Incorporating a B2B offering into your business or transitioning into a B2B sales model could be an effective approach to get to new levels of achievement for your company.

The last time we had a session in our "Level Up with Plus" series, we spoke with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical strategies to iterate and grow your B2B offering.

If you're an entrepreneur working in B2C looking to transition to an B2B selling model , or you are in a bigger enterprise that's trying to incorporate online learning into your offerings Paul's practical advice will provide you with concrete B2B ways to begin.

The B2B selling journey

Selling constantly is exhausting. If you're working in the field of creating online courses It is easy to fall in the habit of continuously "selling" and trying to expand your audience. This requires a significant amount of effort, time, and energy - especially in the case of a large amount of work that is put into selling a cheaper course.

In order to get rid from the cycle of selling, it is essential to develop an effective sales process that grows with your business. This will help create consistent conversions to support future growth, and also help create an unified vision for all stakeholders involved.

Before starting in the process of creating or re-inventing your B2B service There are a few common mistakes to avoid:

• Reinventing the wheel: Do your best to stop yourself from creating a new wheel. Many times when people jump into online courses, they think that they need to create with something completely new and re-invent the wheel entirely. Remind yourself that you don't have to start from scratch, particularly if you've already established 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 the day after you launch your course to think about how your course will be integrated into the larger company plan.
• Do not give up before you reach the point of success: An important thing to remember when starting out in the B2B marketplace is to not give up and you'll be just one step away from being successful. One contract, one vendor or one salesperson may make the B2B offer a hit.

The Lifetime Value of a Student Framework(tm)

This model is made up of three components: Systems, Sales, and Students. By focusing on these areas the companies can manage and function at a high level while creating meaningful customer experiences. Start by making amazing content that resonates with your customers. When you've got them on board it is important to make sure that you've got the proper systems in place to move students between one product and the next, like an escalator, after they've become an avid fan of your material. In order to do this it is necessary to have "systems at the front as well as backend which can identify and trigger students at the right time," says Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize customers to buy the next product" with the help of great learning experience.

This framework helps support your new students coming in and helps them experience transformational learning so you can provide your students with more items and services later on down the line. A lot of organizations and businesses have taken this route in the past, establishing online education methods and identifying great ways to acquire students.

The three strategies to grow in the B2B industry

1. Implementing a customer success strategy
2. Offering an additional service to attract customers, and to reduce the rate of churn  Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and reduce churn
3. Using certifications, accreditations and alliances to speed up expansion and increase your presence on the B2B industry

1. Implementing a Customer Success Strategy

It's important to remind yourself that you're already working hard in your business delivering your products, services, and knowledge. Incorporating online courses and online learning into your company is a way to create an effective strategy to ensure your customers' prosperity, enhance your existing business with new offerings, create more value for your customers, and grow your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" implemented a customer success strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education academy that is now also an integral part of their employee onboarding process as well as serves a dual function for their business.

Some good questions to think about when reflecting on implementing an effective customer strategy include:

• What can you do with courses to complement your existing firm?
• What role, function or issue could the course resolve in your business?

 2. Implementing an additional offer to keep customers loyal and decrease the likelihood of them returning

There is already a method to serve your company. It could be a product, service or form of helping your customers, students or clients. Offering additional services can be a great way by how you will retain your customers , and lower the likelihood of them leaving your business. The use of courses is a good method of providing that extra incentive to your clients, as well as reduce the chance that they will leave your business.

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

At Lansa The team at Lansa was trying to solve a problem: even with the abundance of written documentation There was a need from customers and prospective customers for an official learning of their platform. Customers needed assistance in learning how to use their system.

Previous to using Plus, the staff at Lansa was using the time-mentorship method to guide prospective customers how to use their software and also share the the best techniques. This would take a large amount of time and resources when scaled.

• Think back to your Lifetime student Value Framework for a moment as it aims to create an environment: You want your students, customers, and customers to be supported in a meaningful and wholesome way that also drives revenue for your business, and keeps them inside your systems for longer. Your goal is to offer an overall experience that will keep your clients on board and loyal to your products or service.

The best questions to ask in evaluating the process of applying the term "additional promotion" to reduce churn in your business include:

• What is the reason my clients are currently going away, or are they outgrowing my company?
• What kind of course can I create in my business to ease the burden?

3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and alliances to speed up expansion and increase reach in the B2B market

Even if your business has already grown, it is always beneficial to expand your reach and accelerate your growth beyond the services that you provide to your students, clients or clients by the use of courses and using certification, accreditation, and other partner programs.

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

The IntelyCare team IntelyCare developed a course which was a complement to the company's offerings as well as capable of teaching about half a million individuals quickly and efficiently manner. They also made use of certificates, and leveraged social media as important forms of supporting taking the class to its conclusion.

Important Learning: Including certification and accreditation in your B2B product is a great way for you to accelerate your business's growth within the B2B Market. People want to learn things they have never heard of, and need proof that they have completed their knowledge and retained any new knowledge for purposes of employment, as well as concerns regarding compliance. A certificate is an easy way to give your clients and your students with the chance to show the knowledge, safety, and compliance that they gained through your classes.

 What is HTML0? Keap accelerated growth and expanded coverage beyond the current business services through partnerships

As the Keap partners were accountable for helping their customers implement their platform into their business and Partner Onboarding Program using Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap was already a successful platform, they accelerated the growth of their business by extending to new markets. They also tried to appeal to new customers they didn't have access to by relying on their partners to advocate for them, and to implement their platform for them via Partnerships.

Good questions to consider when reflecting on the practice of using accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence in the B2B market are:

• What B2B accelerator path will be the best fit to my current business?
• Does my company stand to gain from Certificates and Accreditations, or Partnerships?

What it's like to iterate and grow the B2B offerings in a large scale: notes from the trenches of Simon Dunant

The second segment of the Level Up with Plus session in the second part of the session, we spoke in depth with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus and holds a vast background in online education and more than 25 years of experience within the technology industry. Simon is the director of the network of online learning academies within Engaging Networks, the most renowned SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing. He is responsible for the development, curating, and execution of education for customers as well as partner certifications for clients and their agency partners all over the globe.

Simon is also the director of Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security training to its employees. Simon has more than 10 years of B2B and B2C expertise, including mentorship, training, as well as coaching with in-person, on-line, and on-demand content at leading global companies and conferences.

If you're trying to develop strategies for expanding and improving your B2B offerings, Simon offers some tips from the perspective of someone who has gone through the experience over four years of online training both in the capacity of a consultant, and also as an employee in charge of the delivery of online training, constructing the customer education department at Engaging Network from the ground up and migrating to Plus in 2021.

What online learning options can be integrated into the company's goals

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company wanted to explore educational online for both customers and associates. Initially, the company's vision was to offer an online, scalable customer education program that transformed their clients into expert users of their application to improve retention rates, draw new clientsand decrease the time to onboard employees while they expanded the business.

The main goals of Engaging Networks' online platform for learning were:

• In order to inform clients about their product and deliver the best practices to their customers within the digital world
• To train clients in the usage of their tools and platform to help them use their products effectively and reach the goals of their organization.

One of the key issues faced by Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering classes quickly, because of their rapid production schedule and ongoing product feature releases every 6-8 weeks. It was essential that they were able to build and update courses in alignment with product release dates in order to teach their customers how to utilize them and make sure that they provided value to their business.

Benefits of having an online academy
When it came to reducing time for onboarding for Engaging Networks, starting an academy resulted in a reduced work load for the account managers as well as Support teams. With an online academy, many of the tedious training process that Support teams go through when they are onboarding customers can be avoided through the use of self-paced training courses. This will enable account managers and support teams to have more one-on-one time with clients.

Building a partner network by establishing accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community of marketing agencies and nonprofits looking to collaborate to help implement their platform. They built a partner network with the help of an academy online for agency professionals that was able to accredit and verify their members.

The key advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners are a valuable resource in the implementation of the platform, product or service, as well as in training users on how to use it.
• Accredited partners are able to help their clients deliver their plans, as well as refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners were able to transform Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the establishment of an agency academy it was not possible to establish a standard method to verify the high-quality of the partners that the business provided to its clients, and they were unsure of what their clients will experience to be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to provide training to their partners, credit and validate them, as well as strengthen their relationships with their partners. This allowed them to build solid partnerships with companies that they were aware of working using their software and also were familiar with their platforms. They felt confident that their certified partners knew the platforms inside out as they had been certified by their online academy training.

Beginning your training from concept to training in a snap

In the case of a bigger company, you might have a short time frame to develop a course around the introduction of a new service or product feature. In the case of Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in order to create several course modules at once or upload bulk videos as well as create lesson plans in an outline format.

If you use the platform to create your course, you'll be able to film all of your videos at once to upload them all at once, then create a course from beginning to finish , with a predetermined deadline. This allows you to spend longer on the development of the material that's going to be in your course while ensuring that the content will fulfill the requirements that you've set out.

It's beneficial to not spending too much time on administering, hosting, and tweaking the platform rather then focusing on the delivery of your knowledge through written content. The platform helps facilitate this process.

Moving from B2C to B2B

In the case of a B2C audience, your courses will often be centered around one area. Being a course designer there is more freedom and a variety of stakeholders you have to respond to. For B2B purposes It is crucial to be aware that when conducting any form of training services for another organization There will be a wider number of people and departments to answer to. So, it is important to consider the company you are working with, or even within. If you're an external consultant or internal, working in a B2B context will likely involve greater training and training processes, as well as the need for more classes and topics for training in addition to strict compliance regulations.

The key differences between B2C and B2B

• You will have a wider range of stakeholders to deal with: when managing a business you will have a wide array of internal stakeholders that which you need to interact with and engage with. It is possible to talk to customer success executives within the organization as well as the marketing department, the customer support team, sales engineers, and sales personnel to get insights on how to best provide training for clients.
• You may have to expand your inventory of courses: When you are sitting down to plan a course and you're planning to teach a class, you might need to get into a different mindset on how you will train a group of people on one topic. B2B will also have a larger course inventory as well, so you might end up finding that once the business you are working with recognizes the benefits of a training course, they will want to expand their inventory of classes and programs accessible to multiple audiences, such as clients as well as employees, partners as well as other groups.

A few tips to manage B2B content

• Make use of a project management program for managing course content For a B2B scenario, you might have to constantly update your content and courses in order to keep up with the evolving needs of your business. needs. It's helpful to employ tools for managing projects like Asana and Trello for tracking your course as well as their contents as well as the changes done over time, and need to be made in the future.
• Try to cooperate together with your company's internal teamswhen creating B2B courses, it's essential to have an understanding of the businesses' onboarding, customer retention practices, partnership programs, and educational methods. Talking to experts in the field within the industry who possess specific knowledge can help you learn more about the training and courses you're creating. Getting your "buy-in" and seeking their opinions for your course can be an enormous benefit in the development of your product.

Choose an LMS which can scale and grow along with your needs

With Engaging Network's previous LMS it was easier to do administrative tasks that had to be done in order to build courses. By using Plus as their brand new Learning Management System, Simon is able to take around 30 percent of his work time to put back into content creation.

Selecting an online learning platform that is intuitive, scalable as well as allowing you to build courses with ease allows you more flexibility to grow the number of customers you service, as well as have separate sites or learning environments for your students. Prior to becoming part of Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy that served clients, partners, and several stakeholders. Through Plus, they've built a number of various academies for their clients and partners and concentrate in tailoring their learning experiences specifically to their needs.

Another benefit of Plus when used in a B2B setting is that with the creation of various learning spaces, you, as well as several other stakeholders of your business can track the progress of clients as well as employees, partners and customers independently in their journey to learn.

For instance: An HR manager could login to the platform and get updates regarding the progress made by employees who are undergoing the process of onboarding. Additionally, a Customer Success Manager could log into the platform's learning area for education of customers, and keep track of the learning progress of the businesses' customers.

Tips for launching your first B2B course

• Find a way to meet a company's' largest need: As you develop your first B2B service, the most important factor to consider is to have your first-course focus on the most pressing need of the target business you are working with. In this case, if the company you plan to sell your course has a problem with the onboarding process for employees, you should start with that.
• Ask for feedback Get feedback from your students and clients can be one of your best options to can improve your future course offerings and keep improving the B2B services you offer. Keep in mind that starting your initial course is bound to cause anxiety. Try to mitigate this nervousness by performing the best you can for your first course. Continually soliciting feedback from your students, then using it in the following version. It will help you keep improving your course offerings with each launch.
• Utilize surveys, focus groups, and check-ins with clients: It is helpful to use surveys, focus groups, and community forums to gather feedback. To stay in touch with your customers and their requirements, it helps to implement a survey for your clients every 6 months, to inquire about their experience with your courses and how you can improve your support for them by providing them with more content.

KeepTrack of Reporting Early In:

As you build and launch your initial B2B service, be sure that you're getting data from your learners. Make use of reporting tools within your online learning platform to keep track of the progress of your students, and how they are engaging with the content in your courses, and notice if there is any areas to improve.

The most important metrics are worth your attention are:

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

The ability to spot pattern patterns within your report as well as measurements can provide insights into the way that your content is performing with students and know the time to alter your approach. With the application allows you to download report data each week, so that you are able to stay on top of the latest information, as well as build an extensive database of statistics.

Tips To Keep Your Learner's Journey in Mind

• Make suggestions on what you'd like to know next.
   A valuable way to grow and iterate your B2B offering when you are expanding your offerings of courses is to provide your students with a roadmap of what to study next. In your course progress as well as completion pages, you can suggest what courses your students should take next in order to increase their knowledge on a specific topic.
• Get creative using the App Store
   Another method to keep your students engaged and involved in the educational process is by exploring your options in the App Store. There's a variety of apps available that will enable you to broaden the learning experiences for your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video, presentations, and quizzes.
• Integrate micro-learning into ensure that students are engaged  
   In the B2B setting, including micro-learning can help you keep students engaged. Make sure to limit the videos you incorporate in your lessons to be a maximum of 15 minutes long and every course to a maximum duration of two hours. This will allow your students to continue their journey of learning with greater enthusiasm and keeps your completion rates for your students in a higher proportion.
• Use real-world case studies
   Giving your students case studies and examples of topics they've been learning about towards the end of your course allows them to put their learnings into perspective and see the ways in which what they learned applies in a real-world context.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Develop the course. Prove to potential clients that there is value in what you offer and that your course can support the needs of their company.
• Ensure your course solves an issue the prospective client is currently facing Set specific KPIs to the course and describe the problem you're looking to address in order to prove that the worth and effectiveness of the course.
• Request feedback, and continue to improve and refine your B2B service once it's out in the world
• Begin to think bigger, and create other potential educational opportunities and courses to your business, thereby expanding your personal growth as a course creator as a result.
• Do your best to make the process collaborative with your client. Also, make it a a habit of keeping close on the reporting