Expanding your B2B offering with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant Step Up and Review
Implementing a B2B model into your business or transitioning into a B2B sales model is an excellent way to get to the next level of success for your company.
Our final meeting of the "Level up with Plus" series, we had conversations about the topic with Paul Thomson and Simon Durant. They provided practical and practical strategies to iterate and grow your B2B offerings.
You may be an entrepreneur in B2C trying to shift to an B2B selling model, or you're part of a larger business that would like to include online learning into your product. Paul's practical guidance will give you helpful B2B methods to start.
The B2B sales journey
Selling constantly is exhausting. If you're involved in making online courses it is not difficult to get into the habit of constantly "selling" and working hard to connect with a larger market. It takes a lot of time, energy and work, especially when the majority of your effort is spent selling a lower-cost course.
To get out from the cycle of sales It is essential to develop a sales strategy which grows along with your company. This can help ensure consistent conversions to support future growth, and also help to create an integrated strategy for everyone who is involved.
Prior to starting in the process of creating or reinventing your B2B service, consider these some of the common mistakes you should avoid
- Reinventing the wheel: Make an effort to avoid making a fresh starting. Many times when people jump into online classes believe that they must create an entirely new idea and reinvent the wheel entirely by starting from scratch. Be reminded that it's not necessary to begin from scratch - especially if you've already built an impressive B2C firm.
- Don't "Ready to Fire, Ready to Aim": Once you've chosen the topic of your course make sure you don't wait until the day after you launch your course before deciding where your course will fit into your overall enterprise model.
- Do not quit before you reach the point of your success. A crucial aspect to take into consideration in the beginning of beginning your journey in the B2B industry is that you should not give up as you'll become one step closer to being successful. One sale, one salesperson or one salesperson may help your B2B offerings become successful.
The Lifetime Student Value Framework(tm)
The framework is comprised of three components that are three: Systems, Sales and students. Through focusing on these aspects firms are able manage and function at a high level as well as create meaningful customer experience. This begins by making amazing content that resonates with your audience. When you've signed them up, it is important to make sure that you've put the correct procedures in place for moving students between one program into the next, similar like a stepping stone when they've become fans of your content. To do this, you'll require "systems in the front as well as backend that can identify students and alert to them when they need," says Paul, in order to "incentivize students to buy the next item" by creating unforgettable student experience.
The system is intended to support you with new students and ensures they experience a transformative learning environment that will allow you to provide them with more products and services later on down the line. Numerous companies and organizations have gone this approach, leading online education methods and identifying the best ways to recruit students.
The three ways to expand in the B2B market
- Implementing a successful customer strategy
- Incorporating an extra offer to keep customers in the store and to reduce the rate of churn
- Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and alliances that speed up expansion and increase your presence on the B2B marketplace
1. Implementing a Customer-Success Strategie
It's crucial to remember that you are already performing remarkable work for your business in the delivery of the services and products you offer and knowledge. Incorporating online courses and online education into your organization will help to develop an approach to your clients' satisfaction, and to complement your existing business with new services, increase the benefits for your customers and grow your business.
What exactly is HTML0 "Echosec Systems" implemented a customer success strategy
Echosec Systems created a customer education center that is integrated in their onboarding process for employees and has a dual purpose to their company.
The top questions you can be asking when you are evaluating the success of a customer success strategy include:
- What can you do with classes to improve your company?
- What purpose, role or issue could these classes aid you in solving within your organization?
2. An additional promotion to make customers more likely to return and to reduce the rate of churn
There is a method to benefit your company. An item, service, or way of helping your customers, clients or students. The ability to offer an additional discount can be a great way by to keep your customers , and lower the rate of churn. The use of courses is a good option to offer the customers a special deal in addition to reducing the likelihood of them leaving the company.
HTML0 What is HTML0? Lansa, a low-code development platform, implemented"additional service "additional services"
In Lansa In Lansa, the team had to address one issue: despite the volume of documents written There was a need from both potential and existing customers for an official learning about their product. They wanted support from their customers in order to understand how to utilize their platform.
Prior to implementing Plus the Lansa team Lansa used a time-mentorship model to instruct the new users on how to use their product and to share best practices. This would take a substantial amount of resources and time when scaled.
- Take a moment to think about the Lifetime Students Value Framework for a moment and its purpose to create an ecosystem you want your students, customers, and clients to be treated with consideration and in a manner that generates revenue for your business, and keeps them in your program for longer. You want to create an experience overall that keeps your customers onboard and dedicated to your product or service.
Some good questions to ask yourself when you are analyzing the concept of making use of "additional offer" to decrease churn within your company are:
- Why are my customers currently disappearing, or are they growing out of my business?
- What type of course should I create in my business to ease the burden?
3. Utilizing accreditations, certifications, and alliances to speed up the growth of your business and expand its reach into the B2B market
If your business has already increased in size, it's beneficial to extend your reach and increase your expansion beyond the products and services you offer to students, customers or clients through the use of classes and the introduction of certification, accreditation, or other similar programs.
How IntelyCare has increased its reach and extended its reach far beyond business offerings by gaining the certification and accreditation
The IntelyCare team IntelyCare built an offer which could be a supplement to their business which allowed them to instruct over a million students effectively and quickly way. The team also utilized certificates as well as social media in order to support taking the class through to the end.
The key to success is incorporating the accreditation and certification process into your B2B offering is an effective option to boost the expansion of your company within the B2B Market. The customers want to be aware of what's new, and they require proof to prove that they've completed their knowledge and absorbed the most current information to be able to utilize it for work reasons, as well as for questions about compliance. The certificate provides an effective means of providing your customers and students with an opportunity to show their experience as well as the security and compliance they gained through your classes.
How has Keap expanded its growth and more reach over current business services by way of partnership
The Keap members took charge of helping their customers implement their platform into their business They implemented the partner onboarding program with Plus.
Important lesson learned: As Keap was already a thriving platform and was able to increase their growth rate by reaching out to new markets and tried to fit into the new audience they didn't had access to, by relying on their partners to be able to represent them and implement their platform in their behalf through Partnerships.
Questions to consider while analyzing the use of using accreditations, certifications, as well as partnerships to boost the growth of your business and increase your presence in the B2B marketplace are:
- Which B2B Acceleration route is the most suitable for my business?
- Does my company stand to benefit from Accreditations and Certifications as well as partnerships?
It's not easy to build and expand the B2B offerings on a massive scale. the trenches of Simon Dunant
In the final part of the Level Up with Plus session in the second part of the program, we spoke in depth with Simon Dunant, Director of Online Learning at Engaging Networks. Simon is a frequent user of Plus with a strong experience in online education along with over 25 years of experience within the field of technology. Simon is the leader of the group of online learning academies that are part of Engaging Networks. It is the top SaaS platform for non-profit fundraising and marketing, managing the creation, curation and implementation of learning programmes for the customers as well as certificates for customers' partners and their agency partners all across the world.
Simon manages Engaging Network's Staff Academy, helping the firm provide security and compliance education to employees. He has over 10-years of B2B and B2C expertise, which includes coaching, training and mentoring coaching via in-person, online and online material for major global corporations as well as at major conferences.
If you're considering implementing strategies for expanding and improving your B2B offering, Simon offers some tips coming from the perspective of someone who's been through this over the last four years of online education, both as a consultant as well as an employee in charge of online training, building Engaging Network's customer education system from scratch, and migrating to Plus by 2021.
What is online education's potential to be integrated into the business's objectives?
When Simon was first hired by Engaging Networks, the company was looking to expand educational options for its customers as well as customers as well as. Initially, the company's vision was to offer the highest standard online learning to their customers , transforming their clients into expert users of their software , enabling their clients to boost retention rates, find new clients, and reduce the time to onboard employees as they expanded the size of the company.
The principal goals for Engaging Networks' online learning platform were:
- For instance, to educate clients about their product , and to provide top practices for clients within a digital environment
- To educate customers on the use of their tools and platform so that they can use their product effectively, and to meet their goals as an organization.
One of the major challenges faced by Engaging Networks was to be capable of delivering classes quickly because of their rapid-paced production schedule as well as regular updates to features that are released every 6-8 weeks. It was imperative for the company to be able to build and update classes in accordance with feature releases to be able to educate their customers on the best ways to use the features and make sure that they are delivering value to the organization.
Benefits of having an online academy of speeding up onboarding for Engaging Networks, starting an academy has resulted in a reduction of amount of work required for Account managers as well as Support teams. Through an online academy, many of the tedious instruction that Support teams must go through while they're onboarding customers could be avoided by making use of self-paced classes, which help account managers and Support teams spend more one-on-one time with customers.
Establishing a network of partners with accreditation and accreditation
Engaging Networks built a community of nonprofits and marketing agencies who are interested in working together to develop their system. They built a partner network through an online agency academy which was accredited and validated.
The most important benefits of partnership and accreditationare:
- Accredited partners can be a useful aid in the development of an application, platform, or service and also in educating customers on their use.
- Accredited partners can assist their customers in delivering their ideas and also refer potential clients to businesses.
Accredited partners have been able to change the way they work in Engaging Networks' partner program. Prior to the introduction of the academy for agency partners There was no process in place to check the caliber of the partnerships Engaging Networks had been delivering to their clients in addition to being unsure about what the customer's service.
Engaging Networks saw an opportunity to educate their partners, validate and validate them, and establish stronger connections with their partners. This allowed them to form strong partnerships with agencies were familiar with their equipment and were aware of the platforms they used. They felt confident that their certified partners were familiar with their platform since they were certified by completing their online academy.
Beginning your course from concept to the instruction you need in no time
If you are working with a bigger company, you might need to use a smaller period of time to develop a course on the introduction of a brand new service or product feature. When using Plus, Simon advises taking advantage of the bulk importer function for the purpose of creating many elements of a course at the same time or upload bulk video and create lessons plans that are in outline format.
When you're building your courses, you're in the position of filming your entire video content at the same and uploading the entire collection at once and later, you can build your entire course with a tight time frame. This lets you focus longer on the development of content part of your course , while making sure that the course will deliver and meet the goals that you've defined in.
It's helpful not spending all day managing hosting, managing, and changing the platform, rather then focusing on the delivery of information via the data. This is made easier by the platform. procedure.
Transitioning from B2C to B2B
If you are a B2C crowd, the course can often be centered around one topic. If you are a creator of training courses, you will can be more independent and have many stakeholders that which you must address. On the B2B aspect, you should be aware that when you provide any form of training services to another business There will be an additional department or individual that you must report to. Therefore, it's crucial to think about the business you are working with, or within. When you're an outside consultant or an internal consultant working within the B2B scenario will probably involve greater training and training processes in addition to more classes as well as topics of training in addition to compliance demands.
There are key distinctions between B2B and C
- You'll have a larger number of stakeholders managing a firm. There will be many stakeholders within the company that you will need to engage in discussions and conversations with. You may need to meet with manager of customer satisfaction within the organization along with marketing staff and customer support team, sales engineers, and sales representatives to gain insights into the best way to deliver training to clients.
- There is a possibility that you need to broaden the range of training courses that you provide when sitting at the table and design classes. It's possible that you need change your method of teach a class of students about a particular topic. B2B can also give you a greater selection of course options, and you may find that after your business realizes the value of an educational course, it'll look to broaden their selection of training classes accessible to different groups, including customers and employees, partners, in addition to other types of groups.
Some ideas for content management for B2B
- Make use of an application for project management for managing course content If you are in a B2B environment, you might have regularly update your course content and courses in order to stay on top of company's evolving needs. It's valuable to make use of the project management tools like Asana as well as Trello to track your courses and their content as well as changes that have been implemented through time, and that will have to be revised later on.
- It is important to work in partnership with internal teamswhen creating an B2B-focused class is vital to gain an understanding of the business' onboarding, partnerships, retention strategies, and customer education modes. Interacting with experts that have special expertise will help you learn more about the course and the program you're creating. The process of contacting your "buy-in" and obtaining their advice that you could integrate into your training courses can be hugely beneficial in developing your product.
Select an LMS that can scale and grow to meet your requirements
If Engaging Network had its previous LMS it had a great deal of administrative work that had to be done before creating courses. Utilizing Plus as their brand new learning management system Simon is able to reduce around 30 percent of his time and focus on the creation of content.
It is important to choose an online platform for learning that's easy to learn, flexible and able to create courses in just minutes allows you to be more flexible to grow your customer base. You can also offer diverse learning zones or websites that cater to students. Prior to the advent to Plus, Engaging Networks had an extensive Academy which was a service that was available to customers, as well as other stakeholders and partners. Through Plus, they've created a number of different academies to serve their clients and their partners, and focus on customizing each learning experience for them.
Another advantage of Plus in a B2B context is the fact that, with the use of various learning spaces, you along with many other participants of the company are able to monitor the progress of your clients, partners and employees in their journey to learn.
For instance: An HR manager can login to the platform and get updates on the progress of employees who are undergoing the onboarding process. Customer Success Managers are allowed to access the Learning Environment to assist customers in educating them and track the learning progress of their customers.
Ideas for starting your very first B2B class
- Discover a method to satisfy your company's greatest demand. When you are creating your first B2B course, one important factor to consider is that the first course should focus on the most pressing need of your business. As an example, suppose the company you plan to market your course to is having difficulty with their employee onboarding process You should begin at the beginning.
- Request feedback: Asking for feedback from your students and customers is one of the most effective ways that you will be able to improve the next class and enhance your B2B offerings. Remember that launching your initial course will cause some nervousness. Take steps to lessen this anxiety by doing your best for the course you are taking for the first time. Continuously soliciting feedback from students and then implementing the feedback in the next version. This lets you keep improving the quality of your instruction by incorporating feedback as you go.
- Use surveys, focus groups and customer checks-ins. It is helpful to use survey, focus groups along with communities, to collect feedback. To keep on top of your clients and their demands, it assists to create questionnaires for your customers every six months to ask about their experiences they have had in your class and how you can improve their support by providing them with information.
KeepingTrack Of Reporting Early On:
If you're building and launching your first B2B business, ensure that you're obtaining the right data from your users. Use reporting tools in the platform you're using to track your students' development and to determine if they are engaging with your classes, and note if there is any need to improve.
Important metrics should be considered are:
- The number of students who already registered
- Course Enrolments
- The amount of courses have been that were started
- The amount of courses that have been completed
- The Complete Rate
- Last login of the student
Recognizing patterns and patterns in your reports and measurement can provide insights into the way the materials you use in the classroom and can help you decide if it's time to alter the way you teach. When using the platform allows users to download their weekly reports in order to stay on top of the data and also create a database with information.
What Can You Do to Stay Ahead of The Learning Journey
- Create suggestions about which subjects you'd like studying next.
An effective way to expand and expand your B2B offer as you increase your range of classes you offer is to provide your customers with direction on what they should learn in the coming months. On your course progression and completion pages, you can give suggestions as to what courses they should take following to further expand their understanding of a certain area. - Get your ideas on the table by using the App Store
Another method to keep your students interested and active in their educational process is by exploring your App Store. There's an abundance of apps available to help you diversify the educational experience of your students. They also allow for extending the learning experience beyond the traditional classroom with video, text as well as quizzes. - Incorporate micro-learning to ensure that students are engaged
In a B2B setting, including micro-learning into your curriculum can keep students engaged. It is best to limit your videos in the classroom to a maximum of 15 minutes and to make each lesson max. two hours. Your students will be able to continue their education in a more enthusiastic manner and maintain the completion rate of your students in a higher proportion. - Make use of real-world case research examples
Instructing your students with cases studies as well as examples of subjects they've studied towards the close of the class allows them to reflect on their knowledge and see the possibilities of how what they learned can be applied in a practical scenario.
Key Takeaways For Building Your Online Learning Education Strategy
- Develop your program. Show potential customers that you're worth your services and the course will meet the demands of the company.
- The course you choose to teach must be addressing an issue the prospective customer has to face right now. Create certain KPIs for your course, and explain the issue you want for a solution to establish the worth of your course as well as the effectiveness of your program.
- Get feedback from your customers as you work to improve and iterate your B2B offering following its launch in the world.
- Consider bigger ideas and consider different learning and course opportunities to your business, thereby expanding the scope of your expansion as a creator of courses as well.
- Make sure to be as a partner in collaboration in your relationship with your client. Make a a habit of keeping close the progress of your reports.
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