Incorporating a B2B offering in your company or moving into a B2B sales model is a great approach to get to the next stage of growth in your business.

The last time we had a session in our "Level Up With Plus" series, we spoke about the topic with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical methods to expand and improve your B2B offerings.

If you're an entrepreneur working in B2C seeking to move to an B2B selling model , or you are an integral part of a larger enterprise that's trying to integrate online learning into your offerings, Paul's tangible advice will provide you with useful B2B methods to start.

The B2B selling journey

Selling constantly is exhausting. If you are involved in making online courses It is easy to fall addicted to "selling" and working to reach out to a wider audience. It takes a lot of effort, time as well as energy, particularly in the case of a large amount of work that is put into selling a cheaper course.

To get out of the selling cycle it is important to create an effective sales process that grows with your business. This can help ensure consistent conversions to support future growth, and also help create an unified perspective for all parties involved.

Before starting with building or iterating on your B2B service, here are some common mistakes to avoid:

• Reinventing the wheel Try to avoid making a fresh start. When people get into online courses and think they have to start fresh and reinvent the wheel completely from scratch. Be reminded that you do not have to start over - especially if you've built an effective B2C company.
• Don't "Ready to Fire, Ready, and Aim": Once you have chosen a topic for your course, try to avoid waiting until after the start of the course before you consider how the course is going to fit into your larger business plan.
• Don't give up until you've reached the edge of success: An important thing to remember when entering the B2B market is not to give up as you'll soon be one step closer to being successful. A single agreement, one supplier, or one salesperson can be the key to making your B2B offering a success.

The Lifetime Student Value Framework(tm)

The model is comprised of three pillars: Systems, Sales, and Students. When focusing on these three areas businesses are able to manage and function at a high level and provide meaningful customer experiences. The first step is to create amazing content that resonates with your customers. Once you've brought them in You'll need to ensure you have the right methods in place for moving students from one product to the next, like the stepping stone once they've become an avid fan of your content. In order to do this it is necessary to have "systems at the front as well as back end that can detect and prompt students at just the right time," Paul, explains Paul in order to "incentivize students to buy the next product" through creating memorable student experiences.

This structure helps you to support newly enrolled students. It also supports them having transformational experiences so you can provide your students with more items and services later on down the down the. A lot of organizations and businesses have already taken this road in the past, establishing online education models and finding great methods to attract students.

Three strategies to expand within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a successful customer strategy
2. Offering an additional service to attract customers, and to reduce churn  Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and reduce churn
3. Using certifications, accreditations, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence in the B2B market

1. Implementing a Customer-Success Strategy

It's crucial to keep in mind that you're already performing amazing work within the business you run by providing your products, services, and expertise. The incorporation of online and on-line learning into your enterprise will help to develop a strategy for your customers' success, complement your existing business with new offerings, create more value for your customers, and expand your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" executed a successful customer strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is integrated into the new process for onboarding employees and serves a double purpose to their company.

The best questions to ask in evaluating the implementation of an effective customer strategy include:

• What can you do with classes to enhance your firm?
• What function, purpose or issue could the course resolve for your company?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to keep customers loyal and decrease churn

You already have a means to serve your company. It could be a product, service or method of helping customers, customers, or customers. Offering additional services can be a great way by which you can retain your clients and decrease churn. Training courses can be a great method of providing that extra offer for your customers, as well as reduce the chance that they'll leave your business.

 How Lansa is a development platform that uses low-code. platform implemented the "additional service"

At Lansa The team at Lansa tried to address a problem: even with the abundance of documents written in English the team was faced with a request from potential and existing customers for a formal learning about their products. Their customers needed help learning how to make use of their system.

Prior to using Plus the team at Lansa utilized a time-mentorship model to instruct prospective customers how to utilize their products and share the best practices. It would require a significant amount of time and resources at scale.

• Take a moment to think about your Lifetime student Value Framework for a moment as it aims to create an environment: You want your customers, students, and potential customers to feel comfortable with respect and in a positive manner that generates revenue to your company, and keep them in your system for longer. It is important to provide a holistic experience that will keep your clients on board and committed to your product or service.

Some good questions to think about when reflecting on the practice of applying the term "additional deal" to decrease churn your organization are:

• My customers are leaving or outgrowing my business?
• What kind of course can I create in my business to ease the burden?

3. Using certifications, accreditations, and alliances to speed up growth and expand reach in the B2B market

If your business has already grown and expanding, it's always beneficial to increase your reach and accelerate growth beyond the current services you offer to your students, clients or clients by using courses or using the certification, accreditation and partner programs.

 How IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded options beyond its current offerings in business by gaining certification and accreditation

The team at IntelyCare developed a course that was in line with the company's offerings which was capable of teaching half a million people effectively and quickly manner. They also made use of certificates, and social media to provide essential ways of assisting the learning process.

The key to success is incorporating the certification or accreditation into your B2B offering is an effective way for you to accelerate your business's growth in the B2B Market. Customers want to know things they have never heard of, and need proof that they've finished their education and are able to retain new information for employment purposes, as well as questions of compliance. A certificate is a tangible way for you to give your clients and students with an opportunity to demonstrate the experience, safety, and compliance you have taught them through the courses you offer.

 What is HTML0? Keap has accelerated its growth and increased coverage beyond the current business offerings by way of partnership

Since the Keap members were in charge of helping their customers implement their platform in their businesses and partner onboarding program using Plus.

The key lesson: Because Keap was already a successful platform, they increased their growth by reaching to new markets, and tried to fit into new audiences they didn't have access to by relying on their partners to represent them and to implement their platform on their behalf via Partnerships.

Some good questions to think about in evaluating the process of using accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence on the B2B industry include:

• What B2B accelerator path is the most suitable for my company right now?
• Would my business benefit from Certificates and Accreditations, or partnerships?

It's a challenge to iterate and grow the B2B offerings in a large scale: notes from the trenches with Simon Dunant

In the second part of our Level Up with Plus session, we chatted in depth with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus and holds a vast experience in online education as well as over 25 years experience in the tech industry. Simon has been the leader of the group of online learning academies within Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform used by non-profit organizations for fundraising and marketing, directing the creation, curation, and execution of education for customers and partner certification of clients as well as agency partners around all over the world.

Simon manages the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the firm provide security and compliance training to its employees. He has over 10-years of B2B as well as B2C experiences, which includes coaching, training, and mentoring coaching through in-person, online and online content for top global corporations and at conferences.

If you're considering implementing strategies for expanding and improving your B2B offering, Simon offers some tips from the point of view from someone who's gone through this experience in the past 4 years in online training , both as a consultant and as an employee who is responsible for online training delivery, building Engaging Network's customer education program starting from scratch and then transferring it to Plus in 2021.

How online education can fit into company vision

When Simon first came to Engaging Networks, the company wanted to explore online education for customers and customers and. Initially, the vision of Engaging Networks was to offer the highest quality online education to customers that transformed their clients to experts in their software to help improve retention rates, find new clientsand decrease employee onboarding time as they scaled the business.

The objectives of Engaging Networks's online platform for learning were:

• To educate clients about their product and deliver the best practices to their customers in a digital context
• to train customers in the usage of the platform and tools that enable them to use the product efficiently and meet their organizational goals

One of the key problems for Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering courses in a short time frame due to their fast-paced production schedule and ongoing updates to features that are released every 6-8 weeks. It was imperative that the business was in a position to create and modify course content in accordance with features to be able to inform their clients on how they could use them, and ensure that courses provided value to their business.

The advantages of an online academy
In terms of reducing time for onboarding to Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and Support teams. Through an online academy, much of the repetitive training process that Support teams go through when taking on new clients could be eliminated by the introduction of self-paced courses, and help account managers as well as Support teams to have more one-on-one time with clients.

Establishing a network of partners by establishing accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community made up of non-profits and marketing agencies interested in working together in order to implement their platform. They built a partner network through the implementation of an academy online for agency professionals which was accredited and certify them.

The most important advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners are a valuable resource in helping to implement an application, platform, or service, and train users on how to use it.
• Accredited partners can assist their customers in delivering their plans and also refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners were able to change the way they work with Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the introduction of an academy for agencies it was not possible to establish a standard way to ensure the quality of the partners Engaging Networks was delivering to their clients as well as being not sure of their customers will experience be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to educate their partners, accredit and validate them, as well as establish stronger connections with them. This allowed them to build solid partnerships with companies that they were aware of working using their software and were knowledgeable about the frameworks they use. They were confident that they had a network of accredited partners who knew their platforms inside out as they had been certified by their academy online training.

Starting your course from idea to instruction, quickly

When working with a larger company, you might be given a limited time to create a course on the introduction of a new service or product function. With Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer in order to build several course modules at once or upload bulk videos as well as create lesson plans in the form of a list.

If you use the platform to create your courses, you're able to film all of your video content at the same time then upload them and develop a course from scratch to end with a strict date. It allows you to devote longer on the development of content included in the course and ensure that it is going to deliver and meet the goals that you've set out.

It's beneficial to not the time spent the administration, hosting, and tweaking the platform rather then focusing on the delivery of your knowledge through written content. The platform helps facilitate this procedure.

Transitioning from B2C to B2B

If you are working with the B2C audience, your courses will often be centered around one area. As a course creator there is more freedom as well as a range of stakeholders that you must respond to. On the B2B side It is crucial to think about the fact that if you're providing any kind of training delivery to another business, there is going to be more departments and people to answer to. So, it is important to think like the business which you're working for, or even within. If you're an external consultant or an internal one operating in B2B B2B context will likely involve more training activities, a larger amount of classes and topics for training, and may involve compliance requirements.

There are key differences between B2C and B2B

• You'll have a larger number of stakeholders you work for a company, you'll have a range of stakeholders within the company that who you must interact in conversations and discussions with. You may need to speak to the customer success managers within the organization and the marketing staff as well as the customer service team along with sales engineers as well as sales personnel to get insights on how to best deliver training to clients.
• It is possible that you will need to increase your inventory of courses If you're sitting down to plan a course it is possible that you need change your mindset on how you will teach a class of students about a particular topic. B2B will also have an extensive course catalog which means you could end up finding that once your business with sees the value in a training course and wants to increase the number of training and courses accessible to multiple audiences, such as customers and employees, partners, and various other types of audiences.

Strategies for managing B2B B2B B2B content

• Utilize a software for project management for managing course content In a B2B environment, you could require constant updating of your content and courses to ensure they are up-to-date with the evolving needs of your business. demands. It's beneficial to use the project management tools like Asana as well as Trello to keep track of your courses and the content they contain along with the changes done over time, and need to be made at some point in the near future.
• Be sure to collaborate in conjunction with internal teams: When building a B2B course is essential to gain an understanding of your business' onboarding, retention methods, partnership programs, and educational methods. Engaging with subject matter experts in the business who have specialized knowledge will help you gain insights for the courses and training that you're developing. Inquiring about the "buy-in" and soliciting their input that you can incorporate into your courses will be a big asset in the development of your product.

Choosing an LMS that is scalable and grows with you

When Engaging Network had its previous LMS there was a lot of administration work to be done before creating classes. Utilizing Plus as their brand new learning management system, Simon has managed to free up around 30 percent of his time be able to invest it in creating content.

Choosing an online learning platform which is user-friendly, flexible and lets you develop courses quickly gives the flexibility of growing the number of customers you service, as well as have different learning areas or websites for your students. Previous to joining Plus, Engaging Networks had one huge Academy which served customers as well as partners and other stakeholders. With Plus, they have created a variety of different academies to serve their customers and have a focus on tailoring every learning experience specifically to their needs.

Another advantage of Plus in an B2B setting is that with the implementation of different learning environments, you as well as many other participants of the business are able to monitor the development of customers, partners, and employees independently in their journey to learn.

In this instance, an HR manager can log in to the platform and receive updates about the progress of employees going through the process of onboarding. Additionally, a Customer Success Manager could access the learning environment for customer education as well as keep track of how well the employees are learning businesses' customers.

Ideas for starting your first B2B training

• Try to address a business's' largest need: As you develop your first B2B service, the most important factor to consider is that your initial course should address the largest need for your target company you're working with. In this case, if the company you plan to market your course to is currently struggling with employee onboarding, then start at the beginning.
• Get feedback from your students and clients Get feedback from your students as well as customers is one of the most effective ways you can improve your future course offerings and keep improving the quality of your B2B products. Be aware that the first course can cause an element of anxiety. Be prepared by doing your best that you can during your initial course, continuously seeking feedback from students, then using it to the next time. This allows you to keep improving your course offerings as you go along.
• Use surveys, focus groups as well as client check-ins. It's beneficial to make use of surveys, focus groups and communities to collect feedback. To stay in touch with your customers as well as their demands, it assists to create a questionnaire to your customers every six months, to inquire about the experience they had with your classes and ways to better support them with content.

KeepTrack of Reporting Early on:

As you build and launch your first B2B offering, make sure you're receiving information from your students. Utilize reporting tools in the platform you use to track your student's progress, how they're engaging with your classes, and note whether there's areas to improve.

Key metrics that you can pay attention to are:

• The number of students who have registered
• Course Enrolments
• Courses that were began
• Number of completed courses
• Completion Rate
• The student's most recent login

Recognizing patterns in your reports and measurements can provide information about how your content is performing with students and know when it's time to alter your approach. When using the platform allows you to download report data each week, in order to keep up-to-date with this knowledge, and build an inventory of the metrics.

What To Do To Stay On The Learning Journey In Mind

• Give suggestions for what you would like you'd like to study next.
   One of the best ways to increase and iterate your B2B offering when you are expanding the range of courses you offer is to supply your students with guidance on what to study next. On your course progression and completion pages, you'll be able suggest what courses your students should enroll in next to expand their understanding of a particular subject.
• Make your own ideas with the App Store
   Another way to keep students engaged and involved in the learning process is to look into your options in the App Store. There are a large number of apps available that will let you diversify the learning experiences for your students and extend it beyond video, text, presentation, and quiz courses.
• Integrate micro-learning into keep students interested  
   In a B2B setting, including micro-learning in your courses can help to keep your students interested. Try to aim to keep every video you use within your classes to a maximum of 15 minutes in length and each class at least 2 hours. It will enable your students to continue their journey of learning with greater involvement and keep your completion rates for your students at a higher percentage.
• Apply real-world case studies
   Offering your students cases studies as well as examples of topics they've been learning about towards the end of your class allows your students to put their knowledge into perspective and see how what they just learnt can be applied in a real-world context.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Develop your course. Show potential customers that you are worth the services you provide and the course will meet their business needs.
• Ensure your course solves an issue the prospective customer is facing currently. Set specific KPIs to the course and describe a problem that you are seeking to resolve in order to prove the value and success of the course.
• Request feedback, as you continue to refine and improve your B2B offerings when it's released to the world.
• Think bigger and develop other possible educational opportunities and courses to your business, thereby expanding your own development as a course designer by the result.
• Make sure to be a collaborative partner with your client. Make a an effort to keep on the reporting