Your L&D plan appears to be super solid. You have spent weeks, maybe even months on it. You have mapped the gaps, identified the right programmes, built a realistic timeline, thought through the delivery mix.
So, you schedule a meeting with your CFO or your Chief People Officer or the important individual that firmly holds the budget.
And somewhere in the first five minutes, you feel your plan’s solidity begin to soften.
By the time you are showing them the delivery formats, you can feel that something has changed, and you leave the meeting knowing you have lost them, and you’re not entirely sure exactly when it happened or why.
Here is what happened...
You pitched learning, but what they really needed to hear about business outcomes. Learning is classically difficult to quantify sometimes, and when these budget holders are listening to you lay out your plan, two questions continue to ping to the front of their mind.
“What are we getting for the amount of money we will be investing?”
“What will it cost us if we do not go ahead and do this?”
The Pitch Most L&D Teams Give Sounds Like This:
"So, we have identified three crucial capability gaps in our leadership pipeline. We are proposing a blended programme combining in-person workshops with executive coaching and peer learning action sets. We estimate six months to full deployment across all senior managers. Post-programme feedback will be strong, and we expect good engagement scores."
Very professional, and very informational, but missing the point entirely.
The Pitch That Actually Works Sounds Like This:
"Our senior managers are not having the difficult conversations they need to have with their teams. That is costing us retention. Last year, we lost eleven managers to external moves. Replacement cost us roughly 1.5x salary per person. If we can shift how these conversations happen, we reduce churn by even ten percent, we more than cover the cost of the intervention in year one."
Spot the difference?
The first pitch is about the programme itself and what it involves. The second pitch is about outcomes, and why they matter to the business.
Most stakeholders do not actually care how you deliver learning. They care whether the money you are spending solves a problem that might be giving them sleepless nights. If you do not start by naming that problem in their language, you have already lost them.
This is not about being more charismatic or pitching better. It is about starting in a completely different place.
The Brief Was A Wish, Not A Problem
Most L&D briefs start with a solution looking for a problem.
Wanting leaders to be more strategic… that’s a wish. Wanting managers to be better communicators… that’s a wish. Wanting individuals in your team to wield more influence on others… yet another wish.
Your budget holders are not genies. Stop wishing.
"Our regional directors are not pushing back on commercial decisions in steering meetings, and we are losing margin because of it." Now that is a problem, with a clear, tangible metric attached to it to emphasise the need for intervention, and ultimately, the funding to intervene.
One of those briefs gives you something you can actually solve for. The other gives you a programme that is impossible to fail at and impossible to succeed at. By the time you get to your stakeholder meeting, you have already built the plan around the wish, and now you are trying to sell it backwards.
So, the first thing that changes is the brief itself. Before you build anything, before you schedule a single workshop, you get brutally specific with the person asking for the development.
This is why the best L&D plans start not with training, but with business outcomes. Stage 1 of any solid planning process forces you to answer four brutal questions before you move an inch further:
What are your top three business priorities this year?
What does success look like at the end of this period?
What specific behaviour needs to change for that to happen?
And, this is the critical one… what is it costing the business right now if it does not?
If the person asking for development cannot answer those questions with specificity, you do not have a brief yet.
Once you have a real brief, your stakeholder conversation becomes completely different. Because now you are not asking them to fund a few workshops and maybe some coaching sessions. You are asking for them to help you to solve a real business problem through the method of people development.
This is exactly why the best L&D plans, like the ones we outline in the L&D Playbook, start not with training, but with business outcomes.
If you have not already got it, download it here:
You Are Not Pitching A Solution. You Are Pitching The Cost Of Inaction
This. Is. Mega. Important.
Most L&D pitches lead with the solution. "Here is the programme we are proposing, here is how we are doing it, and he is when we are doing it."
Cool, good to know.
Stakeholders have learned to switch off at that moment, because they are thinking: how much is this going to cost, and how do I know it will work?
If you’ve got children, or maybe you remember from your own childhood, there was always that conversation you’d have with your parents trying to convince them that this toy you want is a good investment. It can fly, it can make noises, I will use it all the time.
“Yeah ok, this is all well and good, but how much is coming out of my pocket.”
But if you lead with the cost of the problem, the churn, the missed revenue, the compliance risk, the customer impact… suddenly the conversation is different.
You are not asking them to believe in the power of learning, you are asking them to acknowledge a cost they are already paying and that should be hurting them.
It is common in organisations where senior leaders understand the problem intellectually but have not quite put a number on it. They know manager retention is an issue, however they have not calculated that it is costing them seven figures annually.
Once you do that maths, suddenly a development investment does not look like a cost. It looks like a fix.
Then, And Only Then, Do You Talk About The Programme
Once a stakeholder understands the problem and accepts the cost, the conversation about how you fix it becomes easy.
Now they are not asking "Do we need this?", because you have made it clear that they do. They are instead asking "Will this actually work?" That is a completely different question, and one you can actually answer with confidence.
This is where your programme, your timeline, your delivery mix, your measurement plan all becomes relevant. But they are no longer the opening move, you are not pitching workshops, coaching sessions and peer learning groups, you are now pitching a solution to the problem you have outlined. It is the same content, but framed in a much more meaningful way.
Most L&D teams reverse this order. They lead with the solution and hope the stakeholder will work backwards to care about the problem.
It almost never works.
The ones who get funded lead with the problem, establish the cost, then show the solution as the logical next step.
The good news is that, once funding is approved, the programme is run and the impact has caused a notable positive impact on the problem, you can bring this example to your next conversation as proof of your accuracy for relevant learning interventions.
So, What Changes In Your Next Stakeholder Meeting?
Do not put the cart before the horse.
You have to start with the specific business problem. You quantify the cost, you acknowledge what it would take to shift it, and then you introduce your programme, not as something you want to run, but as the logical response to a problem they have already agreed matters.
That is not more persuasive, and it is not even better presenting. That is starting the conversation in a place where stakeholders are already thinking.
And it means the plan you pitched six weeks ago, the one that was super solid, suddenly becomes fundable.
The question is not "Is your L&D plan any good?"
The question is "Did you brief it against a real business problem, or did you brief it against a wish?"
That question changes everything that comes next.
Thanks
Alex & The Excel Team
