Growing your B2B Business Offering by partnering by partnering together with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant Get Ready and Review

Mar 23, 2022

Implementing a B2B model in your business or implementing the B2B model of sales can be an effective way to unlock higher levels of success for your business.

Our final meeting of the "Level Up by Plus" series was a conversation with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical strategies to increase and improve your B2B service.

In the event that you're an entrepreneurial in B2C seeking to move to the B2B selling model or are an integral part of a larger business that seeks to integrate online education in the product you offer, Paul's specific advice will help you understand specific B2B ways to begin.

The selling journey for B2B

Selling constantly is exhausting. If you're in charge of making online courses, it's not difficult to become hooked on "selling" and trying to increase your reach. It requires lots of time, effort as well as energy, particularly in the case of a large amount of tasks that involve selling a less expensive course.

To get out from sales cycle, you want to establish an effective sales process that is scalable to the needs of your business. This will help create constant changes to increase growth in the future and help build an integrated vision for all stakeholders involved.

Before you begin the procedure of creating or reinventing your B2B services, you should know the most common mistakes to avoid

  • Reinventing your wheel Make an effort to not reinvent the wheel. People who enroll in online courses believe they must create something completely new, and then reinvent the wheel completely all from beginning to finish. Remember that you don't have to do it all over again, especially in the case of a successful B2C business.
  • Don't "Ready, Fire, Aim": Once you choose a topic for your course, try to avoid waiting until the day after you have started the course to consider how it will integrate into your overall business structure.
  • Do not abandon your efforts until you've reached the apex of your success: The most important factor to consider when it comes to entering the B2B market is not to stop and take a step towards successful. Just one deal, one salesperson, or one salesperson may help your B2B business become a success.

The Lifetime Value of a Student Framework(tm)

The model is comprised of three pillars: Systems Sales, and students. When you focus on these three aspects, firms are in a position to function and operate at an optimum level as well as provide customers with meaningful experiences. The initial step is to produce content that is able to connect to the audience you are targeting. Once you've brought them in it is important to have the proper systems in place to move students from one thing to the next in a way that will help them progress when they've become an avid fan of your content. To accomplish this, you'll require "systems in 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 purchase the next product" through creating amazing student experience.

This framework was designed to assist you in supporting the new students who are entering your school and help them have transformative experience that allows the students to be provided with more items and services later on in the future. A lot of organizations and businesses have been on this journey and have pioneered online educational designs and discovered the most efficient ways to recruit students.

The three strategies to expand in the B2B market

  1. The implementation of a customer-success approach
  2. An additional offer to keep customers loyal and decrease the number of customers leaving. The implementation of an additional offer in order to maintain customers and cut down on customer churn.
  3. Making use of accreditations, certifications and partnerships to accelerate the expansion of your business and increase your presence in the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a Strategy for Customer Success

It is important to remember that you're making a difference within the way you provide your services, products, and knowledge. Incorporating online courses and online learning in your business will help you create an approach to your clients' satisfaction. It can also enhance your current business by offering fresh products and services, you can provide more value for your customers as well as increase the amount of money you make for your business.

What is HTML0 "Echosec Systems" put into place the customer-focused strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is integrated into the onboarding process for employees and serves two purposes to their company.

Some good questions to think over when pondering the implementation of an effective strategy for customers are:

  • Are you able to use the courses to complement your current business?
  • What function, purpose or challenge could this course help you solve within your organization?

   2. Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and increase the probability of them returning

There is already a method for you to assist your business. An item, service, or method to help your customers, clients or students. Giving additional services to your customers can be a great way by to keep your customers , and lower the probability of losing them. Training courses can be an excellent way to provide an additional incentive for your customers and lowering chances that they will leave your company.

How Lansa, a low-code development platform, used to implement"the "additional service"

In Lansa The Lansa team Lansa was able to resolve an issue: despite a extensive amount of documentation in the past, there was a need from potential customers as well as customers for a formal learning of their platform. They needed assistance from their customers in order to understand how they could use their system.

Before implementing Plus Lansa's team, Lansa used the technique of time-mentorship to help novice users in how to utilize their software and to share their best practices. This could take a huge amount of time as well as resources on an enormous amount.

  • Consider thinking about your Lifetime Student Value Framework, and consider its goal to create a positive environment. It is important for your students, customers and customers to be able to trust that they are being supported by a genuine and healthy way . The result is a profit to your company, and helps them stay in your system for longer. It's important to give the best possible experience to ensure that customers are committed to your product or service.

The best questions to think about in evaluating the procedure of using the phrase "additional deal" to lower churn within your business include:

  • My customers are leaving or are they growing my business?
  • What sort of training course could I create in my personal firm to reduce the strain?

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

Although your business may be expanding, it's always beneficial to expand your reach and speed up your growth beyond the services that you can provide your customers, clients, or clients by utilizing courses or certification, accreditation along with a partners programs.

How IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded capabilities above the existing offerings to businesses with the aid of certification and accreditation

The IntelyCare team IntelyCare created an offering which was compatible to the offerings of the company in addition to being equipped to teach more than a million students in a speedy and efficient manner. They also used certificates and utilized social media as important forms of supporting the process of learning.

Important Learning: Incorporating the certification or accreditation into your B2B product is a good method to speed up your business's growth within market B2B Market. People want to learn about something they've not heard of before they want proof that they've completed their studies and are able to keep up-to-date knowledge to use it for job purposes, as well as concerns about the law. An official certificate can be a concrete means to present your students and customers with the opportunity to prove the knowledge, expertise, and compliance that you taught them through your courses.

What exactly is HTML0? Keap an increase in growth and wider coverage beyond the current business offerings by forming partnership

Because the Keap partners were responsible to assist their clients in integrating their platform into their business and partner onboarding program by using Plus.

The most important lesson is that Keap already operated a highly profitable platform, they were able to increase the size of their company by expanding their reach into new markets and trying to reach different audiences that they didn't had access to. They relied on their partners to be able to represent them and implement their platform by way of Partnerships.

The best questions to ask yourself when you reflect regarding the process of using certifications, accreditations, and alliances to speed up expansion and enhance your visibility on the B2B market are:

  • Which B2B accelerator is most appropriate for my business?
  • Does my company stand to gain through Accreditations and certifications, or partnership?

What it's like to develop and extend B2B services at a huge scale: The pits of Simon Dunant

The third part of the Level Up with Plus session at the end of the program in which we discussed the topic in conversation with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is a frequent user of Plus with extensive experience in online education as well as more than 25 years of expertise in the technology industry. Simon has served as the head of the group of Academies of online learning for Engaging Networks. It's the most popular SaaS platform for fundraising and marketing, directing the creation, curation and distribution of learning programs for customers and certification for partners of customers and agencies around the globe.

Simon is the manager of staff academy of the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security training to employees. Simon has more than 10-years of experience in B2B as well as B2C experience in coaching, training and mentoring coaching through in-person, online and online information for major corporations as well as at conference.

If you're looking to come up with strategies to increase and enhance your B2B service, Simon offers some tips from the point of view of someone who's been through the past four years of online education in both a consulting role as well as an employee who was responsible for training online. He's also developed the customer education department within Engaging Network from the ground from the ground up, and then transferring to Plus in 2021.

What is online education and how can it be used to fit into company vision

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company determined to enter the world of online education for customers as well as its partners. The initial goal for the company was to offer an online, scalable customer education that turned customers into expert users of their application , enabling them to increase retention rates, acquire new customers, and cut down on the time that employees are required to onboard when they grew the company.

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

  • In order to inform clients about their offerings and offer the best practices to their customers in a digital context
  • to educate customers on how to use the tools and platforms for them to use the tools effectively to achieve the objectives of their company.

One of the biggest challenges that Engaging Networks had to face was to be capable of offering classes on a rapid basis, due to of their rapid course development cycle as well as the regular updates to features that occur each 6 to 8 weeks. It was crucial that they were adept at making and updating the content of their courses according to features in order that allow them to train their customers on how to utilize them and make sure that they are delivering benefits to the business.

Benefits of having an online academy As it relates to reducing the time required in the process of onboarding new clients for Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and support teams. A virtual academy means that the long training process that support teams undergo when welcoming new clients might be cut out through the use of self-paced training courses. It will allow account administrators as well as support teams to have more one-on-one sessions with customers.

The establishment of a network of partner through accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community made up of non-profits and marketing agencies that want to collaborate in developing their network. They built a partner network through the use of an online academy specifically for professionals from agencies that could be accredited and verified.

One of the most significant benefits of partnerships and accreditation:

  • Accredited partners can be a useful resource in helping implement a platform, product, or service, and teach users how to utilize it.
  • Accredited partners can aid their clients to complete their goals in a timely manner, and can also recommend clients to companies.

Accredited partners may enhance Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the establishment of an academy for agencies there was no way to guarantee the high quality of the partner that the business provided to clients. They weren't sure of what the experiences to be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to educate their partners, credit and validate them, as well as improve their relationship with their partners. They were able to establish an extensive network of partners through firms that had a good understanding of on their platform and knew their platform. They felt certain that the partners they had accredited were now familiar with their software in detail because they had been certified through the academy online course.

Taking your course from conception through learning quickly

If you are large-scale enterprises there is the possibility to have a time limit to develop a course around the introduction of a novel service or product function. With Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer in order to build a variety of course components at one time and upload video in bulk as well as create lesson plans in an outline format.

If you decide to utilize the platform to develop your course, you'll have the ability to record all your video content at the same time to upload them simultaneously, and build a course from scratch to finish , with a predetermined time frame. This allows you to spend longer on the development of content in the course, while making sure the course is able to fulfill the objectives you have outlined.

It's beneficial to not the time spent administering the hosting and editing of the platform, instead of focussing on the sharing of knowledge you've learned through the writing of your content. The platform facilitates this process.

The transition to B2C B2B

In the case of people who are B2C in their audience, the course can usually be designed around one particular area. When you are a course developer, has more flexibility and a variety of stakeholders to report to. For B2B purposes, it is important to consider the fact that if you're conducting any form of training delivery for other organizations, you will have many departments and individuals to answer to. Therefore, it's important to consider the company that you collaborate with as well as within. Whatever your role, whether external consultant or an internal employee, operating in a B2B setting could require greater process of training and education in addition to more subjects as well as courses. It could also involve the need to meet the requirements of compliance.

Key differences between B2C and B2B

  • There will be a greater range of stakeholders to deal with: when working with an organization, you'll have a wide range of employees within the organization who you need to discuss and have conversations with. You may need to talk to the customers' success management in the company as well as marketing personnel and support staff for customers and sales engineers and sales personnel to get insights about the best way to provide the right training for clients.
  • There is a possibility that you need to broaden your inventory of courses: When you are sitting in the middle of designing a course, you may have change your mindset on how to teach a class of students regarding a certain subject. B2B is also able to provide a wide range of courses which means you could find that after your business with sees the value in the training program they will want for ways to broaden their range of training and courses that are available to a variety of users, including clients, partners, employees as well as other kinds of audience.

Content management strategies for B2B

  • Use a project management software to manage course content the B2B context, you may require regular updates to your content and courses in order to keep up with changing business requirements. It's beneficial to use tools to manage projects such as Asana as well as Trello to track your classes and the material they include, as well as any changes that occur over time, and will require changes at a later date.
  • Try to cooperate in conjunction with your internal team members when developing B2B courses is essential to gain an understanding of the business's onboarding and customer retention methods, partnership programs, and education modes. Talking to experts in the subject from the business who are experts in their field and have particular expertise can help you gain insights for your courses and training you're creating. Asking about their "buy-in" and soliciting their suggestions for your course will be a big asset to the creation of your course.

Choose an LMS that can scale and adapt to your needs.

With Engaging Network's previous LMS there was a lot of administration work to be completed before creating classes. Utilizing Plus as their brand-new Learning Management System Simon has been able to decrease around 30 percent of his work time, and use it in creating new content.

Selecting an online platform to conduct education that is user-friendly as well as flexible enough to allow you to build courses rapidly gives you the flexibility of growing the number of customers they serve as well as have distinct places for teaching your students. Prior to becoming part of Plus, Engaging Networks had an enormous Academy, which offered services to clients as well as partners and diverse stakeholders. With Plus, they've been able to build several various academies for their stakeholders and focus specifically on tailoring every learning experience for them.

Another benefit of Plus for use in a B2B environment is that with the creation of various learning environments, the company as well as employees of the organization can monitor the progress of clients, partners, and employees separately in their learning journey.

For instance, an HR manager can log on to the platform and receive notifications on the progress of employees who are going through the process of onboarding. Additionally, a Customer Success Manager has the ability to log into the learning area of the platform for customer education and track the progress made by clients of the business.

Considerations For launching your initial B2B-based training

  • Discover a method to satisfy the biggest needs of a business When you are building your very first B2B product The most crucial thing to take into consideration is that your first program must focus on the top need of your target company the company you're working for. For instance, if your business that you want to market your course to struggles with the process of onboarding employees. Then start there.
  • Ask for feedback from your students and clients Inquiring for feedback from clients and your students could be among the most effective ways you'll be able to improve your next courses and enhance the quality of your B2B products. Make sure you are aware that the initial class can bring a sense of stress. Make sure you are prepared by doing your best in your initial course. You should be constantly soliciting the feedback of your students and applying it for the next time. This will allow you to improve the quality of your teaching as you go along.
  • Make use of focus groups, surveys as well as check-ins with clients The best way to collect feedback is to use surveys, focus groups in addition to communities to gather feedback. To keep in contact with your clients and their demands, it also helps to send out a questionnaire to your customers every six months to ask them about their experience in your training and methods to help them better with your content.

The KeepingTrack Of Reporting early On:

While you're constructing and launching your B2B service, be sure you're collecting the data of your pupils. Utilize reporting tools in your learning platform online to monitor the development of your students and how they're engaging to the material in your classes, and to determine where there's areas to improve.

Some important metrics that you should pay attention to include:

  • Students who are registered
  • Course Enrolments
  • The amount of courses have been started
  • The number of courses that have been successfully completed
  • Complementary Cost
  • The last login for the student.

Noticing trends in the reports as well as measurements can reveal information on how well your teaching materials perform with students and know the time to make adjustments. With the help of the platform, you can download weekly reports in order to be on top of the data and create an inventory of the measures.

Tips to Keep Your Learning Experience In Your Mind

  • Offer suggestions about the things you'd like to learn next.
       One of the easiest methods to expand and enhance your B2B services to broaden your offerings is to supply your students with a roadmap of what they'll need to know next. When you create your course progress and completion pages it is possible to suggest what courses your students should follow next to increase their knowledge on the subject they are interested in.
  • Get creative using the App Store
       Another way to keep students actively engaged and involved to their studies is to look into the App Store. There is a wide range of applications that can allow you to diversify the educational experiences of your students and extend it beyond video, text presentations, quizzes, and other classes.
  • Incorporate micro-learning to ensure that the students are fully active    
       In a B2B context, including micro-learning into your curriculum is a great way to keep your students' attention. Make sure that you keep the videos you incorporate within your classes to an maximum of fifteen minutes and that each class is to a maximum of 2 hours. This will allow your students to keep on their path of learning with greater enthusiasm and ensure that you keep your completion rate for your students in a higher percentage.
  • Use real-world cases to study examples
       Offering your students cases research as well as examples of the topics they've learned about toward the end of the course allows them to put their education on the line and think about how what they have learned applies in a real-world context.

Important Takeaways to Build Your Online Learning Education Strategy

  • Build the course. Make it clear to prospective customers that you're valued for what you have to offer and that the course you offer is able to achieve the objectives of the clients they serve.
  • Be sure that your course is addressing any issue the prospective student is currently confronting. Establish specific KPIs for your course, and define the problem you're looking to address to demonstrate that the worth and effectiveness of your course.
  • Find feedback from customers in order to continue improving and iterate your B2B offering after it's launched in the world.
  • 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 by the result.
  • Be sure to keep the entire process co-operative with your client. Also, keep a close track of reporting

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