How to sell Excel training to HR vs business leaders

If you sell Excel training for a living, you learn pretty quickly that there are two very different doors you can knock on inside a company.

One door is HR, or more specifically Learning and Development.

The other is the business itself: the CFO, controller, FP&A manager, operations lead, or whoever actually owns the spreadsheets, reports, deadlines, and recurring monthly chaos.

Both can lead to good work and real money. But they are very different buying environments.

I have sold into both. Here is how I think about the tradeoffs.

Selling to HR and L&D

Let me start with what HR and L&D do well, because it is very easy to get cynical here, and that is not totally fair.

Good L&D people understand learning. That is literally their job. They think about cohorts, completion rates, reinforcement, learner experience, follow-up, and all the things a busy finance manager may care about in theory but absolutely does not have time or experience to manage.

They also have budget. You will hear “we do not have budget” approximately 4,000 times in this business, but do not fully believe it. At companies of any real size, learning and development is usually a line item. The money exists. Whether they choose to spend it with you is a different question, but the pool is real.

And best of all, that pool refills.

That is probably the biggest advantage of HR and L&D. Once you are in, and they like you, you can stay in. They have systems, approved vendor lists, and annual programs. They have early-career cohorts, manager programs, finance academies, data literacy initiatives, and whatever else has been blessed by the organization.

If you can attach your Excel training to one of those recurring programs, that is a very nice place to be. The same need comes back every year with a fresh group of people, and you are already the known quantity. That is about as close to recurring revenue as most trainers get.

Now for the downsides.

HR is process first, process second, and innovation somewhere around item 17 on the agenda. The same structure that makes them good at running programs can also make them slow, cautious, and allergic to anything that feels even slightly unusual.

They also tend to buy from the biggest, safest names in the room. Nobody in procurement ever got fired for hiring the training equivalent of IBM. If you are an independent trainer or a small shop, you may be objectively better for the job, but you are still pushing against a bias toward brand-name safety.

And then there is the urgency problem.

A finance manager with a broken close process wants help yesterday. HR wants to schedule a planning call for next quarter. That does not make them bad people. It just means the pain is often one or two steps removed.

For me, the biggest issue is distance.

HR often sits between you and the people doing the actual work. That means you may never see the messy spreadsheet, the actual reporting process, the weird manual workaround, or the real business problem underneath the training request.

You end up delivering “Excel training” in the abstract, when the real need is usually much more specific.

And when HR owns the relationship, you are often serving at their pleasure. That is not always bad, but it is a weaker seat than being seen as a direct partner to the business.

Selling directly to business leaders

Now walk through the other door. You are talking to the controller, the FP&A lead, the CFO, the operations director, or the person whose team is actually living inside these workbooks all day.

The first thing you notice is that they understand the problem.

You do not have to explain why a bad monthly close process is expensive. They know. They live it. You do not have to explain why copying and pasting the same report every Friday is a problem. They already hate it.

That shared context makes everything faster. You can skip a lot of the throat-clearing and get right to: “What is broken? Who is using this? What would better look like?”

Business leaders are also more likely to move quickly. If they see the value, they can often find a way to say yes this month instead of next fiscal year. There is usually less ceremony between “this sounds useful” and “let’s do it.”

The trick is that you have to speak their language. Do not lead with learning objectives and instructional design jargon. Lead with deadlines, reporting pain, rework, audit risk, forecasting, close cycles, manual processes, and the fact that everyone is apparently still emailing around files called Final_v7_REALLY_FINAL.xlsx.

But subject matter expertise cuts both ways. A controller or finance lead may know Excel well enough to have very strong opinions about what should be covered, how it should be covered, and why their very specific workaround is actually the center of the universe. Sometimes that is helpful, but sometimes it turns into micromanagement.

There is also a subtle “I could almost do this myself” energy that can come from business-side buyers. They may respect your expertise, but they also know enough to want a hand on the wheel. You need some finesse there. You want to listen closely without letting the training become a committee project.

The budget conversation can also be bumpier. HR may have a pre-approved training pool. A department head is often spending from a budget they personally guard. The money may exist, but it feels more personal. They may ask you to justify the price three different ways, delay the decision, or try to shrink the scope because it is coming out of their world.

So yes, business leaders can move faster. But you often have to earn every dollar in real time.

So, which door should you knock on?

Here is the tradeoff, side by side.

If you are early and still proving your offer, I would go straight to the business.

The feedback loop is faster. The buyer is closer to the pain. You learn what the real problems are instead of the cleaned-up, HR-approved version of the problems.

Once you have proof, testimonials, and a few good stories, HR becomes more attractive. That is where the repeatable, scalable, annual-line-item work tends to live.

The ideal move is often this: win the business leader first. Do great work. Get results. Then let that person introduce you to HR or L&D as someone who has already delivered.

Now you are not some random trainer asking to get on the vendor list. You are the person the business already trusts.

You do not have to pick one door forever. You just have to know which door you are standing in front of and adjust accordingly.

Want to work together?

If your team is trying to get better at Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot, Python in Excel, or modern Microsoft analytics tools, I would be glad to help.

I work best with teams that want practical, hands-on training tied to the work people are actually doing, not generic button-clicking for the sake of checking a box.

You can learn more about my approach here: