Incorporating a B2B offering in your company or moving into a B2B sales model can be a useful approach to get to new levels of achievement for your company.

The final session of our "Level Up with Plus" series, we talked about the topic with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical ways to improve and expand your B2B service.

If you're an entrepreneur working in B2C looking to transition to the B2B selling approach or an integral part of a larger business that is trying to incorporate online learning to your offering, Paul's tangible tips will help you develop concrete B2B methods to start.

The journey of B2B sales

Selling constantly is exhausting. If you are involved in making online courses, it's easy to get in the habit of continuously "selling" and trying to expand your audience. It takes a lot of resources, time as well as energy, particularly when an enormous amount of time and effort is put into selling a cheaper course.

To break out from the cycle of selling, it is important to create an effective sales process that grows with your business. This can help ensure regular conversions that will support your future growth, and also help create an unified strategy for everyone involved.

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

• Reinventing the wheel Do your best to keep from making a fresh start. When people get into online learning, they think that they must start with something completely new and re-invent the wheel completely from scratch. Be reminded that you do not have to start from scratch, especially if you've built a strong B2C business.
• Do not "Ready, Fire, Aim": Once you've chosen the topic of your course make sure you don't wait until the day after you launch your course to consider where the course can integrate into your overall company plan.
• Don't quit before the corner of success: The most important factor to consider when it comes to making your debut in the B2B industry is not to give up and you'll be just one step away from being successful. A single agreement, one supplier or one salesperson can be what makes your B2B offering a success.

The Lifetime Value of a Student Framework(tm)

This framework is composed of 3 pillars which are Systems, Sales and students. Through focusing on these aspects the companies can be able to operate and run at an optimum level as well as create meaningful customer experience. It starts by creating great content that connects with your customers. Once you've brought them in You'll need to ensure you've put the correct systems in place to move students between one product and the next, like a stepping stone, once they've become fans of your material. For this, you want "systems both on the front and backend that will identify the students and alert them at the right time" Paul says. Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize customers to buy the next product" with the help of great learning experience.

This structure helps you to support new students and ensures they have transformative experiences which allows you to supply students with additional offerings and services in the future line. Many companies and organizations have already taken this road, pioneering online education methods and identifying the most effective methods to attract students.

Three strategies to grow within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a successful customer strategy
2. Offering an additional service to keep customers loyal and decrease the rate of churn
3. Utilizing certifications, accreditations and alliances to speed up expansion and increase your presence on the B2B industry

1. Implementing a Customer Success Plan

It is important to remind yourself that you're doing amazing work in your business delivering the products and services you offer and expertise. Incorporating online courses and online learning into your company is a way to create an effective strategy to ensure your customers' success, complement the existing offerings of your business by adding new products, provide more value for your customers, and expand your business.

 What is HTML0 "Echosec Systems" put into place a customer-success strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is also an integral part of the new process for onboarding employees and has a dual purpose to their company.

The best questions to ask while implementing the customer-focused strategy include:

• What can you do with training courses to help you build your business?
• What purpose, role or problem could these courses help you solve for your company?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to retain customers and reduce the rate of churn

You already have a way that you serve your business. An item, service, or other method to help your customers, customers, or customers. Offering additional services is a good way through which you can retain your clients and decrease the rate of churn. Training courses can be a great option to offer that added deal to customers as well as reduce the chance that they'll leave your business.

 What is HTML0? Lansa, a low-code development platform has implemented the "additional deal"

At Lansa The team at Lansa had to resolve an issue: despite a large amount of written documentation the team was faced with a request from potential and existing customers for an official learning of their platform. Their customers needed help learning how to use the platform.

Previous to using Plus, the team at Lansa was using the time-mentorship method to guide the new users on how to use their product and to share their the best practices. This could take a huge amount of time and resources when scaled.

• Think back to your Lifetime Student Value Framework for a moment and its purpose of building an ecosystem. You would like your customers, students, and customers to be supported with respect and in a positive manner that generates revenue for your business, and keep them in your systems longer. You want to create a holistic experience that ensures that your customers are committed to your product or service.

Good questions to consider while analyzing the concept of applying an "additional promotion" to reduce churn in your organization include:

• What is the reason my clients are currently moving away or growing my business?
• What program could I create in my business to ease the burden?

3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate growth and expand reach in the B2B market

Although your company is already growing and expanding, it's always beneficial to extend the reach of your business and increase expansion beyond what you offer to your students, clients, or clients through using courses or using the certification, accreditation and partner programs.

 What is HTML0? IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded options beyond its current offerings in business by gaining certification and accreditation

The team at IntelyCare built an offer that was in line with their company which was capable of teaching more than a million students effectively and quickly way. The team also utilized certificates and social media to provide important forms of supporting the learning process.

Important Learning: Including the certification or accreditation into your B2B product is a great method to speed up the expansion of your company in the B2B Market. People want to learn something newand would like to prove that they've finished their education and are able to retain any new knowledge for purposes of employment in addition to compliance issues. A certificate is an effective way to provide your customers and students with the opportunity to show the knowledge, safety, and compliance they have gained from your classes.

 What is HTML0? Keap increased growth and a wider coverage beyond the current business offering by way of partnerships

Since the Keap partners were responsible for aiding their clients in integrating their platform into their business, they implemented a partner onboarding program using Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap already operated a highly successful platform, they were able to accelerate the growth of their business by extending to new markets. They also tried to fit into new audiences that they had no access to. They relied on their partners to be able to represent them and then implement their platform on their behalf by way of Partnerships.

The best questions to ask in evaluating the process of using accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence within the B2B marketplace include:

• Which B2B acceleration route would work best for my company right now?
• Does my company stand to gain through Accreditations and Certifications or partnerships?

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

The second segment of the Level Up with Plus session, we chatted about the topic with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus with a strong experience in online education as well as 25 years of experience in the field of technology. Simon is the director of the network of online learning academies within Engaging Networks, the leading SaaS platform used by non-profit organizations for fundraising and marketing, directing the creation, curation, and delivery of educational programs for customers as well as partner certifications for clients and their agency partners all over all over the world.

Simon also runs the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security training to its employees. Simon has more than 10-years of B2B as well as B2C experiences, which includes coaching, training, and mentoring coaching via in-person, online and online content for leading global companies and conferences.

If you're looking to implement strategies for expanding and improving your B2B offering, Simon offers some tips from the perspective from someone who's gone through this experience in four years of online training , both as a consultant and as an employee who is responsible for training online, developing Engaging Network's customer education program from the ground up and then transferring it to Plus in 2021.

How online education can fit into company goals

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company was eager to get into online education for customers and associates. Initially, the vision of Engaging Networks was to deliver the highest quality online education to customers that transformed their clients into experts of their software to help improve retention rates, find new clients, and reduce employee onboarding time when they grew the company.

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

• In order to inform clients about their products and provide top practices to their clients in a digital context
• to train customers in how to use their tools and platform to enable them to use their product effectively and achieve the goals of their organization.

One of the major issues to Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering courses in a short time frame due to their fast-paced production schedule and ongoing release of new features each 6-8 weeks. It was imperative that the business was able to build and update courses in alignment with product features to be able to educate their customers on the best ways to use them and ensure that courses are delivering value to the business.

The advantages of an online academy
In terms of reducing the time to onboard for Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and Support teams. Through an online academy, most of the routine training process that Support teams must go through while they are onboarding customers can be avoided with the implementation of self-paced classes, which allow account managers and Support teams to have more one-on-one time with their clients.

Building a partner network by establishing accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community of nonprofits and marketing agencies looking to collaborate to help implement their platform. They created a network of partners with the help of an academy for agencies online that could accredit and validate their members.

The most important benefits of partnership and accreditation:

• Accredited partners can be instrumental in the implementation of a platform, product, or service, and train clients on its use.
• Accredited partners may assist their customers in delivering their projects and also refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners could improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the introduction 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 train their partners, as well as accredit and verify them, and establish stronger connections with their partners. They were able to establish an extensive network of partners through companies that they were aware of working with their tools, and were knowledgeable about their frameworks. They felt confident that their certified partners knew the platforms inside out as they had been certified by the online academy course.

Starting your course from idea to instruction rapidly

If you are working for a large enterprise, it is possible to be given a limited time for developing a curriculum around an innovative product or service feature. With Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in the event that you want to develop several course modules at once or upload bulk videos and create lessons in an outline format.

When using to build your courses, you're in a position to record all your videos in one go then upload them and develop a course from scratch to finish with a tight date. This lets you spend longer on the development of the material that's included in the course and ensure that the content will fulfill the requirements you have outlined.

It's helpful not to spending too much time on administering, hosting, and tweaking the platform then focusing on the delivery of the knowledge you have gained through your content. This is made easier by the platform. process.

Transitioning from B2C B2B

If you are working with the B2C audience, your courses will often be centered around one subject. Being a course designer, you have more independence as well as a range of stakeholders that you must respond to. In the case of B2B, it is important to consider that if you are providing any kind of training delivery for another organization, there is going to be a wider number of department and individuals to report to. So, it is important to be aware of the organization that you work with or within. No matter if you're an outside consultant or an internal one, working in the B2B context will likely involve more training activities, a larger amount of classes and topics for training in addition to the need to meet compliance standards.

There are key differences between B2C and B2B

• You'll have a larger variety of stakeholders: When you work for a company, you'll have a variety of internal stakeholders who you must interact with and have conversations with. You may need to speak with the managers of customer success at the firm as well as the marketing department, the customer support team as well as sales engineers and sales representatives to gain information on the best way to provide training for clients.
• It is possible that you will need to increase the number of courses you offer when you sit in the middle of planning a course, you may have change your mindset on how you will train a group of people about a particular topic. B2B will also have a larger course inventory which means you could end up finding that once the business you are working with recognizes the benefits of a training course and wants to broaden their selection of classes and programs available to multiple users like customers as well as employees, partners and various other types of audiences.

Strategies for managing B2B B2B B2B content

• Make use of a project management program to manage course content: In a B2B context, you may require constant updating of your content and courses to stay up to date with the evolving needs of your business. demands. It is beneficial to utilize project management software such as Asana and Trello to track your courses as well as their contents along with the changes implemented over time and need to be made in the future.
• Try to cooperate with the businesses' internal team members: when developing an B2B-focused course is essential to gain an understanding of the businesses' onboarding, customer retention methods, partnership programs, and customer educational methods. Talking to experts in the field within the industry who possess specialized knowledge will help you learn more about the courses and training that you're developing. Inquiring about their "buy-in" and soliciting their input for your course will be a big asset when you are developing your offerings.

Choose an LMS which will grow and scale with you

With Engaging Network's previous LMS, there was more administration work to be done before creating classes. By using Plus as their Learning Management System, Simon has been able to cut down on about 30 percent of his work time to invest in content creation.

Selecting an online platform for learning which is user-friendly, flexible, and allows you to create courses in a matter of minutes gives the flexibility of growing the number of customers you service in addition to having separate sites or learning environments for your students. Before joining Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy that served clients, partners, and several stakeholders. With Plus, they have built a number of different academies to serve their stakeholders and focus specifically on tailoring each learning experience for them.

Another benefit of Plus when used in the B2B scenario is that, through the use of various learning environments, you and many other participants of your business can 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 get updates on the progress of employees going through the onboarding process. Likewise, a Customer Success Manager can log into the platform's learning area for education of customers and track how well the employees are learning company's clients.

Ideas for starting your first B2B training

• Try to address a business's' largest need: As you build your first B2B service, the most important factor to consider is to have your first-course be able to address the biggest need for the target business you are working with. In this case, if the business you are looking to promote your course is struggling to handle employee onboarding, then start with that.
• Ask for feedback Request comments from your students and clients is among the best ways that you will be able to improve your next course offerings and keep improving your B2B offerings. Remember that launching your first course can cause anxiety. Make an effort to ease this anxiety by doing your best you can in your first course. You should be constantly asking for feedback from students, and implementing it for the next iteration. It will help you improve your courses 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. In order to stay in contact with your clients and their needs, it also is helpful to conduct a survey to your customers every six months to ask questions about the experience they had with your classes and ways to better support them with the content.

The KeepingTrack Of Reporting early On:

While you develop and launch your initial B2B offering, make sure that you're getting data from your users. Use reporting tools on your online learning platform to keep track of your students' progress and whether they're interacting with the content in your courses, and notice where there's areas to improve.

Key metrics that are worth your attention include:

• Students who are registered
• Course Enrolments
• The number of courses that have been that were started
• The number of courses that have been completed
• Complimentation Rate
• Student's last login

Recognizing trends in the reports as well as the metrics you use can give you insight into how your material is performing for students and know the time to make adjustments. If you use the platform, you can download the weekly reports to allow you to stay on top of the latest information, as well as build an inventory of the data.

Tips To Keep Your Learning Journey In Mind

• Give suggestions for what you would like you'd like to know next.
   One of the best ways to increase and improve your B2B offerings as you expand the range of courses you offer is to provide your students with a roadmap of what they should learn next. On your course progression and completion pages, you can provide suggestions for what courses your students should enroll in next to expand their knowledge of a certain topic.
• Explore your creativity by using the App Store
   Another way to keep students active and engaged in their education journey is to explore 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. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video, presentation, and quiz courses.
• Incorporate micro-learning to keep students engaged  
   In a B2B scenario, using micro-learning into your curriculum can to keep your students interested. It is best to make sure that you keep 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. It will enable your students to keep on track with their education with increased engagement and will keep the completion rate of your students to a higher level.
• Apply real-world case studies
   Giving your students case studies and examples of the topics they have been learning about towards the end of the course will allow your students to put their knowledge into perspective and see the ways in which what they learned applies in a real-world scenario.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Create the course. Make it clear to prospective clients that you are worth your course and the course will meet the business goals of their clients.
• Your course must address an issue the prospective client is currently facing Set some KPIs for the course and describe a problem that you are trying to solve so that you can prove that the worth and effectiveness of the course.
• Request feedback, as you continue to refine and refine your B2B service once it's out in the world.
• Start thinking bigger, and create other potential course offerings and learning opportunities to your business, thereby expanding the scope of your development as a course designer in the process.
• Try your best to make the process collaborative with your client. Make a a habit of keeping close on the reporting