Lapaya’s Framework for Measuring ROI in Enterprise Training

How do you prove ROI in a market where success has traditionally been measured by participant satisfaction surveys? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Lapaya founder René Janssen revealed their data-driven approach to demonstrating value in enterprise training.

Moving Beyond Happy Sheets

“Luckily I operate in a market where to a large extent, kind of the return on the product was, were participants happy with it? Thumbs up, happy sheet, if we tend to call it,” René explains. But with economic conditions tightening, enterprise buyers need more concrete evidence of impact.

The Two-Pillar ROI Framework

Lapaya breaks their ROI measurement into two distinct categories. As René explains: “We break that basically into two. On the one hand, there is a set of KPIs of business drivers that you can directly impact with training.”

1. Direct Business Impact

The first pillar focuses on measurable business outcomes:

• Retention: “Great managers, great leaders just are able to retain their team better and have people work for them longer. And there’s a direct business case to be made out of that, because every replacements and every lesser onboarding cost money.”
• Productivity: Particularly for customer-facing roles, “productivity per FTE and therefore productivity increase after having gone through a program quite directly.”

2. Behavioral Change Metrics

The second pillar measures actual skill application. René notes they’ve “gotten pretty good at measuring whether people actually apply the skills that we’re trying to teach them after going through the Labaya platform.” This means tracking whether leaders are “exhibiting the leadership behaviors that we want them to show as six months after we’ve gone through for six months that they weren’t shown before.”

The Google Example

To validate their approach, Lapaya points to Google’s Project Oxygen. René explains how Google “started well by now, maybe 15 years ago, their famous product oxygen, which try to prove we can get rid of managers and we can just have engineers run engineering when the salespeople run the commercial side of the organization.”

The project’s findings actually proved the opposite: “By trying to prove that they could do without managers, they actually prove no. Managers are very important, but not so much managers as a concept, but people in the organizations that exhibit a very fairly concise set of eight to ten to twelve kind of specific skills.”

Making the Business Case

This two-pronged approach to ROI helps Lapaya make compelling business cases to different stakeholders:

1. For finance and procurement: Direct impact on retention and productivity
2. For HR leaders: Measurable behavior change aligned with company goals
3. For executives: Research-backed connection between skills and performance

The Broader Economic Context

René ties this to a larger economic imperative. He points out that productivity growth has dropped from “four, five, 6% more every year” decades ago to “zero to 1% a year” today. This creates urgency around proving training ROI: “You can’t really grow an economy where the output per individual is just growing at 0.1% a year.”

Key Lessons for Enterprise SaaS Founders

1. Move beyond traditional industry success metrics
2. Build measurement into your product from day one
3. Connect metrics directly to business outcomes
4. Use external research to validate your approach
5. Tie your solution to broader economic trends

For founders selling to enterprises, the lesson is clear: in today’s environment, you need both hard metrics and behavioral evidence to prove your value proposition. As René puts it, you must demonstrate “whether people actually apply the skills that we’re trying to teach them” long after the initial training ends.