Integrating a B2B service in your company or moving into a B2B sales model could be an effective strategy to help you unlock new levels of achievement for your business.

In the last session of our "Level Up With Plus" series, we had a conversation about the topic with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical strategies to iterate and grow your B2B service.

You may be an entrepreneur working in B2C trying to shift into a B2B selling model , or you are an integral part of a larger business that is trying to integrate online learning to your offering Paul's concrete advice will provide you with practical B2B methods to start.

The selling journey for B2B

Constantly selling is exhausting. If you're in the business of creating online courses It is easy to fall addicted to "selling" and trying to expand your audience. This takes a large amount of resources, time and effort, especially when an enormous amount of time and effort is put into selling a cheaper program.

To break out from the cycle of selling, you want to establish a sales system that scales with your business. This will help create regular conversions that will support your future growth, and also help create an integrated perspective for all parties involved.

Prior to starting with building or iterating on your B2B offering, here are some common mistakes to avoid

• Reinventing the wheel Make an effort to keep from making a fresh start. Many times when people jump into online learning and think they must start with something completely new and re-invent the wheel entirely. Remind yourself that you don't have to start over - especially if you've built an effective B2C business.
• Do not "Ready fire, aim, or ready": Once you have chosen a topic for your course be sure to not wait until after the launch of your course to think about how the course can fit into your larger company structure.
• Don't quit before the corner of your success: A crucial aspect to keep in mind when you're starting out in the B2B marketplace is not to give up and you'll be just one step closer to the success you've always wanted. A single contract, one vendor, or even one salesperson could be what makes 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 and provide meaningful customer experiences. The first step is to create great content that connects with your audience. When you've got them on board it is important to make sure you have the right methods in place for moving students from one product to the nextone, much like an escalator, after they've become fans of your material. For this you'll need "systems on the front and backend that will identify and trigger students at the right moment," Paul says. Paul who explains that they want to "incentivize customers to buy the next product" through creating memorable student experience.

The framework is designed to help you support new students coming in and helps them experience transformational learning which allows you to supply them with other offerings and services in the future in the future. Numerous organizations and companies have already walked this path, pioneering online education models and finding the most effective acquisition strategies.

Three strategies to expand in the B2B market

1. Implementing a successful customer strategy
2. Implementing 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 expansion and increase your presence on the B2B industry

1. Implementing a Customer Success Strategy

It's important to remind yourself that you're already performing amazing work within the way you provide your products, services, and expertise. The incorporation of online and on-line learning into your company can help you develop an approach to your clients' success, complement the existing offerings of your business by adding new products, provide more benefits for your customers and expand your business.

 How "Echosec Systems" implemented a customer success strategy

Echosec Systems created a customer education facility that is an integral component of their employee onboarding process as well as serves a dual function for their business.

The best questions to ask while implementing the customer-focused strategy include:

• What can you do with courses to complement your existing company?
• What role, function or problem could these courses resolve for your company?

 2. The implementation of an additional promotion to keep customers loyal and decrease churn

There is already a method to serve your company. An item, service, or method of helping customers, clients or students. Offering additional services is an effective way in to keep your customers and reduce the rate of churn. The use of courses is a good way to provide that additional deal to customers and reduce the likelihood of them leaving your company.

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

In Lansa The team at Lansa tried to address the issue that arose: despite having an abundance of written documentation There was a need from potential and existing customers for a formal learning of their platform. They needed help from their customers to learn the best way to utilize their system.

Previous to using Plus, the team at Lansa utilized the time-mentorship method to guide prospective customers how to use their software and also share the best techniques. This would take a large amount of time, and also resources in a large scale.

• Think back to that Lifetime Students Value Framework for a moment as it aims to create an ecosystem: you want your students, customers, and customers to be supported with respect and in a positive way that also drives revenue to your company, and keeps them inside your system for longer. Your goal is to offer a holistic experience that ensures that your customers are dedicated to your product or service.

Some good questions to think about when reflecting on the practice of making use of an "additional deal" to decrease churn your business are:

• Why are my customers currently going away, or are they outgrowing my company?
• What course could I develop in my own business to help ease that

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

If your business has already grown in the right direction, it's never a bad idea to expand the reach of your business and increase expansion beyond what you are providing for students, customers, or clients through taking advantage of classes and the implementation of the certification, accreditation as well as partner program.

 What does it mean? IntelyCare increased its growth rate and capabilities beyond the current offerings for business with the help of accreditation and certification

The IntelyCare team IntelyCare built an offer which was a complement to their company, and was able to teach more than a million students quickly and efficiently way. They also used certificates and leveraged social media as essential ways of assisting the learning process.

Important Learning: Including the certification or accreditation into 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 of having completed their knowledge and retained new information for employment purposes, as well as questions of compliance. An official certificate can be an easy way to provide your customers and students with an opportunity to prove the expertise as well as the safety and conformity they have gained from your classes.

 What is HTML0? Keap accelerated growth and expanded coverage beyond the current business offering by way of partnership

As the Keap members were in charge of aiding their clients in integrating the platform within their own businesses and Partner Onboarding Program using Plus.

Key learning: Since Keap already operated a thriving platform, they were able to accelerate its growth by expanding into new markets and attempted to fit into new audiences that they had no access to by relying on their partners to advocate for them, and to implement their platform on their behalf by way of Partnerships.

Good questions to consider while analyzing the use of using certifications, accreditations as well as partnerships to boost growth and expand your reach within the B2B marketplace are:

• Which B2B acceleration route would work best for my company right now?
• My business could benefit from Accreditations and Certificates, or partnerships?

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

In the second part of our 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 and holds a vast background in online education and 25 years of experience in the technology industry. Simon has led the network of online learning academies within Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing, directing the development, curating, and execution of education for customers and partner certification of clients as well as agency partners around the world.

Simon manages Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the firm provide security and compliance training to its employees. Simon has over decade of experience in B2B as well as B2C experiences, which includes training, mentoring, and coaching via in-person, online and online content for top global corporations and at conferences.

If you're trying to develop strategies to grow and iterate your B2B offerings, Simon offers some tips from the point of view of someone who's been through the the past 4 years in online education both in the capacity of a consultant, and also as an employee who is responsible for the delivery of online training, constructing Engaging Network's Customer Education Program starting from scratch before relocating to Plus in 2021.

What can online education do to be integrated into the company's goals

When Simon first joined Engaging Networks, the company was eager to get into online education for customers and partners. The initial goal of the company was to deliver the highest quality online education to customers which transformed customers into experts of their application to improve retention rates, attract new clients, and reduce employee onboarding time as they scaled the business.

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

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

One of the major issues for Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering courses quickly due to their fast-paced production schedule and ongoing product feature releases every 6 to 8 weeks. It was essential for the company to be able to build and update courses that were in line with the latest product feature releases to be able to teach their customers how they could use them, and make sure that they provided value to their business.

Benefits of having an online academy
When it came to reducing onboarding times to 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 onboarding clients can be eliminated by the introduction of self-paced courses, and 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 nonprofits and marketing agencies interested in working together in order to implement their platform. They created a network of partners by implementing an academy for agencies online that was able to accredit and verify their members.

The key advantages of partnerships and accreditation:

• Accredited partners can be instrumental in helping implement the platform, product or service, and train customers on the use of it.
• Accredited partners can assist their customers in delivering their plans, as well as refer prospective customers to a company.

Accredited partners were able to improve Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the establishment of an academy for agencies, there was no standard method to verify the high-quality of the partners Engaging Networks was delivering to their clients They were also not sure of their customers would experience be.

Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to provide training to their partners, as well as accredit and verify them, and establish stronger connections with them. This allowed them to build an extensive network of partners through companies that they were aware of working using their software and also were familiar with the frameworks they use. They felt confident that their certified partners knew the platforms inside out as they were certified through the online academy course.

Taking your course from idea to instruction in a snap

When working with a larger enterprise, it is possible to be given a limited time to develop a course around the introduction of a new service or product feature. In the case of Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer feature in order to create several course modules at once, bulk upload videos, as well as create lesson plans in a list form.

In the case of building your courses, you're in a position to record all your videos at once then upload them and create a course from beginning to finish , with a predetermined time frame. This lets you spend longer on the development of the material that's included in your course while ensuring that the content will fulfill the requirements that you've laid out.

It's helpful not to having to spend too much time administering, hosting, and tweaking the platform rather instead of focusing on sharing your knowledge through content. The platform assists in this process.

Transitioning from B2C B2B

In the case of an B2C audience, courses can usually be designed around one subject. If you are a creator of courses You have greater autonomy and different stakeholders to respond to. For B2B purposes It is crucial to be aware that when offering any type of training services to another business, there is going to be more people and departments to answer to. So, it is important to think like the business that you work with or inside. Whether you are an outside consultant or internal operating within the B2B scenario will probably involve greater training and training processes, as well as a larger amount of subjects and courses in addition to the need to meet compliance standards.

The key difference between B2C and B2C

• There will be a greater number of stakeholders managing a business there will be a array of internal stakeholders that you will need to engage with and have conversations with. You may need to speak to customer success executives within the organization as well as the marketing department as well as the customer service team as well as sales engineers and sales teams to gather insight into how best to provide training for clients.
• It is possible that you will need to increase your inventory of courses If you're sitting down to plan a course, you may have change your approach to how you instruct a crowd of participants about a particular topic. B2B has an extensive course catalog which means you could discover that when your business with sees the value in a training course it will be looking to increase the number of classes and programs accessible to multiple audiences, such as customers as well as employees, partners and other audiences.

A few tips for B2B content management

• Use a project management software to manage course content: When you're in an B2B context, you may require constant updating of the content of your courses in order to ensure they are up-to-date with the evolving needs of your business. demands. It's helpful to employ project management software such as Asana and Trello to keep track of your courses as well as their contents and also the changes implemented over time and will require changes in the future.
• Try to cooperate together with your company's internal team members: when developing a B2B course is essential to gain an understanding of the businesses' onboarding and customer retention methods, partnership programmes, as well as customer training methods. Talking to experts in the field within the industry who possess specialized knowledge will help you gain insights for the courses and training that you are building. Getting their "buy-in" and seeking their opinions for your course can be an enormous benefit in the development of your product.

Choose an LMS which will grow and scale to meet your needs

When Engaging Network had its previous LMS, there was more administration work to be completed in order to build classes. Utilizing Plus as their learning management system Simon has been able to take about 30 percent of his time be able to invest it in creating content.

Selecting an online platform for learning which is user-friendly, flexible, and allows you to build courses with ease allows you to expand the customer base you serve, as well as have distinct learning spaces or sites to teach your students. Previous to becoming part of Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy that served clients, partners, and several different stakeholders. With Plus, they have created a variety of different academies to serve their stakeholders and focus specifically in tailoring their learning experiences to them.

Another advantage of Plus in the B2B scenario is that, through the implementation of different learning environments, you as well as many other participants of the business are able to keep track of the progression of your clients, partners, and employees on their own learning path.

For instance: An HR manager is able to log in to the platform and receive updates about the progress of employees going through the process of onboarding. A Customer Success Manager can join the platform's learning environment for customer education as well as keep track of how well the employees are learning businesses' customers.

Ideas for starting your first B2B training

• Try to address a business's' largest need: As you develop your first B2B service, the most important thing to keep in mind is that your initial course should focus on the most pressing need of the target business you are working with. In this case, if your business that you want to promote your course is struggling to handle employee onboarding, start there.
• Get feedback from your students and clients Get feedback from your students and clients can be one of the best ways that you can improve your future classes and improve the quality of your B2B products. Keep in mind that starting your first course will always induce some nervousness. Make an effort to ease this anxiety by performing the best that you can during your initial course, continuously asking for feedback from students and then implementing the feedback in the following version. This will allow you to continue to improve the quality of your teaching with each launch.
• Make use of survey, focus group, as well as client check-ins. It's helpful to utilize survey, focus groups as well as communities for collecting feedback. In order to stay in contact with your customers and their demands, it is helpful to conduct a survey to your customers every six months, to inquire about their experience with your courses and how you can improve your support for them by providing them with more the content.

KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early on:

While you develop and launch your first B2B service, be sure you're receiving information from your students. Utilize reporting tools in your online learning platform to monitor your student's progress, how they're interacting with the material in your courses, and notice where there's areas to improve.

Key metrics that should be considered are:

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

Recognizing patterns in your reports as well as the metrics you use can give you insights into the way that your material is performing for students and know the time to make adjustments. With the application, you can download the report data each week, to allow you to remain on top of this knowledge, and build a database of statistics.

What To Do To Stay On The Moving Forward In The Learning Journey

• Give suggestions for what you would like you'd like to study next.
   A valuable way to grow and expand your B2B offer as you expand your offerings of courses is to provide your learners with a roadmap of the next steps to take. On your course progression as well as completion pages, you can suggest the courses that your students need to take next in order to increase their understanding of a particular area.
• Explore your creativity with the App Store
   Another option to keep them interested and active in their education journey is to explore your options in the App Store. There are a large number of applications that can enable you to broaden the learning experiences for your students. They can also extend the learning experience beyond text, video presentation, and quiz courses.
• Introduce micro-learning in order to ensure that students are engaged  
   In the B2B setting, including micro-learning into your curriculum can keep students engaged. Make sure to limit each video that you include in your lessons to be an maximum of fifteen minutes long and every course at a maximum of 2 hours. Your students will be able to follow through on their journey of learning with greater involvement and keep the completion rate of your students to a higher level.
• Make use of real-world case study examples
   Offering your students instances and case studies of topics they've recently learned about at the conclusion of your class allows your students to put their knowledge into perspective and see the way in which what they have discovered can be used in a practical situation.

Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy

• Build the course. Prove to potential clients that you are worth the services you provide and the course will meet the needs of their company.
• Your course must address an issue the prospective student is experiencing. Establish certain KPIs for your course and describe a problem that you are trying to solve so that you can prove that the worth and effectiveness of the course.
• Get feedback from users as you continue to refine and improve your B2B offerings after it's launched in the world
• Begin to think bigger, and develop other possible educational opportunities and courses for your company, and expand your personal expansion as a creator of courses as a result.
• Make sure to make the process collaborative with your client. Make a an effort to keep track of reporting