Most learning providers assume churn happens at renewal.
In reality, it starts earlier, when budgets tighten and your programme gets pulled into conversations you’re not part of. Somewhere along the way, someone asks ‘What are we actually getting from this?’, and if your L&D contact isn’t armed with a good answer right away, it can leave your relationship in a precarious position.
Then, by the time renewal comes around, you’re fighting a battle you had no idea you were losing until it’s too late.
When organisations need to cut costs, L&D is nearly always in the firing line. That’s not because it isn’t valuable, but because its impact can be harder to prove than, for instance, sales or marketing. L&D can’t point to revenue or leads, so on the surface, it can be much trickier to demonstrate the value of what we do. Unfortunately the cost is easy to point to.
So decisions tend to follow a pattern:
Learning programmes often fall into that third category – even the good ones. That puts learning vendors in a very difficult position, where we constantly have to justify why our programmes deserve to stay when budgets are being slashed across our customers’ businesses.
In 2025, 61% of L&D teams saw their budgets stagnate or decrease.
– Fosway Group, 2025
You might be delivering something genuinely valuable. Sessions land well, feedback is strong and learners are engaged. But in a budget conversation, we know that’s not what carries weight.
Stakeholders want to know:
If those answers aren’t clear, ‘this is good’ quickly becomes ‘is this essential?’, and when a vendor is delivering a non-essential programme, it becomes an obvious choice to cut from a squeezed budget.
It’s rarely complaints that signal risk. It’s usually silence.
That will often show up as fewer check-ins. Less curiosity. A noticeable drop in energy. Maybe customers will start skipping calls, or stop opening newsletters, or stop showing interest in new content.
Often, your internal champion is feeling the pressure. They still believe in the programme, but they don’t have the evidence to confidently defend it, so they start quietly detaching from the relationship, anticipating the impending cancellation without giving you an opportunity to turn things around.
That’s the moment where your support matters most, and until that cancellation has been confirmed, there’s still a chance you can prove the value you’re bringing and get the relationship back on track.
When you feel that shift, doing more isn’t the answer. Throwing more courses or free content at a customer isn’t going to be the deciding factor between them staying or leaving.
What does work is proving the customer’s ROI.
Here’s what that looks like:
If you’re relying on vanity metrics like workshop attendance, LMS logins or completion rates, now is the time to stop. Your customers can find those figures on their own, and they’re just indicators of learning activity, not impact.
Instead, show:
Even small examples of behaviour change can shift perception. Which sounds more impressive to senior stakeholders: 80% of employees logging into the LMS in a month, or 80% of employees showing measurable improvements in key skills?
Don’t wait until the end of a programme to demonstrate impact.
L&D teams need something they can point to along the way, such as:
It doesn’t need to be perfect – just clear. Bringing your customers on the journey with you and telling a real-time story with your data will build momentum and give them something tangible to share with their senior leadership team, which puts you in a much stronger position to maintain a positive relationship.
Your biggest ally is the person advocating for you internally – most likely the Head of Learning or L&D Manager, who will have visibility over the programmes and content you’re delivering.
Make it easy for them by providing simple, clear data, a story they can tell and proof points that don’t need explaining. You can make this even more effective if you ask your L&D contact what challenges the wider business is currently facing, so you can ensure you’re building into the narrative that shows how your programme is making a real difference where it matters most.
If they feel confident, they’ll fight for the programme. Armed with the right impact evidence, they might not even need to.
A common trap most learning vendors fall into is talking to customers about the easy stuff. The logins, the course completions, the ‘90% of learners would recommend this programme to a colleague’... all nice to know, but from a business perspective, not something for the C-suite to get excited about.
This is where tools like Helix, 5app’s AI skills intelligence platform, can help.
Instead of relying on a general sense that things are going well, you can:
It gives you and your customers something concrete to point to, empowering both them and you to prove the impact of your programme, not just the activity.
There’s a big difference between ‘We think it’s working’ and ‘Here’s what’s changed, and here’s the dashboard where you can see it’. That second position is far easier to defend.
If a customer is questioning your programme, it doesn’t always mean something’s wrong. More than not often, the value just isn’t visible enough.
The providers who hold onto customers in tough markets aren’t necessarily doing completely different things, but they’re better at making their impact clear, easy to explain and hard to cut.
When your learning customers go quiet, it’s time to act. Bring them real data about real learning impact to help remind them why they chose to work with you in the first place. Delivering reports filled with real-time behaviour change data will help reignite the customer relationship, ensuring your next renewal goes without a hitch.