Implementing a B2B model in your company or moving into a B2B sales model can be a useful method to unlock new levels of achievement for your company.

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

If you're an entrepreneur working in B2C seeking to move to the B2B selling model or are an integral part of a larger business that is trying to include online education in your product offerings Paul's concrete guidance will give you concrete B2B methods to start.

The selling journey for B2B

Constantly selling is exhausting. If you're in the business of making online courses, it's easy to get addicted to "selling" and trying to increase your reach. It takes a lot of effort, time as well as energy, particularly in the case of a large amount of work that involves selling a less expensive course.

To get out from the cycle of selling, you want to establish a sales system that scales to the needs of your company. This will help create constant conversions for long-term growth and help build an integrated vision for all stakeholders involved.

Prior to starting in the process of creating or re-inventing your B2B service Here are some typical errors to avoid

• Reinventing your wheel Make an effort to avoid reinventing the wheel. When people get into online courses believe that they need to create something new and reinvent the wheel completely from scratch. Remember that you don't have to start over - especially if you've built a strong B2C business.
• Do not "Ready, Fire, Aim": Once you select a course topic, try to avoid waiting until after the start of the course before you consider how the course can fit into your larger enterprise structure.
• Don't give up until you've reached the edge of success: The most important factor to consider when it comes to entering the B2B market is not to give up and you'll be just one step closer to success. A single deal, one seller, or one salesperson may make your B2B offering a success.

The Lifetime Student Value Framework(tm)

The model is comprised of 3 pillars: Systems, Sales, and Students. Through focusing on these aspects businesses are able to be able to operate and run at an optimum level and provide meaningful customer experiences. The first step is to create excellent content that is able to connect to your target audience. Once you've brought them in it is important to make sure you have the right systems in place to move students from one item to another, as a stepping stone, once they've become an avid fan of your content. In order to do this you'll need "systems at the front as well as backend that will identify the students and alert them at the right moment," Paul says. Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize customers to buy the next product" by creating great student experiences.

The framework is designed to help you support new students coming in and supports them having transformational experiences which allows you to supply your students with more items and services later on down the line. Many companies and organizations have already walked this path and have pioneered online educational models and finding the most effective ways to acquire students.

The three strategies to expand in the B2B market

1. Implementing a customer-success strategy
2. The implementation of an additional offer to keep customers loyal and decrease the number of customers who leave.  Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and reduce churn
3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate the growth of your business and extend your reach within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a Customer-Success Strategy

It is important to remember that you're performing amazing work within the way you provide your products, services, and knowledge. Incorporating online courses and online learning into your enterprise can help you develop a strategy for your customers' satisfaction, and to complement your existing business with new products, provide more worth for your clients, and increase the size of your company.

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

Echosec Systems created a customer education academy that is now also an integral part of their employee onboarding process and has a dual purpose to their company.

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

• Are you able to use the courses to complement your existing business?
• What function, purpose or issue could the course solve 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. An item, service, or form of helping your customers, clients or students. Offering additional services is a good way through which you can retain your customers , and lower the rate of churn. Training courses can be a great method of providing that extra incentive to your clients, and reduce the likelihood of them leaving your business.

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

In Lansa The team at Lansa tried to address an issue: despite a large amount of documentation written, there was a demand from customers and prospective customers for a formal learning of their platform. They needed help from their customers to learn how to use their system.

Prior to using Plus Lansa's team Lansa utilized the time-mentorship method to guide the new users on how to use their product and also share the best practices. This could take a huge amount of time, and also resources in a large scale.

• Take a moment to think about your Lifetime student Value Framework for a moment and consider its goal of creating an environment: You want your students, customers, and clients to feel supported by a genuine and healthy way . This also generates income for your business, and keep them in your system for longer. It is important to provide an overall experience that ensures that your customers are dedicated to your product or service.

Some good questions to think about in evaluating the process of using the term "additional deal" to decrease churn your company include:

• My customers are moving away or growing my business?
• What kind of course can I develop in my own business to ease the burden?

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

Even if your business is growing already, it is always beneficial to extend your reach and speed up your growth beyond the services you offer to your students, clients, or clients through the use of courses and using accreditation, certification, as well as partner program.

 How IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded capabilities beyond the current offerings for business with the help of accreditation and certification

The IntelyCare team IntelyCare created an offering that was in line with the company's offerings as well as capable of teaching more than a million students quickly and efficiently manner. They also used certificates and leveraged social media as important forms of supporting the learning process.

Important Learning: Including the certification or accreditation into your B2B offering is an effective method to speed up your business's growth in the B2B Market. Customers want to know things they have never heard of, and want to have evidence that they have finished their education and are able to retain the latest information to be able to use it for job purposes, as well as questions of compliance. A certificate is a tangible way for you to provide your customers and students with the opportunity to prove the expertise, safety, and compliance that they gained through your classes.

 What is HTML0? Keap increased growth and a wider coverage beyond the current business offerings by forming partnership

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

The key lesson: Because Keap already operated a highly successful platform, they increased the growth of their business by extending to new markets, and tried to fit into new audiences they did not have access to. They relied on their partners to be able to represent them and implement their platform by way of Partnerships.

Some good questions to think about when reflecting on the practice of using certifications, accreditations, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence in the B2B market include:

• What B2B accelerator path is the most suitable to my current business?
• Does my company stand to gain through Accreditations and Certifications or partnerships?

What it's like to develop and expand the B2B offerings on a massive 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 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 more than 25 years of experience within the tech industry. Simon has been the leader of the group of online learning academy academies for Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing, directing the creation, curation, and delivery of educational programs for customers and certification for partners of customers as well as agency partners around the world.

Simon manages the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security training through employees. Simon has over 10 years of B2B as well as B2C experience: coaching, training, and mentoring coaching through in-person, online and online content for top global corporations and at conferences.

If you're trying to develop methods to expand and improve your B2B offering, Simon offers some tips from the viewpoint of someone who's been through the four years of online training both as a consultant as well as an employee in charge of training online, developing the customer education department at Engaging Network from the ground up and migrating to Plus by 2021.

What can online education do to fit into company vision

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company was keen to dive into the world of online education for its customers as well as partners. The initial goal of the company was to provide scalable online customer education which transformed customers into experts of their software , enabling them to increase retention rates, attract new clients, and reduce the amount of time employees spend on onboarding when they grew the company.

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

• In order to inform clients about their products and provide best practices for their clients in a digital context
• to train customers 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 major issues faced by Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering classes quickly, because of their fast-paced course development cycle as well as the regular product feature releases every 6 to 8 weeks. It was imperative for the company to be capable of creating and updating course content in accordance with features to be able to educate their customers on how to utilize them and make sure that they are delivering value to the company.

Benefits of having an online academy
As it relates to cutting down the time to onboard to 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 many of the tedious learning process Support teams must go through while taking on new clients could be eliminated through the use of self-paced training courses. This will help account managers as well as Support teams to have more one-on-one time with clients.

Establishing a network of partners through accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community made up of non-profits and marketing agencies who are interested in working together to develop their platform. They built a partner network with the help of an academy online for agency professionals that could accredit and verify them.

The most important advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners are a valuable resource in helping implement a platform, product, or service, and train users on how to use it.
• Accredited partners are able to help their clients deliver their projects, as well as refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners could improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the establishment of an academy for agencies There was no established way to ensure the quality of the partners that the business provided to its clients, and they were uncertain of the will experience to be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to train their partners, accredit and verify them, and strengthen their relationships with them. This allowed them to build a strong partner network through companies that they were aware of working using their software and also were familiar with their platforms. They felt confident that their accredited partners now knew their platform inside out because they were certified through the online academy course.

Taking your course from conception to learning, quickly

In the case of a bigger enterprise, it is possible to be given a limited time to create a course on the introduction of a new service or product function. With Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer in order to create many course components at one time, bulk upload videos, and create lessons in a list form.

If you use the platform to create your course, you'll be able to film all of your video content at the same time to upload them all at once, then develop a course from scratch to finish , with a predetermined time frame. This allows you to spend more time on the creation of the material that's included in the course, while making sure the course will deliver and meet the goals you have outlined.

It's beneficial to not the time spent administering, hosting, and tweaking the platform instead of focusing on sharing the knowledge you have gained through your written content. The platform helps facilitate this procedure.

The transition from B2C B2B

When working with a B2C audience, the course can usually be designed around one area. Being a course designer there is more freedom and different stakeholders to answer to. On the B2B side It is crucial to think about the fact that if you're offering any type of training delivery for another organization There will be more departments and people to answer to. So, it is important to consider the company that you work with or inside. No matter if you're an outside consultant or internal, working in a B2B environment will most likely require greater training and training processes, as well as a larger amount of subjects and courses, and may involve the need to meet compliance standards.

Key differences between B2C and B2B

• You will have a wider range of stakeholders to deal with: when working with 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 along with sales engineers as well as sales personnel to get insights on how to best deliver training to clients.
• There is a possibility that you need to broaden your inventory of courses: When you are sitting 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 is also able to offer an extensive course catalog which means you could end up finding that once your business with sees the value in the training program it will be looking to expand their inventory of training and courses available to multiple users like clients, partners, employees, and various other types of audiences.

Strategies for B2B content management

• Use a project management software for managing course content In the B2B environment, you could need to regularly update your courses and content in order to keep up with a businesses' changing demands. It is beneficial to utilize tools for managing projects like Asana as well as Trello to keep track of your courses and the content they contain and also the changes made over time, and will require changes later on.
• Try to cooperate in conjunction with internal team members: when developing B2B courses is essential to gain an understanding of the businesses' onboarding and customer retention methods, partnership programs, and education modes. Speaking to subject matter experts within the industry who possess specialization will allow you to gain insights for your courses and training you're creating. Inquiring about their "buy-in" and soliciting their input for your course will be a big asset in the development of your product.

Selecting an LMS that can scale and grow with you

With Engaging Network's previous LMS, there was more administration work to be completed before creating classes. By using Plus as their brand new learning management system Simon is able to cut down on approximately 30% of his time to be able to invest it in creating content.

Selecting an online platform for learning which is user-friendly, flexible and lets you develop courses quickly gives the flexibility of growing the number of customers you service, as well as have distinct learning spaces or sites to teach your students. Prior to joining Plus, Engaging Networks had one huge Academy which was a service for clients along with partners and various different stakeholders. Through Plus, they've been able to build several various academies for their stakeholders and focus specifically on tailoring each learning experience to them.

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

In this instance, an HR manager could login to the platform and get updates on the progress of employees who are going through the onboarding process. Likewise, a Customer Success Manager is able to log into the platform's learning environment for customer education and track the progress made by the businesses' customers.

Considerations For launching your first B2B training

• Find a way to meet a company's' largest need: As you build your first B2B service, the most important factor to consider is that your initial course should focus on the most pressing need of your target company you're working with. As an example, suppose your business that you want to market your course to is struggling to handle employee onboarding, then start there.
• Get feedback from your students and clients: Asking for comments from your students and clients can be one of the most effective ways you will be able to improve your next courses and continue to improve the quality of your B2B products. Be aware that the first course can cause an element of anxiety. Be prepared by doing your best that you can during your initial course. You should be constantly soliciting feedback from your students, and implementing it to the next time. This allows you to continue to improve the quality of your teaching as you go along.
• Use surveys, focus groups, and 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 needs, it also helps to implement a survey to your customers every six months, to inquire about their experiences with your course and ways to help them better with your information.

The KeepingTrack Of Reporting early On:

When you are constructing and launching your initial B2B product, ensure that you're getting data from your students. Use reporting tools on your online learning platform to track the progress of your students, and how they're engaging with the content in your lessons, and also to determine where there's areas to improve.

Important metrics you can pay attention to 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
• Last login of the student

Noticing trends in the reports as well as measurements can provide information about how your materials are performing with students and know the time to make adjustments. When using the platform it is possible to download weekly reports in order to stay on top of these data, and create an inventory of the metrics.

How To Keep The Learning Journey In Mind

• Offer suggestions about what you'd like to know next.
   One of the best ways to increase and improve your B2B offerings in order to expand your course offerings is to supply your students with a roadmap of what they should learn next. On your course progression and completion pages, you'll be able suggest what courses your students should take next in order to increase their knowledge on a specific topic.
• Make your own ideas using the App Store
   Another way to keep students active and engaged in their learning process is to look into an App Store. There is a wide range of applications that can allow you to diversify the learning experiences for your students and extend it beyond video, text, presentation, and quiz courses.
• Integrate micro-learning into ensure that students are engaged  
   In an B2B scenario, using micro-learning into your curriculum can retain students' attention. It is best to make sure that you keep the videos you incorporate within your classes to an maximum of fifteen minutes and to keep each course at a maximum of 2 hours. It will enable your students to continue their journey of learning with greater enthusiasm and keeps your completion rates for your students in a higher proportion.
• Make use of real-world case study examples
   Providing your students with cases studies as well as examples of the topics they have been learning about towards the end of your course allows them to put their learnings to the test and consider the way in which what they have learned applies in a real-world context.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Build the course. Make it clear to prospective clients that you are worth what you offer and that your course is able to meet the business goals of their clients.
• Make sure your course addresses a problem that the potential client is currently facing Set certain KPIs for your course, and define the problem you're seeking to resolve so that you can prove the value and success of your course.
• Get feedback from users and continue to improve and iterate your B2B offering after it's launched in the world.
• Begin to think bigger, and think of other course offerings and learning opportunities for your company, and expand the scope of your growth as a course creator as a result.
• Make sure to make the process collaborative with your client and make a habit of keeping close track of reporting