Implementing a B2B model within your organization or transitioning into a B2B sales model is a great approach to get to the next level of success in your business.

The last time we had a session in our "Level Up with Plus" series, we talked about the topic with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They discussed practical and concrete methods to expand and improve your B2B offerings.

You may be an entrepreneur working in B2C trying to shift to a B2B selling model or are an integral part of a larger business that is trying to incorporate online learning in your product offerings, Paul's tangible guidance will give you practical B2B methods to start.

The selling journey for B2B

Constantly selling is exhausting. If you are involved in making online courses It is easy to fall addicted to "selling" and trying to expand your audience. This requires a significant amount of effort, time as well as energy, particularly when a lot of effort is put into selling a cheaper course.

To break out of the selling cycle it is important to create an effective sales process that grows with your business. It will ensure that you have regular conversions that will support your long-term growth and help build an unified perspective for all parties involved.

Prior to starting by constructing or refining the B2B product Here are some typical mistakes to avoid:

• Reinventing your wheel Make an effort to stop yourself from making a fresh start. A lot of times, when people dive into online learning believe that they need to create something new and reinvent the wheel entirely. Be reminded that you do not need to begin from scratch - especially if you've built a strong B2C business.
• Don't "Ready fire, aim, or ready": Once you have chosen a topic for your course, try to avoid waiting until the day after you launch your course to think about how the course can be integrated into the larger business plan.
• Do not give up before you reach the point of your success: A crucial factor to consider when it comes to starting out in the B2B marketplace is to not give up as you'll soon be one step closer to success. A single contract, one vendor, or even one salesperson could be the key to making your B2B business a success.

The Lifetime Value of a Student Framework(tm)

The model is comprised of three pillars: Systems, Sales, and students. By focusing on these areas businesses are able to run and operate at scale as well as create meaningful customer experience. It starts by creating great content that connects to your target audience. When you've got them on board You'll need to ensure that you've got the proper methods in place for moving students from one product to another, as a stepping stone, once they have become a fan of your material. For this it is necessary to have "systems both on the front and back end that can detect and trigger students at the right time," says Paul, to "incentivize students to buy the next product" by creating great student experience.

This framework helps support your newly enrolled students. It also ensures they have transformative experiences so you can provide students with additional products and services down the down the. A lot of organizations and businesses have already walked this path in the past, establishing online education strategies and discovering the most effective acquisition strategies.

Three strategies to expand in the B2B market

1. Implementing a customer-success strategy
2. Implementing an additional offer to keep customers loyal and decrease the rate of churn  Implementing an additional offer to retain customers and reduce churn
3. Utilizing certifications, accreditations as well as partnerships to boost the growth of your business and extend your reach in the B2B market

1. Implementing a Customer Success Strategy

It is important to remember that you are already performing amazing work within your business delivering the products and services you offer as well as your expertise. The incorporation of online and on-line learning into your company can help you develop an approach to your clients' satisfaction, and to complement the existing offerings of your business by adding new services, increase the benefits for your customers and expand your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" executed a successful customer strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education center that is integrated into the new process for onboarding employees and has a dual purpose to their company.

Some good questions to think about while implementing an effective customer strategy include:

• Are you able to use the classes to enhance your business?
• What role, function or problem could these courses 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. A service, product, or method of helping customers, students or clients. Making an extra offer available can be a great way by how you will retain your customers and reduce the rate of churn. The use of courses is a good option to offer that added offer for your customers, as well as reduce the chance that they will leave your company.

 What is HTML0? Lansa is a development platform that uses low-code. platform implemented the "additional offer"

At Lansa The team at Lansa had to resolve the issue that arose: despite having a large amount of written documentation, there was a demand from their customers and potential customers for an official learning about their products. Their customers needed help learning how to make use of their platform.

Previous to using Plus the staff at Lansa was using an approach of time-mentorship to teach prospective customers how to use their software and share best practices. This would take a large amount of time, and also resources in a large scale.

• Think back to the Lifetime Student Value Framework for a moment and its purpose of building an ecosystem. You would like your students, customers, and potential customers to feel comfortable by a genuine and healthy manner that generates revenue for your business, and helps them stay in your systems longer. It is important to provide an experience that is holistic and will keep your clients on board and committed to your product or service.

The best questions to ask while analyzing the concept of applying the term "additional deal" to cut down on churn within your company include:

• Why are my customers currently moving away or growing my business?
• What program could I design in my company to ease the burden?

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

If your business is growing already and expanding, it's always beneficial to expand your reach and accelerate your growth beyond the services you offer to students, customers, or clients through the use of courses and using certification, accreditation, and other partner program.

 What is HTML0? IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded reach beyond current business offerings through certification and accreditation

IntelyCare's team IntelyCare created an offering that was complementary to their company which was able to teach half a million people in a quick and efficient way. They also used certificates and social media to provide important forms of supporting the learning process.

Key Learning: Incorporating certification and accreditation in your B2B offering is an effective option to boost the expansion of your company in the B2B Market. Customers want to know something newand would like to prove that they've completed their knowledge and retained the latest information to be able to use it for job purposes and concerns regarding compliance. A certificate is an easy way to give your clients and students with the opportunity to demonstrate the experience, safety, and compliance that they gained through your courses.

 How Keap accelerated growth and expanded coverage beyond the current business services by forming partnerships

As the Keap partners were responsible for helping their customers implement the platform within their own businesses They implemented a partnership onboarding program that used Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap already operated a successful platform, they accelerated its growth by expanding to new markets, and tried to appeal to new customers that they had no access to by relying on their partners to be able to stand up for them and implement their platform via Partnerships.

Some good questions to think about while analyzing the use of using certifications, accreditations, and partnerships to accelerate expansion and increase your presence within the B2B marketplace include:

• Which B2B acceleration route is the most suitable for my company right now?
• Does my company stand to gain from Certificates and Accreditations, or partnerships?

What it's like to develop and expand a B2B offering in a large scale: notes from the trenches with 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 over 25 years experience in the field of technology. Simon is the director of 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 execution of education for customers and certification for partners of customers as well as agency partners around the world.

Simon also runs the Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security education to employees. He has over 10-years of B2B as well as B2C expertise, including mentorship, training, as well as coaching through in-person, online, and on-demand content at major global conferences and companies.

If you're considering implementing strategies to grow and iterate the B2B services you offer, Simon offers some tips from the point of view of someone who's been through the experience over four years of online education both as a consultant as well as an employee responsible for training online, developing Engaging Network's customer education program starting from scratch before relocating to Plus by 2021.

What online learning options can fit into company goals

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company was eager to get into educational online for both customers and associates. The initial goal of the company was to deliver scalable online customer education which transformed customers into experts of their application to improve retention rates, find new customers, and cut down on employee onboarding time while they expanded the business.

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

• To educate clients about their product and deliver top practices to their clients in a digital context
• to train customers in the usage of their platform and tools to enable them to use their product effectively and achieve their goals as an organization.

One of the major problems for Engaging Networks was to be able to produce and deliver courses quickly due to their fast-paced course development cycle as well as the regular release of new features every 6-8 weeks. It was crucial for the company to be in a position to create and modify courses in alignment with product release dates in order to teach their customers the best ways to use them and to ensure that the courses were providing value to the enterprise.

The benefits of an online academy
As it relates to cutting down time for onboarding in Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and Support teams. With an online academy, much of the repetitive instruction that support teams must go through while taking on new clients could be eliminated with the implementation of self-paced classes, which enable account managers and support teams to spend more 1-on-1 time with their customers.

Building a partner network by establishing accreditation and certification programs

Engaging Networks built a community made up of non-profits and marketing agencies looking to collaborate to help implement their platform. They built a partner network by implementing an academy for agencies online that could accredit and verify their members.

The most important advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners can play a key role in the implementation of the platform, product or service, and train clients on its use.
• Accredited partners can help their clients deliver their plans in addition to referring potential customers to businesses.

Accredited partners were able to improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the introduction of the academy for agency partners There was no established process to check the caliber of the partners Engaging Networks provided to its clients They were also not sure of their customers' customer experience was going to be like.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to train their partners, as well as accredit and verify them, and establish stronger connections with their partners. This allowed them to build solid partnerships with agencies that they knew worked using their software and also were familiar with the frameworks they use. They believed that the they had a network of accredited partners who knew their system inside and out since they were certified through their academy online training.

Beginning your training from conception to learning, quickly

If you are working for a large enterprise, it is possible to have a short time frame to develop a course around an innovative product or service characteristic. When using Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in the event that you want to develop several course modules at once and upload video in bulk and create lessons in the form of a list.

If you use the platform to create your courses, you are in a position to record all your videos in one go then upload them and build a course from start to end with a strict deadline. It allows you to devote longer on the development of content going to be in the course and ensure that it is going to deliver and meet the goals that you've set out.

It's beneficial to not the time spent managing, hosting and tweaking the platform rather instead of focusing on sharing information through the content. The platform assists in this process.

Transitioning from B2C B2B

If you are working with an B2C audience, courses can often be centered around one subject. Being a course designer You have greater autonomy and a variety of stakeholders you have to respond to. For B2B purposes It is crucial to think about the fact that if you're providing any kind of training for another company, there is going to more department and individuals to report to. Therefore, you have to consider the company that you work with or even within. Whether you are an outside consultant or an internal one, working in the B2B context will likely involve more training activities, a larger amount of courses and training topics, and may involve compliance requirements.

There are key differences between B2C and B2B

• You'll have a larger number of stakeholders you work for a company, you'll have a array of internal stakeholders that you will need to engage with and engage with. There may be a need to talk to the customer success managers at the firm, the marketing team, the customer support team as well as sales engineers and sales representatives to gain insight into how best to provide training for clients.
• There is a possibility that you need to broaden your inventory of courses when you sit in the middle of planning a course and you're planning to teach a class, you might need to get into a different approach to how you train a group of people in a specific area. B2B will also have an extensive course catalog as well, so you might find that after your company you work with recognizes the benefits of an educational course it will be looking to broaden their selection of courses and training that are available to many users, including clients as well as employees, partners and other audiences.

A few tips for managing B2B B2B B2B content

• Make use of a project management program for managing course content For an B2B scenario, you might have to constantly update your content and courses to ensure they are up-to-date to meet the changing needs of a business' demands. It's helpful to employ project management software such as Asana and Trello for tracking your course and the content they contain along with changes that have been made over time, and need to be made in the future.
• Try to cooperate together with your company's internal teamswhen creating a B2B course, it's essential to have an understanding of the business' onboarding, retention practices, partnership programmes, as well as customer educational methods. Talking to experts in the field from the field who have specific knowledge can help you gain insights for the training and courses you're developing. Inquiring about their "buy-in" and soliciting their input for your course is a huge benefit in the development of your product.

Choosing an LMS that can scale and grow along with your needs

When Engaging Network had its previous LMS there was a lot of administrative work that needed to be accomplished before creating courses. By using Plus as their brand new learning management system Simon has managed to free up approximately 30 percent of his work time to invest in content creation.

Selecting an online learning platform that is easy to use, adaptable, and allows you to develop courses quickly gives the flexibility of growing the customer base you serve, as well as have separate sites or learning environments for your students. Previous to the introduction of Plus, Engaging Networks had one large Academy which was a service for clients as well as partners and other stakeholder groups. Through Plus, they've created a variety of different academies to serve their clients and partners and concentrate on tailoring every learning experience for them.

Another advantage of Plus in an B2B scenario is that, through the implementation of different learning spaces, you, as well as others involved in the business are able to monitor the development of customers as well as employees, partners and customers separately in their learning journey.

For instance: An HR manager is able to login to the platform and receive updates about the progress of employees going through the onboarding process. A Customer Success Manager is able to access the Learning Environment to help educate customers as well as keep track of how well the employees are learning company's clients.

Ideas for starting your very first B2B class

• Try to address a business's' largest need: As you develop your first B2B service, the most important aspect to be aware of is to make sure that the first course you create focus on the most pressing need of the business you're working with. In this case, if the business you are looking to sell your course is struggling to handle employee onboarding, then start at the beginning.
• Get feedback from your students and clients Get feedback from your students as well as customers is one of the most effective ways you could improve the quality of your course offerings and keep improving your B2B offerings. Keep in mind that starting your first course will always induce an element of anxiety. Be prepared by performing the best you can in your first course. You should be constantly soliciting feedback from your students, and implementing it for the next iteration. This will allow you to continue to improve the quality of your teaching with each launch.
• 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. To stay in touch with your customers and their requirements, it is helpful to conduct a survey with your clients once every six months. They can ask questions regarding their experiences with your course and how you can better support them with content.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early In:

While you develop and launch your first B2B service, be sure you're receiving information from your users. Utilize reporting tools in your online learning platform to monitor your student's progress, how they are engaging with the material in your lessons, and also to determine whether there's room to improve.

The most important metrics are worth your attention include:

• Number of registered students
• Course Enrolments
• The number of courses that have been began
• Courses completed
• Completion Rate
• Student's last login

Recognizing trends in the reports as well as metrics can help you gather insight into how your material is performing for students and know when you need to adjust your course. With the application it is possible to download weekly reports so that you are able to remain on top of this knowledge, and build a database of statistics.

Tips To Keep Your Moving Forward In The Learning Journey

• Give suggestions for what you would like you'd like to know next.
   One of the best ways to increase and expand your B2B offer in order to expand the range of courses you offer is to provide your learners with a roadmap of the next steps to take. In your course progress and completion pages, you'll be able suggest what courses your students should enroll in next to expand their knowledge of a certain subject.
• Get creative with the App Store
   Another way to keep students engaged and involved in the educational process is by exploring an App Store. There are a large number of apps that let you diversify the educational experience of your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video presentation, and quiz courses.
• Incorporate micro-learning to keep students engaged  
   In an B2B context, incorporating micro-learning into your curriculum can retain students' attention. Make sure to limit every video you use in your lessons to be a maximum of 15 minutes in length and each class at least 2 hours. This will allow your students to keep on track with their learning journey with more enthusiasm and keeps your completion rates for your students at a higher percentage.
• Use real-world case studies
   Giving your students cases studies as well as examples of topics they've been learning about towards the end of your class allows your students to put their knowledge to the test and consider the ways in which what they learnt can be applied in a real-world situation.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Develop the course. Show potential customers that there is value in your course and your course is able to meet their business needs.
• Ensure your course solves any issue that your potential student is experiencing. Establish certain KPIs for your course, and outline a problem that you are seeking to resolve to demonstrate the value and success of the course.
• Ask for feedback and continue to improve and improve your B2B offerings when it's released to the world.
• Start thinking bigger, and develop other possible courses and learning opportunities to your business, thereby expanding your personal growth as a course creator as a result.
• Do your best to make the process collaborative with your client and make a habit of keeping close on the reporting