Incorporating a B2B offering within your organization or transitioning to a selling model that is B2B could be an effective strategy to help you unlock the next level of success 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 discussed practical and concrete methods to expand and improve your B2B offerings.

If you're an entrepreneur from B2C looking to transition into a B2B selling model or are in a bigger company that wants to include online education to your offering Paul's concrete guidance will give you practical B2B strategies to get started.

The selling journey for B2B

Selling constantly is exhausting. If you're working in the field of creating online courses it is not difficult to get addicted to "selling" and working to increase your reach. This takes a large amount of resources, time, and energy - especially when a lot of effort goes into selling a lower-priced course.

In order to get rid from the cycle of selling, it is essential to develop an effective sales process that grows to the needs of your company. It will ensure that you have regular conversions that will support your future growth, and also help create an aligned strategy for everyone involved.

Prior to starting with building or iterating on your B2B offering, here are some common mistakes to avoid

• Reinventing the wheel Try to keep from reinventing the wheel. When people get into online classes believe that they must start with something completely new and re-invent the wheel from scratch. Be reminded that you do not have to start from scratch, particularly if you've already established an effective B2C company.
• Do not "Ready, Fire, Aim": Once you've chosen the topic of your course be sure to not wait until the day after you launch the course before you consider how the course is going to fit into your larger company plan.
• Don't quit before the corner of success: The most important aspect to keep in mind when you're making your debut in the B2B industry is not to give up - you'll find yourself just one step away from success. A single agreement, one supplier or one salesperson can be what makes 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. Through focusing on these aspects, companies are able to run and operate at scale while creating meaningful customer experiences. Start by making amazing content that resonates to your target audience. When you've got them on board, you'll want to ensure you've put the correct methods in place for moving students from one product to another, as an escalator, after they've become fans of your content. For this you'll need "systems at the front as well as back end that can detect and prompt students at just the right moment," Paul says. Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize students to buy the next one" through creating memorable student experience.

The framework is designed to help you support newly enrolled students. It also supports them having transformational experiences so you can provide students with additional products and services down the in the future. Many companies and organizations have already walked this path and have pioneered online educational models and finding the most effective methods to attract students.

Three strategies to increase your presence in the B2B market

1. Implementing a successful customer strategy
2. Offering an additional service to retain customers and reduce the number of customers who leave. to reduce churn
3. Using certifications, accreditations, and partnerships to accelerate growth and expand your reach on the B2B industry

1. Implementing a Customer-Success Strategy

It's important to keep in mind that you're performing amazing work within the way you provide the products and services you offer as well as your expertise. Incorporating online courses and online learning into your enterprise can help you develop an approach to your clients' satisfaction, and to complement your current business offering with innovative products, provide more benefits for your customers and grow your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" executed a successful customer strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is an integral component of their employee onboarding process and serves a double purpose for their business.

The best questions to ask when reflecting on implementing the customer-focused strategy include:

• What can you do with training courses to help you build your firm?
• What purpose, role or problem could these courses resolve within your organization?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to encourage customers to stay and to reduce the likelihood of them returning

You already have a means to serve your company. A service, product, or other method to help your customers, clients or students. Implementing an additional offer is a good way through to keep your customers , and lower the rate of churn. Training courses can be a great method of providing that extra incentive to your clients, as well as reduce the chance of them leaving your business.

 How Lansa, a low-code development platform, implemented the "additional service"

At Lansa The team had to resolve a problem: even with an abundance of written documentation the team was faced with a request from their customers and potential customers for an official learning of their platform. Customers needed assistance in learning how to make use of their platform.

Previous to using Plus Lansa's team Lansa utilized an approach of time-mentorship to teach the new users on how to use their software and share the best methods. This could take a huge amount of time, and also resources in a large scale.

• Take a moment to think about that Lifetime student Value Framework for a moment and its purpose of building an ecosystem: you want your customers, students and potential customers to feel comfortable by a genuine and healthy manner that generates revenue to your company, and helps them stay in your systems for longer. It is important to provide an overall experience that ensures that your customers are committed to your product or service.

Good questions to consider when reflecting on the practice of making use of an "additional deal" to reduce churn in your business are:

• My customers are leaving or outgrowing my business?
• What program could I design in my company to ease the burden?

3. Using certifications, accreditations, as well as partnerships to boost expansion and increase reach in the B2B market

Even if your business is already growing and expanding, it's always beneficial to extend the reach of your business and increase your growth beyond the services that you provide to your customers, students or clients by taking advantage of classes and the implementation of the certification, accreditation and other partner programmes.

 How IntelyCare has accelerated its growth and increased capabilities beyond the current offerings for business by gaining certification and accreditation

The team at IntelyCare developed a course that was complementary to their business, and was capable of teaching more than a million students effectively and quickly manner. The team also utilized certificates and leveraged social media as important forms of supporting the learning process.

The key to success is incorporating the certification or accreditation into your B2B service is a good way for you to accelerate your business's growth in the B2B Market. Customers want to know something new, and they need proof that they have learned the material and have retained the latest information to be able to use it for job purposes in addition to questions of compliance. An official certificate can be a tangible way for you to give your clients and students with the opportunity to prove the expertise of safety, knowledge, and understanding you have taught them through the courses you offer.

 How Keap increased growth and a wider capabilities beyond its current offerings by way of partnerships

Because the Keap members were in charge of aiding their clients in integrating their platform into their business and partner onboarding program using Plus.

The key lesson: Because Keap was already a successful platform, they accelerated the growth of their business by extending to new markets, and tried to appeal to new customers that they had no access to. They relied on their partners to stand up for them and then implement their platform on their behalf by way of Partnerships.

Good questions to consider when reflecting on the practice of using certifications, accreditations, and partnerships to accelerate growth and expand your reach within the B2B marketplace include:

• Which B2B acceleration path would work best for my business right now?
• Does my company stand to gain from Certificates and Accreditations, or partnerships?

How to iterate and grow an offering for B2B at scale: Notes from the trenches of Simon Dunant

In the final part of the Level Up with Plus session We had a chat about the topic with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus and has a solid background in online education and over 25 years experience in the technology industry. Simon is the director of the network of online learning academies at Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform used by non-profit organizations for fundraising and marketing. He is responsible for the creation, curation, and execution of education for customers and certification for partners of customers and their agency partners all over the world.

Simon manages the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security training to its employees. Simon has over decade of experience in B2B as well as B2C experiences, which includes coaching, training, and mentoring coaching via in-person, online, and on-demand content at leading global companies and conferences.

If you're considering implementing strategies for expanding and improving the B2B services you offer, Simon offers some tips from the viewpoint of someone who has gone through the these past four years working in online training , both in the capacity of a consultant, and also as an employee who is responsible for online training delivery, building 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 came to Engaging Networks, the company wanted to explore educational online for both customers and partners. Initially, the vision of Engaging Networks was to offer an online, scalable customer education program that transformed their clients into expert users of their software , enabling them to increase retention rates, draw new clients, and reduce the amount of time employees spend on onboarding when they grew the company.

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

• To educate clients about their product and to provide top practices to their clients within the digital world
• to train customers in how to use the platform and tools that enable them to use the product efficiently and meet the goals of their organization.

One of the key problems for Engaging Networks was to be able to produce and deliver classes quickly, because of their fast-paced course development cycle as well as the regular updates to features that are released every 6-8 weeks. It was essential for the company to be capable of creating and updating courses in alignment with product feature releases to be able to inform their clients on the best ways to use them and make sure that they were providing value to the company.

The benefits of an online academy
When it came to reducing time for onboarding in Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and support teams. An online academy will mean that much of the repetitive instruction that support teams go through when they are onboarding customers can be avoided through the use of self-paced courses, and enable account managers and support teams to spend more 1-on-1 time with their customers.

The creation of a partner network by establishing accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community of nonprofits and marketing agencies interested in working together in order to implement their platform. They established a partnership network by implementing an academy online for agency professionals that could accredit and certify their members.

The main advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners can play a key role in helping to implement a platform, product, or service, and train clients on its use.
• Accredited partners are able to assist their customers in delivering their projects and also refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners have been able to transform Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the establishment of an academy for agencies it was not possible to establish a standard way to ensure the quality of the partners Engaging Networks provided to its clients, and they were uncertain of the would experience to be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to educate their partners, credit and verify them, and establish stronger connections with them. They were able to establish a strong partner network through agencies that they knew worked with their tools, and had a good understanding of their frameworks. They were confident that certified partners knew the system inside and out since they were certified through their academy online training.

Starting your course from idea to instruction, quickly

In the case of a bigger enterprise, it is possible to need to work with a shorter timeframe to develop a course around an innovative product or service function. In the case of Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer in order to build many course components at one time and upload video in bulk and create lessons in an outline format.

When using to build your courses, you are able to film all of your videos in one go, upload them, and create a course from beginning to finish , with a predetermined deadline. It allows you to devote more time on the creation of the content that is included in your course while ensuring the course will deliver and meet the goals you have outlined.

It's beneficial to not spending too much time on administering, hosting, and adjusting the platform, rather than working on delivering the knowledge you have gained through your written content. The platform assists in this process.

The transition from B2C B2B

When working with the B2C audience, the course can usually be designed around one topic. If you are a creator of courses, you have more independence and different stakeholders to be accountable to. On the B2B side, it is important to consider that if you are conducting any form of training services for another company There will more departments and people to answer to. So, it is important to consider the company that you work with or within. Whether you are an outside consultant or internal that works in a B2B context will likely involve larger training operations, the need for more subjects and courses as well as strict compliance regulations.

The key differences between B2C and B2B

• You will have a wider variety of stakeholders: When managing a business you'll have a array of internal stakeholders that which you need to interact with and engage with. You may need to speak to the customer success managers at the firm, the marketing team and the support staff for customers, sales engineers, and sales personnel to get insight into how best to offer training to customers.
• It is possible that you will need to increase your inventory of courses: When you are sitting at a table to design a class and you're planning to teach a class, you might need to change your approach to how you teach a class of students about a particular topic. B2B is also able to offer a larger course inventory as well, so you might find that after the business you are working with realizes the importance of a training course and wants to expand their inventory of training and courses that are available to many users, including clients, partners, employees, and various other types of audiences.

A few tips for B2B content management

• Use a project management software to manage course content: When you're in the B2B context, you may require constant updating of the content of your courses in order in order to keep up with the evolving needs of your business. needs. It is beneficial to utilize the project management tools like Asana and Trello for tracking your course and the content they contain along with modifications that were implemented over time and will require changes later on.
• Try to cooperate together with your company's internal teamswhen creating a B2B course It is crucial to have an understanding of the businesses' onboarding, retention methods, partnership programs, and educational methods. Talking to experts in the field within the industry who possess specialization will allow you to gain insights for the courses and training that you are building. Inquiring about their "buy-in" and soliciting their input to include into your training is a huge benefit when you are developing your offerings.

Choosing an LMS that is scalable and grows along with your needs

With Engaging Network's previous LMS it was easier to do administrative tasks that had to be accomplished before creating courses. By using Plus as their brand new learning management system Simon has been able to cut down on about 30 percent of his time be able to invest it in creating content.

Selecting an online learning platform that is easy to use, adaptable as well as allowing you to build courses with ease allows you more flexibility to grow your customer base in addition to having distinct learning spaces or sites to teach your students. Prior to joining Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy which served customers as well as partners and other different stakeholders. Thanks to Plus, they've built a number of Academies that serve different stakeholders and focus specifically on tailoring each learning experience specifically to their needs.

Another benefit of Plus when used in a B2B setting is that with the use of various learning spaces, you, as well as many other participants of the business are able to track the progress of clients or partners as well as employees separately in their learning journey.

In this instance, an HR manager can login to the platform to receive notifications regarding the progress made by employees going through the onboarding process. A Customer Success Manager can log into the platform's learning environment for customer education as well as keep track of how well the employees are learning company's clients.

Ideas for starting your first B2B course

• Try to address a business's biggest need. As you create your initial B2B service, the most important factor to consider is to have your first-course focus on the most pressing need of the business you're working with. In this case, if the company you plan to promote your course is currently struggling with employee onboarding, then start at the beginning.
• Get feedback from your students and clients Request feedback from your students and clients can be one of the most effective ways you will be able to improve your next course offerings and keep improving the B2B services you offer. Remember that launching your first course can cause some nervousness. Be prepared by doing the best job you can for your first course. You should be constantly asking for feedback from students and then implementing the feedback in the following version. This will allow you to keep improving your course offerings every time you launch.
• Make use of survey, focus group, and check-ins with clients: It's beneficial to make use of surveys, focus groups, and community forums to gather feedback. To stay in touch with your customers and their demands, it assists to create a questionnaire for your clients every 6 months to ask questions about the experience they had with your classes and the ways you could help them better with your information.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early on:

As you build and launch your first B2B offering, make sure that you are receiving data from your learners. Use reporting tools on the platform you use to monitor the progress of your students, and how they're engaging with your classes, and note whether there's need to improve.

The most important metrics are worth your attention are:

• The number of students who have registered
• Course Enrolments
• Number of courses that were started
• Courses completed
• Complimentation Rate
• Last login of the student

Noticing pattern patterns within your report and the metrics you use can give you insights into the way that your material is performing for students and know the time to make adjustments. If you use the platform, you can download the report data each week, in order to keep up-to-date with this knowledge, and build a database of metrics.

What To Do To Stay On The Learner's Journey in Mind

• Make suggestions on what you'd like to know next.
   An effective way to expand and expand your B2B offer when you are expanding the range of courses you offer is to supply your students with guidance on what they should learn next. In your course progress and completion pages, you can to make suggestions on the courses that your students need to be taking next in order to broaden their knowledge of a certain subject.
• Get creative with the App Store
   Another method to keep your students interested and active in their learning process is to look into your options in the App Store. There is a wide range of apps that let you diversify the educational experience of your students, and go beyond text, video, course presentations and quizzes.
• Introduce micro-learning in order to ensure that students are engaged  
   In an B2B setting, including micro-learning can help you keep students engaged. Make sure to limit every video you use in your lessons to be an maximum of fifteen minutes in length and each class at least two hours. This will allow your students to follow through on their journey of learning with greater involvement and keep your student completion rates to a higher level.
• Use real-world case studies
   Offering your students instances and case studies of subjects they've just learned at the end of your class allows your students to put their knowledge to the test and consider the ways in which what they learned applies in a real-world scenario.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Develop your course. Prove to potential clients that there is value in the services you provide and your course can support the business goals of their clients.
• Your course must address a problem that the potential client is currently facing Set specific KPIs to the course, and define the problem you're trying to solve to demonstrate that the worth and effectiveness of the course.
• Ask for feedback and keep improving and refine your B2B service once it's out in the world
• Begin to think bigger, and think of other courses and learning opportunities to your business, thereby expanding the scope of your growth as a course creator by the result.
• Try your best to collaborate with your client. Make a a habit of keeping close on the reporting