Implementing a B2B model into your business or transitioning into a B2B sales model can be a useful method to unlock the next stage of growth in your business.

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

You may be an entrepreneur from B2C seeking to move into an B2B selling model or are in a bigger company that wants to incorporate online learning in your product offerings Paul's concrete advice will provide you with practical B2B methods to start.

The B2B selling journey

It's exhausting to constantly sell. If you're in the business of making online courses it is not difficult to get addicted to "selling" and working to increase your reach. This takes a large amount of time, resources and effort, especially when an enormous amount of time and effort is put into selling a cheaper course.

In order to get rid from the sales cycle, you want to establish an effective sales process that grows to the needs of your company. This will help create regular conversions that will support your long-term growth and help build an aligned vision for all stakeholders involved.

Before you get started in the process of creating or re-inventing your B2B offering, here are some common mistakes to avoid

• Reinventing your wheel Do your best to stop yourself from creating a new wheel. Many times when people jump into online courses believe that they must start with something completely new and re-invent the wheel completely from scratch. Remind yourself that you don't have to start over - especially if you've built an effective B2C company.
• Don't "Ready fire, aim, or ready": Once you've chosen the topic of your course be sure to not wait until the day after you launch your course to think about how your course will integrate into your overall company structure.
• Don't quit before the corner of success: An important 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 the success you've always wanted. A single contract, one vendor, or even one salesperson could make your B2B business a success.

The Lifetime Value of a Student Framework(tm)

The model is comprised of 3 pillars that are: Sales, Systems and students. By focusing on these areas businesses are able to run and operate at scale as well as create meaningful customer experience. The first step is to create excellent content that is able to connect with your audience. When you've got them on board, you'll want to ensure you have the right methods in place for moving students from one product to the nextone, much like a stepping stone, once they have become a fan of your content. For this you'll need "systems on the front and backend that will identify the students and alert them at the right moment," says Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize students to buy the next product" with the help of great learning experience.

This framework helps support your new students and supports them having transformational experiences to enable you to provide students with additional offerings and services in the future in the future. Numerous organizations and companies have already walked this path, pioneering online education strategies and discovering excellent methods to attract students.

Three strategies to increase your presence within the B2B marketplace

1. Implementing a customer success strategy
2. Offering an additional service to retain customers and reduce churn
3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate growth and expand your reach in the B2B market

1. Implementing a Customer Success Plan

It's crucial to remember that you're performing amazing work within the way you provide the products and services you offer and knowledge. The incorporation of online and on-line learning into your enterprise will help to develop an approach to your clients' satisfaction, and to complement your existing business with new products, provide more worth for your clients, and grow your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" implemented a customer success strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education center that is integrated into the new process for onboarding employees as well as serves a dual function to their company.

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

• What can you do with courses to complement your existing company?
• What purpose, role or issue could the course help you solve in your business?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to retain customers and reduce the likelihood of them returning

You already have a way that your business can benefit. It could be a product, service or method of helping customers, customers, or customers. Implementing an additional offer is an effective way in to keep your customers , and lower churn. Training courses can be a great option to offer that added offer for your customers, as well as reduce the chance of them leaving your company.

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

At Lansa The team tried to address the issue that arose: despite having the abundance of documentation written There was a need from potential and existing customers for a formal learning of their platform. Their customers needed help learning how to make use of the platform.

Before implementing Plus Lansa's team Lansa utilized the time-mentorship method to guide prospective customers how to use their software and also share the good techniques. It would require a significant amount of time and money at scale.

• Take a moment to think about your Lifetime Student Value Framework for a moment and consider its goal of creating an ecosystem: you want your students, customers, and potential customers to feel comfortable by a genuine and healthy way . This also generates income for your company and keeps them inside your systems for longer. You want to create a holistic experience that keeps your customers onboard and dedicated to your product or service.

Some good questions to think about in evaluating the process of using as an "additional deal" to cut down on churn within your business include:

• Why are my customers currently going away, or are they outgrowing my company?
• What program could I design in my company to help ease that

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

Even if your business has already grown and expanding, it's always beneficial to expand your reach and speed up expansion beyond what you are providing for your students, clients, or clients through using courses or the introduction of the certification, accreditation and other partner program.

 What is HTML0? IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded capabilities beyond the current offerings for business by gaining certification and accreditation

The IntelyCare team IntelyCare created an offering that was complementary to the company's offerings, and was able to teach half a million people effectively and quickly way. They also used certificates and social media to provide essential ways of assisting taking the class to its conclusion.

Key Learning: Incorporating the certification or accreditation into your B2B service is a good way for you to accelerate your business's growth in the B2B Market. People want to learn things they have never heard of, and want to have evidence that they've completed their knowledge and retained any new knowledge for purposes of employment in addition to questions of compliance. A certificate is an easy way to present your customers as well as your students with the chance to show the knowledge of safety, knowledge, and understanding they have gained from the courses you offer.

 How Keap has accelerated its growth and increased capabilities beyond its current offering through partnership

As the Keap partners were responsible for aiding their clients in integrating the platform within their own businesses, they implemented a Partner Onboarding Program using Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap already operated a successful platform, they were able to accelerate its growth by expanding into new markets and attempted to fit into new audiences they didn't have access to, by trusting their partners to stand up for them and to implement their platform for them via Partnerships.

The best questions to ask when reflecting on the practice of using accreditations, certifications, and partnerships to accelerate growth and expand your reach in the B2B market include:

• Which B2B acceleration route will be the best fit to my current business?
• Does my company stand to gain from Accreditations and Certificates, or partnerships?

How to build and improve the B2B offerings at scale: Notes from the trenches with Simon Dunant

The second segment of our Level Up with Plus session, we chatted in depth with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus and holds a vast experience in online education as well as more than 25 years of experience within the field of technology. Simon is the director of the network of online learning academies at Engaging Networks, the leading SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing, directing the development, curating, and implementation of customer education as well as partner certifications for clients as well as agency partners around the globe.

Simon manages Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the firm provide security and compliance education to employees. He has over decade of experience in B2B as well as B2C experience: training, mentoring, and coaching through in-person, online as well as on-demand material at top global corporations and at conferences.

If you're trying to develop strategies for expanding and improving the B2B services you offer, Simon offers some tips from the perspective of someone who has gone through this experience in the past 4 years in online education both as a consultant and as an employee in charge of the delivery of online training, constructing 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 the world of online education for its customers as well as partners. Initially, the vision of Engaging Networks was to provide scalable online customer education that transformed their clients to experts in their application to improve retention rates, draw new customers, and cut down on the amount of time employees spend on onboarding while they expanded the business.

The objectives of Engaging Networks's online education platform was:

• to educate customers about their product and to provide top practices to their clients within a digital environment
• to train customers in the usage of their tools and platform to allow them to utilize the product efficiently and meet the goals of their organization.

One of the biggest issues faced by Engaging Networks was to be able to produce and deliver courses quickly because of their fast-paced production schedule and ongoing updates to features that are released every 6 to 8 weeks. It was crucial that the business was able to build and update course content in accordance with feature releases to be able to teach their customers how to utilize them and make sure that they were providing value to the enterprise.

Benefits of having an online academy
In terms of reducing the time to onboard in Engaging Networks, starting an academy led to a reduction in amount of work for account managers and Support teams. Through an online academy, most of the routine learning process Support teams go through when onboarding clients can be eliminated with the implementation of self-paced classes, which help account managers as well as Support teams to have more one-on-one time with clients.

Establishing a network of partners with accreditation and certification

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

The most important advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners can play a key role in the implementation of a platform, product, or service, as well as in training users on how to use it.
• Accredited partners can assist their customers in delivering their ideas, as well as refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners could improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Previous to the implementation of an agency academy, there was no standard process to check the caliber of the partners the company provided to its clients, and they were unsure of what their clients' customer experience was going be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to educate their partners, as well as accredit and validate them, as well as build stronger relationships with the partners. This allowed them to build a strong partner network through organizations that were familiar using their software and had a good understanding of their frameworks. They were confident that they had a network of accredited partners who knew their platforms inside out as they had been certified by their academy online training.

Beginning your training from idea to instruction rapidly

In the case of a bigger business, sometimes you may need to work with a shorter timeframe to create a course on the introduction of a new service or product characteristic. When using Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer in the event that you want to develop several course modules at once and upload video in bulk as well as create lesson plans in a list form.

In the case of building your courses, you are able to film all of your videos at once then upload them and create a course from beginning to finish with a tight time frame. This lets you spend more time in the making of content part of the course and ensure that the content will fulfill the requirements that you've set out.

It's helpful not to the time spent the administration, hosting, and tweaking the platform than working on delivering the knowledge you have gained through your written content. The platform helps facilitate this process.

Moving from B2C to B2B

If you are working with a B2C audience, your courses will typically be focused around a single area. If you are a creator of courses You have greater autonomy and a variety of stakeholders you have to respond to. For B2B purposes, it is important to think about the fact that if you're offering any type of training delivery to another business it will be a wider number of people and departments to answer to. So, it is important to be aware of the organization you are working with, or within. If you're an external consultant or internal, working within a B2B context will likely involve greater training and training processes, as well as a larger amount of classes and topics for training in addition to the need to meet compliance standards.

There are key distinctions between B2B and B2C

• There will be a greater range of stakeholders to deal with: when managing a business you will have a wide range of stakeholders within the company that who you must interact with and have conversations with. It is possible to talk to the customer success managers at the firm, the marketing team as well as the customer service team, sales engineers, and sales teams to gather insight into how best to provide training for clients.
• There is a possibility that you need to broaden your courses' offerings when you sit in the middle of planning a course, you may have to get into a different approach to how you instruct a crowd of participants in a specific area. B2B has an extensive course catalog which means you could end up finding that once the business you are working with realizes the importance of the training program it will be looking to expand their inventory of courses and training accessible to multiple audiences, such as customers, partners, employees, 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 context, you may have to constantly update your courses and content in order to keep up with a businesses' changing needs. It's helpful to employ project management software such as Asana as well as Trello to keep track of your courses and their content as well as changes that have been done over time, and will require changes at some point in the near future.
• Be sure to collaborate in conjunction with internal team members: when developing an B2B-focused course is essential to gain an understanding of the business' onboarding and customer retention strategies, partnerships programs, and customer training methods. Talking to experts in the field from the field who have specialized knowledge will help you get insights into your courses and training you're developing. Making sure you get your "buy-in" and asking them for their insights to include into your training will be a big asset when you are developing your offerings.

Selecting an LMS that will grow and scale to meet your needs

In the past, when Engaging Network used to be their LMS it was easier to do administrative tasks that had to be accomplished before creating classes. By using Plus as their brand new learning management system, Simon has managed to cut down on about 30 percent of his time put back into content creation.

Choosing an online learning platform 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 to teach your students. Previous to becoming part of Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy which served customers as well as partners and other different stakeholders. Through Plus, they've been able to build several various academies for their clients and partners and concentrate on tailoring each learning experience specifically to their needs.

Another benefit of Plus within an B2B setting is that with the use of various learning environments, 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.

In this instance, an HR manager can login to the platform to receive notifications on the progress of employees who are undergoing the process of onboarding. Additionally, a Customer Success Manager can log into the platform's learning environment for customer education as well as keep track of the learning progress of the business's customers.

Ideas for starting your first B2B course

• Try to address a business's most pressing need. you develop your first B2B offering, a key aspect to be aware of is to make sure that the first course you create be able to address the biggest need for the target business you are working with. In this case, if the company you plan to market your course to has a problem with employee onboarding, then start there.
• Request feedback Request feedback from your students as well as customers is one of your best options to can improve your future classes and improve the B2B services you offer. Remember that launching your initial course is bound to cause some nervousness. Be prepared by performing the best that you can during your initial course, continuously asking for feedback from students and then implementing the feedback to the next time. This will allow you to keep improving your course offerings every time you launch.
• Utilize surveys, focus groups, and client check-ins: It's beneficial to make use of surveys, focus groups and community forums to gather feedback. To keep in touch with your customers and their requirements, it is helpful to conduct a survey for your clients every 6 months to ask questions about their experiences with your course and ways to improve your support for them by providing them with more the content.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early In:

While you develop and launch your initial B2B service, be sure you're receiving information from your learners. Make use of reporting tools within your online learning platform to keep track of your students' progress and whether they're engaging with the material in your lessons, and also to determine if there is any areas for improvement.

Key metrics that should be considered include:

• Students who are registered
• Course Enrolments
• Courses that were began
• The number of courses that have been completed
• Complimentation Rate
• Last login of the student

Noticing trends in the reports and the metrics you use can give you insight into how your content is performing with students and know when you need to make adjustments. When using the platform it is possible to download report data each week, so that you are able to keep up-to-date with this knowledge, and build an extensive database of data.

How To Keep The Moving Forward In The Learning Journey

• Offer suggestions about what to learn next
   One of the best ways to increase and iterate your B2B offering in order to expand your course offerings is to provide your students with guidance on what to study next. On your course progression and finalization pages, you'll be able to make suggestions on which courses students can enroll in next to expand their understanding of a particular subject.
• Get creative using the App Store
   Another option to keep them interested and active in their educational process is by exploring the App Store. There is a wide range of apps available that will allow you to diversify the educational experience of your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video, presentations, and quizzes.
• Introduce micro-learning in order to keep students interested  
   In a B2B setting, including micro-learning in your courses can help retain students' attention. It is best to make sure that you keep the videos you incorporate in your lessons to be an maximum of fifteen minutes and to keep each course at a maximum of two hours. Your students will be able to continue their journey of learning with greater enthusiasm and keeps your student completion rates at a higher percentage.
• Make use of real-world case study examples
   Giving your students instances and case studies of topics they've recently learned about at the conclusion of your course allows them to put their learnings in perspective and understand the way in which what they have learned applies in a real-world scenario.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Create the course. Make it clear to prospective clients that there is value in what you offer and that your course is able to meet the needs of their company.
• Ensure your course solves any issue that your potential client is currently facing Set certain KPIs for your course, and define your problem you're trying to solve so that you can prove your course's value and the success of your program.
• Ask for feedback and keep improving and refine your B2B service when it's released to the world.
• Start thinking bigger, and create other potential courses and learning opportunities to your business, thereby expanding the scope of your growth as a course creator by the result.
• Make sure to collaborate with your client. Make a the habit of keeping a close the progress of reports