just about education customers and partners. Well-trained employees help your company reduce costs and increase revenue. When you consider that the cost to replace an employee is often 1.5x their salary (not to mention lost opportunity cost), doesn’t it make sense to invest in their growth and performance?

It’s clear: Learning isn’t just a support function—it’s a growth lever. 

But too often, learning programs are held back by the very system meant to support them. Legacy LMS platforms weren’t built for today’s demands. They struggle to deliver relevant data, lack integration with the customer ecosystem, and trap education teams in a cycle of content production and admin work.

Meanwhile, expectations have evolved. Business leaders (like you!) want proof of impact. Learners want seamless experiences. Education teams need tools that help them scale across customers, partners, and employees. The right LMS can unlock this potential. The wrong one? It keeps you stuck.

Switching isn’t just about upgrading tech. It’s about removing the roadblocks that prevent your education efforts from driving real business results. It's about automation, personalization, and integration—not more friction, silos, and reporting gaps. If your LMS can’t support the strategic role of learning in your business, then it’s not just outdated, it’s in the way.

5 Signs It’s Time to Replace Your LMS

Here are five signs that the cost of keeping your existing LMS is higher than you think:

1. Growth is stalling.

When your learning platform can’t keep up with your business, it becomes a bottleneck. Launching in new markets? Rolling out new products? Scaling onboarding or training? A clunky, rigid LMS turns every new initiative into a manual lift. That lag costs time and weakens your competitive advantage. If your learning can’t move as fast as your strategy, you’ll lose both speed and market share.

Cost of delay: Months of revenue lost from delayed product adoption, inefficient onboarding, or missed global launches.

2. Retention is slipping. 

Whether it’s new hires walking away after a rocky start or customers churning because they never realized value, poor learning experiences drive disengagement. Your LMS might not seem like the culprit, but when the experience is generic, disjointed, or difficult to access, your people tune out.

Cost of disengagement: Replacing an employee can cost 1.5–2x their salary. And churned customers? That’s not just lost ARR, it’s a threat to lifetime value and brand reputation.

3. You can’t prove ROI. 

You’re investing time, talent, and tools into training, but if your LMS doesn’t capture impact, you can’t prove its value. Leadership starts to question the spend. Your team gets left out of strategic conversations. Without a clear line to business outcomes, learning is seen as overhead instead of a growth driver.

Cost of invisibility: Budgets get slashed. Headcount gets cut. And your strategic work loses its seat at the table.

4. Your team is burned out on busy work.

If your LMS creates more manual work than it solves—slow course creation, clunky enrollment, no automation—your team is stuck reacting instead of leading. Reporting takes hours. Admin work piles up. There’s no time left for innovation or impact.

Cost of inefficiency: Your most skilled people are trapped in spreadsheets and workflows, instead of designing experiences that move the needle.

5. Your LMS doesn’t play nice with the rest of your tech stack. 

In a modern tech stack, integration isn’t optional. If your LMS doesn’t connect with your CRM, analytics tools, or product data, you’re operating in a silo. You can’t personalize learning. You can’t measure what matters. And you definitely can’t drive cross-functional impact.

Cost of disconnection: Leadership wants intelligence, not islands. If your LMS can’t contribute to the broader data ecosystem, it’s dead weight.

Are You Ready to Make the Switch?

Switching your LMS isn’t just a tech decision. It’s a business one that can improve engagement, reduce inefficiencies, and accelerate your ability to educate customers, partners, and employees at scale.

If your current platform is holding you back, it’s time to stop settling and start leading.

Here are resources that can help you take your next steps:

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Dave Sliwinski

SVP Solutions Engineering
Dave Sliwinski has over 20 years of experience in the software services industry and managing LMS platforms and L&D programs. He joined Intellum in 2016 and serves as Intellum's SVP of Solutions Engineering, a trusted source of technical product expertise and platform best practices for clients and prospects.