Incorporating a B2B offering into your business or transitioning into a B2B sales model is a great approach to get to the next level of success for your company.

The final session of our "Level Up With Plus" series, we had a conversation with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical strategies to iterate and grow your B2B offerings.

You may be an entrepreneur in B2C seeking to move to an B2B selling model , or you are an integral part of a larger company that wants to incorporate online learning to your offering Paul's practical 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 not difficult to get into the habit of constantly "selling" and working to reach out to a wider audience. It takes a lot of effort, time and effort, especially when a lot of effort involves selling a less expensive program.

To get out from the sales cycle, it is important to create an effective sales process that grows with your business. This will help create consistent conversions to support long-term growth and help build an integrated strategy for everyone involved.

Prior to starting in the process of creating or re-inventing your B2B service, here are some common mistakes to avoid

• Reinventing the wheel: Make an effort to avoid making a fresh start. Many times when people jump into online classes believe that they need to create with something completely new and re-invent the wheel completely from scratch. Be reminded that you do not need to begin from scratch - particularly if you've already established an impressive B2C company.
• Do not "Ready to Fire, Ready, and 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 your course will fit into your larger enterprise model.
• Don't quit before the corner of success: An important factor to consider when it comes to starting out in the B2B marketplace is that you should not quit as you'll soon be one step closer to being successful. One deal, one seller or one salesperson may make your B2B offering a success.

The Lifetime Student Value Framework(tm)

This framework is composed of three components that are: Sales, Systems and students. By focusing on these areas, companies are able to manage and function at a high level as well as create meaningful customer experience. It starts by creating amazing content that resonates with your audience. After you've enrolled them it is important to make sure that you've got the proper methods in place for moving students from one product to the nextone, much like the stepping stone once they've become fans of your content. For this you'll need "systems at the front as well as backend that will identify the students and alert them at the right time," says Paul, to "incentivize them to purchase the next one" through creating memorable student experiences.

The framework is designed to help you support new students and ensures they have transformative experiences which allows you to supply students with additional items and services later on down the line. A lot of organizations and businesses have taken this route, pioneering online education methods and identifying great ways to acquire students.

The three ways to expand within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a successful customer strategy
2. Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and reduce the rate of churn
3. Utilizing certifications, accreditations and alliances to speed up expansion and increase your presence within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a Customer-Success Strategy

It's crucial to keep in mind that you are already performing amazing work within your business delivering the products and services you offer and knowledge. Incorporating online courses and online learning into your company is a way to create a strategy for your customers' success, complement your existing business with new services, increase the benefits for your customers and grow your business.

 What is HTML0 "Echosec Systems" implemented a customer success strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education center that is integrated into their employee onboarding process and serves a double purpose for their business.

The best questions to ask in evaluating the implementation of a customer success strategy are:

• How can you use classes to enhance your business?
• What purpose, role or problem could these courses help you solve within your organization?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to encourage customers to stay and to reduce churn

You already have a way that your business can benefit. An item, service, or method of helping customers, clients or students. Making an extra offer available can be a great way by to keep your customers and reduce the rate of churn. The use of courses is a good option to offer that added deal to customers as well as reduce the chance of them leaving your company.

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

In Lansa, the team was trying to solve an issue: despite the abundance of documentation written There was a need from their customers and potential customers for an official learning about their products. They needed help from their customers to learn how to make use of their platform.

Before implementing Plus, Lansa's team Lansa used a time-mentorship model to instruct the new users on how to use their product and share good methods. It would require a significant amount of time and resources when scaled.

• Recall that Lifetime Students Value Framework for a moment and its purpose of building an ecosystem: you want your students, customers, and customers to be supported with respect and in a positive manner that generates revenue for your business, and helps them stay in your system for longer. You want to create an overall experience that keeps your customers onboard and dedicated to your product or service.

Some good questions to think about while analyzing the concept of making use of the term "additional offer" to reduce churn in your organization include:

• Why are my customers currently going away, or are they outgrowing my company?
• What kind of course can I create in my business to help ease that

3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and alliances to speed up the growth of your business and broaden its reach into the B2B market

If your business has already grown, it is always beneficial to extend your reach and speed up your growth beyond the services you offer to your customers, students or customers through the use of courses and the introduction of certification, accreditation, and other partner programmes.

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

IntelyCare's team IntelyCare built an offer which was a complement to their business which was able to teach more than a million students effectively and quickly way. The team also utilized certificates and leveraged social media as crucial ways to support taking the class to its conclusion.

The key to success is incorporating an accreditation and certification into your B2B offering is an effective option to boost the expansion of your company within the B2B Market. Customers want to know something new, and they want to have evidence that they've completed their knowledge and retained the latest information to be able to use it for job purposes in addition to questions of compliance. The certificate provides an effective way to provide your customers and students with an opportunity to demonstrate the experience as well as the safety and conformity that they gained through your classes.

 How Keap increased growth and a wider reach beyond current business services by way of partnerships

As the Keap members were in charge of helping their customers implement their platform into their business They implemented a partner onboarding program using Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap was already a thriving platform, they were able to accelerate their growth by reaching to new markets, and tried to fit into new audiences they did not have access to by relying on their partners to be able to represent them and implement their platform for them through Partnerships.

The best questions to ask while analyzing the use of using accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate the growth of your business and extend your reach in the B2B market are:

• Which B2B acceleration route is the most suitable to my current business?
• Does my company stand to gain through Accreditations and Certifications or partnerships?

It's a challenge to develop and expand the B2B offerings at scale: Notes from the trenches with Simon Dunant

In the final part of our 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 with a strong experience in online education as well as more than 25 years of experience within the field of technology. Simon has led the network of online learning academies within Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform for non-profit marketing and fundraising, managing the creation, curation, and delivery of educational programs for customers and certification for partners of customers and their agency partners all over the globe.

Simon manages Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the company provide compliance and security education to employees. He has over 10-years of B2B and B2C expertise, including coaching, training, and mentoring coaching via in-person, online and online content for top global corporations and at conferences.

If you're looking to implement strategies for expanding and improving your B2B offering, Simon offers some tips from the viewpoint from someone who's gone through this experience in the past 4 years in online education both as a consultant as well as an employee who is responsible for online training delivery, building Engaging Network's customer education program beginning from scratch, and migrating to Plus in 2021.

What can online education do to be integrated into the company's goals

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company wanted to explore online education for customers and customers and. Initially, the company's vision was to offer the highest quality online education to customers that transformed their clients into experts of their software , enabling them to increase retention rates, find new clients, and reduce the time to onboard employees when they grew the company.

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

• In order to inform clients about their product and deliver best practices for their clients within a digital environment
• In order to educate clients on the use of their tools and platform to help them use the product efficiently and meet their goals as an organization.

One of the biggest problems for Engaging Networks was to be able to produce and deliver courses quickly 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 able to build and update courses in alignment with product feature releases to be able to educate their customers on the best ways to use them and ensure that courses are delivering value to the company.

Benefits of having an online academy
In terms of reducing onboarding times for Engaging Networks, starting an academy resulted in a reduced amount of work for account managers and Support teams. With an online academy, much of the repetitive training process that Support teams go through when they are onboarding customers can be avoided through the use of self-paced classes, which help account managers as well as Support teams to spend more 1-1 time with their customers.

Building a partner network with accreditation and certification

Engaging Networks built a community of nonprofits and marketing agencies interested in working together to help implement their platform. They built a partner network with the help of an online agency academy which was accredited and validate them.

The main benefits of partnership and accreditation:

• Accredited partners are a valuable resource in helping to implement an application, platform, or service and also in educating customers on the use of it.
• Accredited partners can assist their customers in delivering their ideas, as well as refer potential customers to businesses.

Accredited partners have been able to transform Engaging Networks' partner program. Previous to the implementation of an academy for agencies There was no established process to check the caliber of the partners Engaging Networks was delivering to their clients as well as being uncertain of the' customer experience was going to be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to train their partners, accredit and confirm them, and establish stronger connections with their partners. It allowed them to create solid partnerships with agencies that they knew worked with their tools, and were knowledgeable about the frameworks they use. They were confident that accredited partners now knew their platforms inside out as they had received certifications through their online academy training.

Starting your course from idea to instruction in a snap

When working with a larger company, you might need to work with a shorter timeframe to create a course on the introduction of a new service or product feature. With Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in order to build many course components at one time or upload bulk videos as well as create lesson plans in an outline format.

In the case of building your courses, you're capable of filming all your video content at the same time to upload them all at once, then build a course from start to finish with a tight time frame. It allows you to devote longer on the development of content part of your course while ensuring the course will deliver and meet the goals that you've laid out.

It is helpful to avoid having to spend too much time administering, hosting, and adjusting the platform, rather then focusing on the delivery of information through the information. This is made easier by the platform. procedure.

Moving from B2C to B2B

In the case of an B2C audience, the course can often be centered around one topic. If you are a creator of courses, you have more independence and a variety of stakeholders you have to respond to. On the B2B side you must be aware that when conducting any form of training services to another business, there is going to more department and individuals to report to. So, it is important to consider the company you are working with, or within. If you're an external consultant or an internal one that works within the B2B scenario will probably involve greater training and training processes, as well as a larger amount of classes and topics for training in addition to compliance requirements.

There are key distinctions between B2B and B2C

• You'll have a larger number of stakeholders managing a business you will have a wide range of stakeholders within the company that you will need to engage in conversations and discussions with. There may be a need to talk to the customer success managers within the organization as well as the marketing department and the support staff for customers, sales engineers, and sales teams to gather insight into how best to deliver training to clients.
• There is a possibility that you need to broaden the number of courses you offer when you sit at a table to design a class it is possible that you need change your approach to how you train a group of people on one topic. B2B is also able to offer a larger course inventory, and you may find that after your business with sees the value in a training course it will be looking to expand their inventory of training and courses accessible to multiple audiences, such as clients and employees, partners, as well as other groups.

A few tips for B2B content management

• Make use of a project management program to manage course content: For a B2B scenario, you might have to constantly update your content and courses in order to keep up with a businesses' changing requirements. It is beneficial to utilize the project management tools like Asana as well as Trello to track your courses and the content they contain along with changes that have been implemented over time and need to be made in the future.
• Try to cooperate in conjunction with internal teamswhen creating an B2B-focused course is essential to gain an understanding of the business' onboarding, retention practices, partnership programs, and customer education modes. Engaging with subject matter experts from the field who have specific knowledge can help you learn more about the courses and training that you are building. Inquiring about your "buy-in" and seeking their opinions that you can incorporate into your courses is a huge benefit in the development of your product.

Choose an LMS which can scale and grow to meet your needs

When Engaging Network had its previous LMS there was a lot of administration work to be done before creating courses. By using Plus as their brand new learning management system Simon is able to cut down on approximately 30 percent of his work time to put back into content creation.

Selecting an online platform for learning that is easy to use, adaptable as well as allowing you to create courses in a matter of minutes gives you more flexibility to grow your customer base and also have different learning areas or websites for students. Before the introduction of Plus, Engaging Networks had one large Academy which was a service for clients along with partners and various different stakeholders. Thanks to Plus, they've built a number of different academies to serve their clients and partners and concentrate on tailoring each learning experience for them.

Another advantage of Plus within a B2B scenario is that, through the implementation of different learning environments, you and several other stakeholders of the company are able to keep track of the progression of your clients, partners, and employees separately in their learning journey.

For instance: An HR manager can login to the platform and receive updates on the progress of employees who are going through the onboarding process. A Customer Success Manager is able to log into the platform's Learning Environment to help educate customers and track the learning progress of the business's customers.

Ideas for starting your very first B2B class

• Find a way to meet a company's biggest need. As you create your initial B2B offering, a key factor to consider is that your initial course should focus on the most pressing need of the business you're working with. For example: If the company you plan to sell your course is currently struggling with the onboarding process for employees, you should start there.
• Request feedback: Asking for feedback from your students and clients is among the best ways that you will be able to improve your next classes and improve your B2B offerings. Remember that launching your initial course is bound to cause some nervousness. Make an effort to ease this anxiety by doing your best you can for your first course. Continually asking for feedback from students and then implementing the feedback in the following version. This will allow you to continue to improve the quality of your teaching as you go along.
• Utilize surveys, focus groups as well as client check-ins. It is helpful to use surveys, focus groups, as well as communities for collecting feedback. In order to stay in contact with your clients and their demands, it assists to create a questionnaire for your clients every 6 months, to inquire about the experience they had with your classes and ways to better support them with content.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early On:

When you are constructing and launching your initial B2B service, be sure that you're getting data from your learners. Use reporting tools on the platform you use to track your students' progress and whether they are engaging with your classes, and note if there is any need to improve.

Important metrics should be considered are:

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

Recognizing pattern patterns within your report and measurements can provide insights into the way that your materials are performing with students and know when it's time to alter your approach. When using the platform allows you to download weekly reports so that you are able to remain on top of these data, and create a database of statistics.

What To Do To Stay On The Moving Forward In The Learning Journey

• Make suggestions on what you'd like to study next.
   A valuable way to grow and expand your B2B offer when you are expanding the range of courses you offer is to provide your learners with guidance regarding what to study next. In your course progress and completion pages, you are able provide suggestions for what courses your students should enroll in next to expand their knowledge of a certain area.
• Make your own ideas by using the App Store
   Another way to keep students active and engaged in their educational process is by exploring the App Store. There are a large number of applications that can let you diversify the educational experience of your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video, presentations, and quizzes.
• Incorporate micro-learning to keep students engaged  
   In a B2B setting, including micro-learning into your curriculum can keep students engaged. Try to aim to keep the videos you incorporate within your classes to a maximum of 15 minutes and to keep each course at a maximum of two hours. This will allow your students to continue their education with increased enthusiasm and keeps the completion rate of your students in a higher proportion.
• Make use of real-world case study examples
   Offering your students case studies and examples of the topics they have been learning about towards the end of the course will allow them to put their learnings into perspective and see the ways in which what they discovered can be used in a practical scenario.

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 the needs of their company.
• Your course must address an issue the prospective customer is facing currently. Set some KPIs for the course and describe the problem you're seeking to resolve in order to prove your course's value and the success of your course.
• Ask for feedback as you continue to refine and iterate your B2B offering after it's launched in the world.
• Think bigger and think of other course offerings and learning opportunities to your business, thereby expanding the scope of your expansion as a creator of courses in the process.
• Make sure to be a collaborative partner with your client. Make a a habit of keeping close the progress of reports