Implementing a B2B model within your organization or transitioning to a B2B selling model is a great approach to get to the next stage of growth for your company.

The last time we had a session in our "Level Up With Plus" series, we had a conversation with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical ways to improve and expand your B2B service.

Whether you are an entrepreneur from B2C looking to transition to a B2B selling model , or you are in a bigger enterprise that's trying to integrate online learning in your product offerings, Paul's tangible advice will provide you with useful B2B ways to begin.

The B2B selling journey

It's exhausting to constantly sell. If you're involved in making online courses it is not difficult to get addicted to "selling" and trying to reach out to a wider audience. This takes a large amount of resources, time, and energy - especially in the case of a large amount of work that involves selling a less expensive course.

To break out from the cycle of selling, it is important to create an efficient sales strategy that can scale according to your company's needs. This will help create consistent conversions to support the long-term development of your business and create an integrated strategy for everyone involved.

Before starting by constructing or refining the B2B product Here are some typical errors to avoid

• Reinventing your wheel Do your best to stop yourself from reinventing the wheel. Many times when people jump into online classes believe that they must start fresh and reinvent the wheel from scratch. Remind yourself that you don't have to start from scratch, especially if you've built an impressive B2C business.
• Don't "Ready to Fire, Ready, and Aim": Once you select a course topic make sure you don't wait until the day after you launch your course to think about how the course can fit into your larger enterprise model.
• Don't quit before the corner of success: An important aspect to keep in mind when you're making your debut in the B2B industry is that you should not quit - you'll find yourself just one step away from the success you've always wanted. A single agreement, one supplier or even one salesperson could be the key to making the B2B offer a hit.

The Lifetime Student Value Framework(tm)

This framework is composed of three components: Systems, Sales, and students. When focusing on these three areas, companies are able to run and operate at scale and provide meaningful customer experiences. The first step is to create amazing content that resonates to your target audience. Once you've brought them in it is important to make sure that you've got the proper processes in place to guide students from one item to the nextone, much like the stepping stone once they've become fans of your material. In order to do this you'll need "systems on the front and backend that will identify and trigger students at the right time" says Paul in order to "incentivize customers to buy the next one" through creating memorable student experience.

This framework helps support your newly enrolled students. It also helps them experience transformational learning so you can provide students with additional items and services later on down the down the. A lot of organizations and businesses have already taken this road and have pioneered online educational models and finding great methods to attract students.

The three strategies to increase your presence in the B2B market

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

1. Implementing a Customer Success Strategy

It is important to keep in mind that you're already doing amazing work in your business delivering your products, services, as well as your expertise. The incorporation of online and on-line learning into your enterprise is a way to create an approach to your clients' satisfaction, and to complement your existing business with new products, provide more benefits for your customers and increase the size of your company.

 What is HTML0 "Echosec Systems" executed a successful customer strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is also an integral part of their new employee onboarding process and serves a double purpose for their business.

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

• How can you use courses to complement your existing company?
• What function, purpose, or need could courses solve for your company?

 2. Making an extra offer in order to keep customers loyal and decrease the rate of churn

There is already a method that you serve your business. A service, product, or form of helping your customers, students or clients. Implementing an additional offer is a good way through which you can retain your customers , and lower the rate of churn. The use of courses is a good way to provide that additional incentive to your clients, and reduce the likelihood that they will leave your company.

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

In Lansa, the team was trying to solve the issue that arose: despite having the abundance of written documentation There was a need from customers and prospective customers for an official learning of their platform. They needed help from their customers to learn the best way to utilize the platform.

Before implementing Plus, the staff at Lansa was using a time-mentorship model to instruct prospective customers how to utilize their products and share the best practices. It would require a significant amount of time, and also resources when scaled.

• Think back to the Lifetime Student Value Framework for a moment as it aims to create an environment: You want your customers, students and clients to feel supported with respect and in a positive way . This also generates income for your company and keep them in your system for longer. You want to create an experience that is holistic and will keep your clients on board and dedicated to your product or service.

The best questions to ask in evaluating the process of applying the term "additional offer" to cut down on churn within your company are:

• My customers are moving away or growing my business?
• What program could I design in my company to alleviate that

3. Utilizing certifications, accreditations as well as partnerships to boost 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 extend your reach and speed up expansion beyond what that you provide to your students, clients, or clients through the use of courses and using accreditation, certification, as well as partner programs.

 How IntelyCare accelerated growth and expanded reach beyond current business offerings by gaining certification and accreditation

IntelyCare's team IntelyCare developed a course that was complementary to the company's offerings which was in a position to instruct half a million people effectively and quickly manner. The team also utilized certificates and social media to provide important forms of supporting the learning process.

Key Learning: Incorporating the certification or accreditation into your B2B offering is an effective option to boost the expansion of your company in the B2B Market. The majority of people want to be educated about something newand want to have evidence that they've finished their education and are able to retain any new knowledge for purposes of employment in addition to concerns regarding compliance. An official certificate can be a tangible way for you to present your customers as well as students with the opportunity to demonstrate the experience as well as the safety and conformity that they gained through your classes.

 How Keap accelerated growth and expanded reach beyond current business offering by forming collaborations

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

Important lesson learned: As Keap already operated a highly successful platform, they increased their growth by reaching to new markets. They also tried to appeal to new customers they did not have access to, by trusting their partners to represent them and then implement their platform for them by way of Partnerships.

Some good questions to think about in evaluating the process of using certifications, accreditations and alliances to speed up growth and expand your reach on the B2B industry are:

• Which B2B acceleration path is the most suitable to my current business?
• Would my business benefit from Certificates and Accreditations, or partnerships?

What it's like to develop and expand a B2B offering on a massive scale: Notes from the trenches with Simon Dunant

In the final part of our Level Up with Plus session in the second part of the session, we spoke in depth with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is an avid user of Plus and holds a vast background in online education and over 25 years experience in the field of technology. Simon has been the leader of the group of online learning academies at Engaging Networks, the most renowned SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing. He is responsible for the creation, curation, and implementation of customer education as well as partner certifications for clients and agency partners across the globe.

Simon manages Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the business deliver compliance and security education to employees. Simon has over decade of experience in B2B and B2C expertise, including training, mentoring, and coaching via in-person, online as well as on-demand material at major global conferences and companies.

If you're trying to develop 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 this experience in four years of online training , both as a consultant as well as an employee responsible for training online, developing Engaging Network's customer education program beginning from scratch, and migrating to Plus by 2021.

How online education can be integrated into the company's plans

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company wanted to explore online education for customers and associates. The initial goal of the company was to offer the highest quality online education to customers which transformed customers to experts in their software to help improve retention rates, find new clients, and reduce the amount of time employees spend on onboarding as they scaled the business.

The objectives of the Engaging Networks' web-based platform for learning were:

• In order to inform clients about their product and to provide best practices for their clients within a digital environment
• To train clients in the usage of their tools and platform to help them use their product effectively and achieve the goals of their organization.

One of the major challenges to Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering courses in a short time frame due to their fast-paced course development cycle as well as the regular updates to features that are released every 6-8 weeks. It was imperative for the company to be capable of creating and updating courses in alignment with product release dates in order to inform their clients on how to utilize them and ensure that courses provided value to their enterprise.

Benefits of having an online academy
In terms of reducing onboarding times for Engaging Networks, starting an academy resulted in a reduced work load for the account managers as well as support teams. Through an online academy, many of the tedious learning process Support teams go through when taking on new clients could be eliminated with the implementation of self-paced courses, and enable account managers and support teams to spend more 1-on-1 time with their customers.

Building a partner network with accreditation and certification

Engaging Networks built a community made up of non-profits and marketing agencies interested in working together to help implement their platform. They built a partner network by implementing an academy for agencies online which was accredited and certify their members.

The most important advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners are a valuable resource in helping implement the platform, product or service, and train clients on its use.
• Accredited partners are able to help their clients deliver their projects in addition to referring potential customers to businesses.

Accredited partners were able to improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Previous to the implementation of the academy for agency partners it was not possible to establish a standard way to ensure the quality of the partners Engaging Networks offered to their customers as well as being unsure of what their clients will experience be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to train their partners, as well as accredit and validate them, as well as establish stronger connections with their partners. It allowed them to create a strong partner network through companies that they were aware of working with their tools, and had a good understanding of their frameworks. They believed that the they had a network of accredited partners who knew their platform inside out because they were certified through the online academy course.

Beginning your training from concept to training, quickly

In the case of a bigger business, sometimes you may have a short time frame for developing a curriculum around an innovative product or service feature. In the case of Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in order to create many course components at one time and upload video in bulk as well as create lesson plans in an outline format.

In the case of building your course, you'll be capable of filming all your videos at once then upload them and create a course from beginning to finish with a tight deadline. It allows you to devote longer on the development of the content that is part of the course, while making sure the course will deliver and meet the goals that you've laid out.

It's helpful not to the time spent managing, hosting and tweaking the platform instead of focusing on sharing your knowledge through written content. The platform assists in this procedure.

Transitioning from B2C to B2B

When working with an B2C audience, the course can often be centered around one topic. If you are a creator of courses You have greater autonomy as well as a range of stakeholders that you must be accountable to. On the B2B side, it is important to think about the fact that if you're providing any kind of training for another organization it will more people and departments to answer to. Thus, you must think like the business you are working with, or inside. No matter if you're an outside consultant or an internal one that works within B2B B2B context will likely involve greater training and training processes, as well as more subjects and courses in addition to the need to meet compliance standards.

Key differences between B2C and B2B

• You'll have a larger range of stakeholders to deal with: when working with a business, you'll have a variety of internal stakeholders you will need to engage with and engage with. There may be a need to talk to the customer success managers in the company as well as the marketing department and the support staff for customers as well as sales engineers and sales representatives to gain insights on how to best offer training to customers.
• There is a possibility that you need to broaden your courses' offerings: When you are sitting at a table to design a class and you're planning to teach a class, you might need to change your mindset on how you will instruct a crowd of participants about a particular topic. B2B is also able to offer a larger course inventory, and you may find that after your business with recognizes the benefits of the training program, they will want to increase the number of classes and programs available to multiple users like clients and employees, partners, and various other types of audiences.

A few tips to manage B2B content

• Utilize a software for project management for managing course content When you're in a B2B scenario, you might need to regularly update your courses and content to stay up to date with a businesses' changing requirements. It's helpful to employ the project management tools like Asana as well as Trello to keep track of your courses and their content and also modifications that were done over time, and will require changes at some point in the near future.
• Be sure to collaborate together with your company's internal team members: when developing a B2B course, it's essential to have an understanding of your business' onboarding and customer retention methods, partnership programs, and customer education modes. Talking to experts in the field in the business who have specialized knowledge will help you gain insights for the courses and training that you're creating. Inquiring about the "buy-in" and soliciting their input for your course is a huge benefit when you are developing your offerings.

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

When Engaging Network had its previous LMS it was easier to do administration work to be done for the creation of the courses. Utilizing Plus as their brand new learning management system, Simon is able to free up around 30% of his time to invest in content creation.

Selecting an online platform for learning that is intuitive, scalable and lets you build courses with ease allows you to expand the customer base you serve in addition to having separate sites or learning environments for your students. Before joining Plus, Engaging Networks had one huge Academy that served clients as well as partners and other stakeholder groups. With Plus, they have created a variety of Academies that serve different customers and have a focus on tailoring every learning experience to them.

Another advantage of Plus when used in the B2B setting is that with the creation of various learning environments, you as well as others involved in the business are able to monitor the development of customers or partners as well as employees independently in their journey to learn.

For instance: An HR manager can log in to the platform to receive notifications about the progress of employees who are going through the process of onboarding. Likewise, a Customer Success Manager can access the learning environment for customer education, and keep track of the learning progress of the business's customers.

Tips for launching your very first B2B class

• Try to address a business's biggest need. As you create your initial B2B product, one important factor to consider is to make sure that the first course you create address the largest need for the target business you are working with. As an example, suppose the business you are looking to promote your course is struggling to handle employee onboarding, start there.
• Get feedback from your students and clients Request comments from your students and customers is one of the best ways that you will be able to improve your next courses and continue to improve the quality of your B2B products. Remember that launching your initial course is bound to cause some nervousness. Make an effort to ease this anxiety by doing the best job you can in your first course, continuously seeking feedback from students and then implementing the feedback for the next iteration. This allows you to continue to improve the quality of your teaching every time you launch.
• Make use of surveys, focus groups as well as client check-ins. It's helpful to utilize surveys, focus groups and communities to collect feedback. To stay in touch with your clients and their demands, it is helpful to conduct a survey to your customers every six months. They can ask questions regarding their experience with your courses and the ways you could help them better with your the content.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early In:

While you develop and launch your first B2B product, ensure that you are receiving data from your students. Use reporting tools on your online learning platform to keep track of your student's progress, how they are engaging with your classes, and note where there's room for improvement.

Key metrics that are worth your attention include:

• Students who are registered
• Course Enrolments
• Courses that were began
• Number of completed courses
• Completion Rate
• The student's most recent login

Recognizing pattern patterns within your report and metrics can help you gather information about how your content is performing with students and know when you need to make adjustments. If you use the platform, you can download the reporting data every week in order to stay on top of the latest information, as well as build an extensive database of data.

What To Do To Stay On The Learning Journey In Mind

• Make suggestions on what you'd like to study next.
   A valuable way to grow and iterate your B2B offering in order to expand your offerings of courses is to supply your students with guidance regarding the next steps to take. Through your course's progress and finalization pages, you can to make suggestions on which courses students can be taking next in order to broaden their understanding of a particular subject.
• Explore your creativity using the App Store
   Another way to keep students engaged and involved in the education journey is to explore an App Store. There's a variety of apps available that will let you diversify the educational experience of your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond video, text, presentations, and quizzes.
• Incorporate micro-learning to keep students interested  
   In a B2B scenario, using micro-learning into your curriculum can keep students engaged. Try to aim to keep each video that you include within your classes to a maximum of 15 minutes and to keep each class at least 2 hours. It will enable your students to follow through on their learning journey with more involvement and keep the completion rate of your students at a higher percentage.
• Use real-world case studies
   Offering your students instances and case studies of the topics they have just learned at the end of the course will allow them to put their learnings into perspective and see how what they just discovered can be used in a practical scenario.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Create your course. Show potential customers that you are worth what you offer and that your course can support their business needs.
• Ensure your course solves an issue the prospective customer is facing currently. Set some KPIs for the course, and define your problem you're seeking to resolve to demonstrate that the worth and effectiveness of your course.
• Get feedback from users and keep improving and iterate your B2B offering when it's released to the world.
• Think bigger and create other potential educational opportunities and courses for the business, expanding your personal growth as a course creator by the result.
• Do your best to be a collaborative partner with your client and make a habit of keeping close track of reporting