The Building of a B2B Online Learning Experience That Helps Increase Your Business
Read this blog post to find out how you can create the best online learning experience to B2B customers. Map out the essential steps required to successfully build, pitch and market your online course.
You will learn:
- What does the change from a B2C to an B2B selling model will look like
- How to identify the learner you are trying to identify in order to be able to access the B2B market
- How to craft your customer persona for promoting your online course
- How can you design an educational curriculum for B2B clients
- Key considerations for building a B2B online learning experience
The transition from a B2C model to an B2B model of selling
When making the transition from a traditional B2C selling model to selling B2B when it comes to selling online your course, you'll have take some time to identify not only who your learners are, but also who your potential buyers are. If you want to be successful in B2B there is a need to alter your course content and experience in order to meet the needs of your customers. You will want to clearly be able to identify:
- Your Learner Persona: Who will be learning and taking your classes at your institution?
- Your Buyer Persona Who are you as a buyer and "middleman" within the company and what motivates the buyers to buy?
- Your Program: What you will be teaching , and how online learning experiences could you design for B2B clients?
- The Learning Experience: What exactly will the experience of learning be like in order to get your client's desired results?
Identifying Your Learner Persona
Initially the idea of selling your online education experience directly to the public could be a good way to get into the online learning market and to understand the "learner character".
If you are involved in designing digital courses as a B2B business client you must consider your learning persona as well as the needs of the learner the course is designed for. There are core considerations which you must be mindful of as well as existing digital learning preferences for larger organizations:
- Has the "learner" taken an online course previously?
- What were they like?
- What was their biggest complaint?
- What kind of learning are they looking for? As an example...
- Self-paced learning
- Learning through community-based networks
- Social Learning
It's crucial to have clarity on your learner persona before approaching your B2B clients to make a pitch. Some other key considerations that you should think about before approaching you "middleman" (representative who is going to be making the sale) at the organization are:
- Demographics: Where is the team based? Does their team have the hybrid method?
- Technology considerations such as digital literacy challenges as well as access to technology.
- The pain points and what is driving the client to attain this level for their company.
- Drivers and motivators to students, such as career progression and raises in pay.
- Digital Learning Preferences (Self-paced, cohort-based).
- Barriers To Learning.
One key way that you could gather more details about your persona as a learner is by using learning analytics of your existing B2C customers to discover what your "learners" challenges are in order to offer and perfect a solution: Are they constantly struggling with when it concerns your subject or education?
Once you identify your target learners' most pressing problems and issues You can then draw the information you gather from the narrative your LMS report system tells you to create a value proposition for your B2B client and continue to improve the learning experience for your clients.
Accessing B2B Clients via the individual learners you have
It opens the doors for your business to gain access B2B customers by designing effective learning experiences for your B2C clients.
If you keep an eye at your B2C customers' progress in learning and progress with your courses You will get a clear sense of the issues they face, improve your learning experience, and help them achieve their desired transformation in a powerful way.
You can bring the stories of your customers who achieve the results they desire and change back to your corporate clients to help you make your case.
Crafting your buyer persona
The "buyer persona" represents the individual with whom you'll eventually engage in sales meetings within the larger organizations that you want to market your online education experiences.
To get clarity on the persona of your customer, you will want to be sure that you are aware of
- The purchaser and the company's demographics
- A business issue they're looking to fix
- Their objectives for the online learning experience: Are there any Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they're searching for?
The B2B selling process is very much a consultative sales process with the buyer. It is important to get underneath what their issues are, so you can start to build your proposition for value and learner transformation story.
Be aware that, in the B2B sales process, there are two stakeholders that you need to be really conscious of: the buyer and the instructors within the company.
Within larger organizations you may have someone on a team or even an entire team that is committed to online education and learning design which has different standards for online courses and learning outcomes than your buyer. It is important to make sure that your course is conforming to the requirements of all stakeholders to showcase their value to the organization.
A few examples of KPIs that stakeholders in the organization are looking for include:
- Reducing training costs.
- In reducing customer support requests and inquiries.
- Is reducing the time to board.
- Improved completion of training.
creating a course curriculum for B2B clients
It is important to remember that when designing courses for B2B clients, you will be working with the "off-the-shelf" model as your customers will likely be looking for customized training experiences.
You will initially want for your course to go into the market using the market research that you've conducted. When you start working with more large B2B clients, you'll rapidly realize that there must likely to be a consultative approach to crafting the course's curriculum and contents.
A model of the "off-the-shelf" Curriculum model
It's good to offer standard courses that you can modify it for pitching who are B2B, as your client might want to include some specific content to your course which is specific to their organization or even to integrate the latest technology of their company to the online learning environment also.
The "off-the-shelf" model is an scalable model that can help you create a recurring revenue stream for your business in B2B after you have created your initial "customizable" course.
Designing the B2B Online Learning Experience
You will also want to be conscious of the type of content that you are selling to B2B clients. In the case of, for instance, working with larger companies in the regulatory and compliance field or providing any technical or technical-related content, you will need to go through an advanced design process and modify your content in line with the requirements of regulatory agencies and regulations in the space you work within.
It is also important think about how much knowledge in your class needs to take place.
- Do you want to build an understanding of the concepts?
- Are you working in the area of change in behaviour such as leadership development, which require a lot of knowledge?
If you're in a space where you need to be able to provide deep knowledge, B2B customers will generally want your online course to seamlessly integrate with the programs they have. When working with the learning and development team at your client's organization, you need to take note of the fact that they already potentially are offering a course or "subject matter expert" in the space the course you're teaching.
Keep an eye on the political aspects at play that you need to be careful about regarding how you deal with subject matter experts at the organization. You will want to successfully "onboard" the experts so that they are able to work with you to integrate their knowledge into the services you are already offering. By doing this, you will be able to integrate yourself into the company.
Spend some time to familiarize yourself with the team of learning and development that it is and the roles that are currently in the team that you may be working with, like instructional designers, budget holders, program managers and developers.
Finally, if there is an element of adapting the curriculum It is essential to determine what part you're playing when working with B2B customers. If you're working with a large B2B client and they're asking you to adjust your content and curriculum, or even your online learning experience to suit what they're seeking, it's really important that you have a process that you can follow when working with your client.
It is possible to leverage the technology of Plus within the B2B market to collect sophisticated analytics and information on your clients while their students are going through the course, so they are able to track the ROI of their investment.