Building a scalable B2B online learning business without the right technology is like trying to run an ultra-marathon in flip-flops. It’s possible but it’s not going to be easy.
If you’re a training company that’s currently stuck in the weeds, trying to increase your revenue but feeling confined by your current tech stack and team size, you’re not alone.
The good news? Building a scalable B2B online learning experience ecosystem has never been easier thanks to new tools designed to help you do more with less.
Here’s our breakdown of how to build high-quality online learning experiences for B2B clients that delight, engage, and retain customers – plus the key steps to successfully deliver and sell your learning products at scale for maximum returns.
Follow along or skip ahead:
- Why B2B is the next growth opportunity for online learning businesses
- Understanding the shift from B2C to B2B online learning
- 6 steps to build a B2B online learning experience
- Top tools to support your B2B learning business
- 3 common pitfalls when building B2B online learning experiences
Why B2B is the next growth opportunity for online learning businesses
If you’re in the business of selling online learning experiences directly to consumers, there’s a significant opportunity for you to scale your business and increase your revenue by expanding to B2B customers.
As more companies invest in online learning experiences to educate, engage, and upskill their employees – skirting the many drawbacks of in-person training – there’s a huge opportunity for your business to get a slice of the B2B pie.
Selling B2B comes with a range of benefits, including:
- Higher revenue potential
- Longer-term relationships
- Predictable, recurring revenue
Building high-quality B2B online learning experiences is the ultimate opportunity to grow your revenue and scale your business because you get access to bigger budgets, longer-term contracts, and more chances to boost your MRR.
By creating streamlined B2B online learning experiences – with a tech stack that’s scalable and simple to use – you can shift from constantly worrying about customer acquisition to building stronger, longer-term relationships with high-value B2B clients. And growing your business with ease.
Understanding the shift from B2C to B2B online learning
If you’re used to selling to individual consumers, the shift from B2C to B2B may feel like a big leap. Everything from the business model to the buyers is different. Here are some key differences to keep in mind.
| Category | B2C online learning | B2B online learning |
| Business model | Individual learners Typically lower price point products One-time payments | Bulk or Team licenses Higher value contracts Recurring revenue |
| Sales cycle | Direct-to-consumer selling Faster sales cycles Purchase decisions often emotionally-driven | Multiple stakeholders Lengthier sales cycle Requires long-term relationship building |
| Buyers | Learners are the Buyers | Buyers: HR, L&D, Ops Lead Learners: Employees, Partners, Contractors |
| Purchase motivation | Personal growth, career advancement, interests & hobbies | Business outcomes e.g. compliance, onboarding, skill gaps |
| Learning experience design | Focus on individual engagement Usually self-paced or cohort-based learning experiences | Learning experience needs to align with organizational goals May include customized learning content May include custom certifications and integrations |
| Technology needs | Standard LMS or course platform | Requires Enterprise LMS with advanced reporting, integrations, white-labelling, enterprise-grade security and compliance |
Business model
If you’re pivoting from B2C to B2B online learning, your business model is likely to change dramatically.
A B2B business model usually involves selling bulk or team licenses to organizations. The result? Contracts are usually high-value. Many training organizations use a subscription-based business model which means there’s an opportunity for recurring, predictable revenue month-on-month, rather than one-off purchases common in B2C businesses.
This is a direct contrast to B2C learning businesses which typically target single buyers and learners and sales tend to be at a lower price point due to lower budgets.
Sales cycle
When you’re selling B2B online learning experiences, expect a slower sales cycle involving multiple stakeholders. B2B sales often require longer-term relationship building compared to the relatively quick B2C sales cycles which can include impulse purchases and split-second decision making.
Buyers vs Learners
One of the core differences between B2C and B2B selling is your buyers and your learners. When you’re making the transition from a B2C to B2B business model, you’ll need to do some work to identify not only who your learners are – but who your buyers are too.
B2C Buyers vs Learners
In B2C business models, the buyer is almost always the learner. This means they’re evaluating your offering based on how much it will help them personally and are more likely to make decisions based on emotion.
B2B Buyers vs Learners
For B2B businesses, buyers are usually a dedicated team or individual in an organization looking to purchase training for multiple employees or team members. This might include teams such as:
- Learning & Development
- HR
- Operations
The learner is usually multiple employees who don’t have a say in the purchase decision – learning experiences are purchased and offered to them on behalf of the organization.
The impact? When you’re shifting from a B2C to B2B business, you’ll want to clearly identify:
- Your Learner Persona: Who will be learning and taking your courses at the organization?
- Your Buyer Persona: Who is your client and “middleman” at the organization and what will motivate them to purchase?
Learn more: The B2B leap and successfully transitioning from selling B2C to B2B
Purchase motivation
If you’re looking to scale your B2B online learning business, you’ll also need to understand the difference in purchase motivation. Unlike B2C purchases that are largely based on emotional factors, personal interests, career advancement, and personal growth, B2B purchase decisions are more black and white.
B2B purchase decisions are based on specific, defined business outcomes such as compliance needs, skill gaps, and performance KPIs. Purchase motivation is more logical, so you’ll need to demonstrate the concrete impact your online learning experiences will have on an organization.
- Learning experience design
Shifting from B2C to B2B audiences is also likely to mean tweaking or completely re-building your online learning experience to suit a different audience with different goals. Here are a few things to consider:- Curriculum: What type of training you will be delivering and what online learning experiences will you create for B2B clients?
- Delivery: How will you deliver the learning content for the best possible business outcomes?
- Learning experience: What will the learning experience need to look like to achieve your client’s desired results?
B2B buyers will have different expectations from training programs with greater focus on the business outcomes your training provides – including performance improvement, team engagement, and skill adoption.
- Technology needsTo cater to B2B audiences, your tech stack needs to be B2B ready. B2B customers have more advanced technology requirements, including in-depth analytics and reporting needs, user roles and permissions, and integrations with their internal tools.
You will want to ensure that the LMS or course platform you use to deliver your online learning programs can handle large volumes of learners, assign roles and permissions, and white-labelling, as well as advanced security and compliance.
Learn more about finding the right LMS for your needs here.
6 steps to build a B2B online learning experience
Whether you’re looking to shift from a B2C to B2B business model or you’re looking for a scalable way to start selling to bigger or more profitable B2B clients, here are 6 steps to help you build a successful B2B online learning empire.
Identify your learner persona
To scale your business and grow your revenue, you need to make sure you’re clear on your B2B learner persona. That is who your target learner or student is, what problems they’re facing, and what they need from your learning program.
The goal is to create the best possible learning experience for a specific learner profile – one that will delight, engage, and give them the transformation they crave.
When you’re working on digital learning design for B2B clients, it’s important to be clear on your B2B learner persona and the needs of the learner you’re building a course for.
Here are a few questions to ask to help you define your learner persona:
- Who will be taking this learning program?
- E.g. Job role
- Department
- Seniority
- Location
- What is their work environment?
- E.g. Remote
- Customer-facing
- Frontline
- What type of learning do they prefer?
- E.g. Self-paced learning
- Cohort-based learning
- Social learning
- Blended learning
- What type of online learning experience is likely to be most effective?
- E.g. Bite-size microlearning
- Long-form modules
- Interactive, hands-on learning
- What technology do they need to complete the learning?
- E.g. Do they need mobile-friendly content?
- Do they need offline access?
- Are there digital literacy barriers?
- Has the learner taken online learning programs before? What was their experience?
- E.g. What did they like about previous courses?
- What did they dislike or find challenging?
- What content formats did they enjoy most?
As well as understanding your learners’ demographics, preferences, and learning environment, it’s also important to think about the motivations for them to complete training.
When you’re creating your learner persona, consider their motivations such as:
- Pain points
- Frustrations
- Challenges
- Career goals
- Incentives
- Skill gaps
Take the time to gain clarity on your learner persona before you approach B2B clients to pitch. Why? Because then you’ll know who your ideal learner is and why your training can help solve their biggest pain points, making it easier to sell your solution.
Use research to build your learner persona
The most effective learner personas are based on research rather than guesswork. When you’re building your learner persona, try to speak to as many potential learners as possible to understand their needs, challenges, and requirements for learning.
For example, you can conduct research through:
- Surveys
- Interviews
- Focus groups
- Social listening
- Analytics and reporting
If you already have B2B clients, use surveys and targeted interviews to learn more about their learners. You can also gain more information about your learner persona by analyzing any current B2C customers to identify what your learners’ challenges are.
- Is there something they are constantly struggling with when it comes to specific topics or concepts?
- What questions or concerns come up most often?
- Can you identify any areas that might be relevant to B2B customers?
Use the insights from your LMS analytics to build up a more detailed picture of your learners’ needs and interests. By keeping a close eye on your customers’ learning journey and progress with your courses, you can gain a clearer sense of their pain points, helping you perfect your learning experience and guide them through their desired transformation.
You can also bring the stories of customers who achieve their desired results and transformation back to your corporate clients when it comes to pitching to add essential social proof. Think case studies, testimonials, reviews, and data.
- Who will be taking this learning program?
Craft your buyer persona
To sell effectively to B2B customers, you also need to be clear on your buyer persona within the organizations you’re targeting.
Your “buyer persona” is a snapshot of the person who you’ll ultimately be having sales conversations with, within the larger organizations where you’ll aim to sell your online learning experiences.
To get clarity on who your buyer persona is, you’ll want to make sure you have a clear sense of factors such as:
- The buyer and company demographics
- The business goals or pain points they’re looking to solve
- The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they’re prioritizing
The most effective B2B sales processes take a consultative approach with the buyer. The more you can learn about your ideal customers, the more you can tailor your sales process, your messaging, and your product to their needs.
If you can get to the heart of your customers’ pain points, you can position your online learning products as the best possible solution and start to build up your value proposition with your ideal customer in mind.
Here are some top examples of KPIs stakeholders look for:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Skill adoption
- Training completion rate
- Training cost reduction
- Reduced customer support tickets
- Reduced onboarding time
In the B2B sales process, there are usually two key stakeholders that you need to be conscious of: the buyer and the instructional designers at the organization.
Within larger organizations, there might be a team member or an entire team dedicated to digital learning and instructional learning design. This team may have different standards and requirements for online courses and learning outcomes than your buyer. To successfully sell your products to B2B customers, you need to ensure that your digital learning products meet the standards set by these teams.
Design a customizable B2B course curriculum
Customization is often a key requirement for many B2B customers. Every business has unique needs and companies want online learning experiences that speak to their specific challenges, goals, and objectives.
Many companies also look for online learning that fits their organization, including their:
- Terminology
- Brand voice
- Case studies
- Real-world scenarios
For training companies selling to B2B customers, offering customized content allows you to create a collaborative, consultative relationship with your customers. This can help build a long-term partnership that brings in recurring revenue.
By creating ‘off-the-shelf’ online learning content with option add-ons for customization, you can easily adapt and personalize your content based on each individual customers’ needs. And sell a premium product at a higher price point.
The ‘off-the-shelf’ curriculum model
Many training companies choose to offer a standardized course with the option for customization when pitching to clients in the B2B space.
If you start with a scalable, foundational course, you can then offer add-ons and modular options that allow individual B2B customers to customize your learning experience to their needs.
B2B clients may want to include original content in your course that’s specific to their organization – and they may want to introduce their own technology in the online learning experience as well.
The ‘off-the-shelf’ model allows you to sell B2B online learning experiences at scale, helping you build a predictable, recurring revenue stream for your business once you build your first ‘customizable’ course.
Learn more: Practical Tips for Creating Profitable B2B Online CoursesBuild a B2B-ready online learning experience
When you’re clear on your learner persona, your buyer persona, and your B2B learning experience curriculum, you’re ready to build your product.
Use customer data and feedback to help you every step of the way, including:
- Your learning formats
- Accessibility standards
- Security and compliance standards
- Technology considerations
Make sure you know what your B2B customers want and need from your online learning experience so you can ensure that every element of your learning product is tailored to your audience.
For example, if you’re working with organizations in a heavily regulated industry or you’re offering highly technical content, you’ll need to go through a more sophisticated design process to ensure your content meets the regulatory standards for your audience.
Your B2B clients may also want your online course to integrate seamlessly into the existing programs or systems they already have. This may require you to adapt your content or your tech stack to work with customer expectations.
And if there’s an element of customization in your online learning experience, it’s important that you clarify what role you’re going to play when working with B2B clients. Make sure you have a clear process for working with B2B clients if they ask you to adjust your learning content, curriculum or your digital learning experience to suit what they’re looking for. Map out what that might look like and how much customization you’ll offer.
Having an advanced tech stack that allows you to track, analyse, and understand learner data is a good helping hand throughout this process. For example, you can leverage the technology of Thinkific Plus to pull advanced analytics and deliver data and reports directly to your clients as their learners progress through your training content, so they’re able to track their return on investment in real-time.
Learn more about Thinkific Plus advanced analytics here.
Use data to validate and improve
The most effective B2B training companies understand the power of continuous improvement. Your work is never ‘done’.
Instead, aim to create a cycle of continuously refining and improving your B2B online learning experience based on data from learners and customers. If you can create a continuous feedback loop, you can dramatically improve the performance of your learning programs and create a more engaging and effective product for your customers.
Choose an enterprise-ready LMS that has advanced analytics and reporting built into the platform to allow you and your B2B clients to track learner progress through your training content – and see where they’re getting stuck.
Pay attention to where learners are:
- Dropping off
- Skipping content
- Scoring badly
These are all indicators that your learning experience needs some improvement. Use learner feedback surveys to understand more about what’s happening on the ground so you can take action.
Advanced analytics capabilities also allow you to monitor and share report training outcomes to each organizations’ stakeholders, helping you to deliver solid proof of ROI and build stronger relationships with your customers.
Pitch and sell to B2B clients
When you’re ready to start pitching and selling to B2B clients, it’s important to think about the sales process from start to finish to make sure you have a clear plan to move potential customers from leads to sales.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Who you’re pitching to: Identify the buyer you’re targeting in an organization to make sure you’re pitching to the right people – the ones who have control over the final purchase decision.
- Why they should care: Create a clear value proposition to help prospective customers understand why they should listen to you and how you can help them achieve their goals. Use case studies and customer testimonials to enhance your pitch.
- How you’ll reach them: Build a strategy for how you’ll find, engage, and pitch to potential customers, including the tools and technology you’ll need to create an efficient sales process. Look out for an LMS that includes built-in integrations with sales and marketing tools.
Selling to B2B organizations involves understanding – and navigating – the multiple relationships at play within an organization to allow you to connect with and convert the key players.
Remain conscious of politics at play, especially when it comes to subject matter experts at the organization. You’ll want to successfully ‘onboard’ them so that they can work with you to integrate their expertise into what you already offer. Doing this will help you ingrain yourself within the organization.
Take some time to get acquainted with the learning and development team and existing managers in the wider team who you’ll be working with, such as instruction designers, program managers and developers.
Image by Digital Learning Institute
Top tools to support your B2B learning business
If you’re looking to scale, you need a tech stack that can keep up.
Manual-heavy B2B processes like learner enrollment, quote negotiation, and collecting payments can all get in the way of doing what you do best, eating into your team’s bandwidth and limiting the time you have to spend on delivering maximum value to your customers.
To avoid falling into the trap of endless admin and delivery distress, look for enterprise-ready tools to help you work seamlessly and efficiently.
Here are some top tools and features to prioritize in your LMS:
- Advanced analytics and reporting: To build a successful B2B learning business, comprehensive analytics and custom reporting are must-haves to help you track learner outcomes and ROI.
- Payments and billing: Reduce admin load with features like built-in payment processing, invoices, billing tools, and integrated payment gateways.
- Bulk actions: Tools to manage learners and customers at scale are essential, including AI-driven automations, bulk uploads for content, automatic enrollment, and more.
- User roles and permissions: Features like separate team dashboards and user segmentation are key for B2B customers, allowing you to effectively manage access and permissions.
- Customization: Create fully white-labelled online learning experiences, branded mobile apps, and customized online academies for every B2B client.
- Integrations: Enterprise-ready integrations are essential to reduce digital friction, including CRM, HRIS, Slack, and SCORM.
- Enterprise-grade features: Look for features tailor-made for enterprise clients, including Single Sign-On (SSO), built-in SSL, and SOC2 Compliance.
Extend your possibilities and expand your horizons with a powerful enterprise LMS like Thinkific Plus – built to be your business partner as you grow your B2B learning business. Get a single source of truth for every aspect of your business from content to payments to user management.
With Thinkific Plus, you can reduce digital friction for your team and streamline repetitive processes like bulk enrollments and content uploads, without compromising on client experience, so you can move more efficiently and easily through the day-to-day tasks of managing your business and delivering best-in-class learning experiences. The right platform can turn that mountain you have to climb into a minor speed bump. Find out more here.
3 common pitfalls when building B2B online learning experiences
To build a thriving B2B online training company, there are some key things to bear in mind to help you deliver maximum value with minimum stress for your team day-to-day. Here are some common pitfalls.
Your B2B business lacks scalability
If you’re running a training company with a high volume of learners, you’ve probably already run into problems with delivering training at scale.
When you’re delivering B2B training, your capacity as a team can easily get eaten up by repetitive admin jobs and day-to-day tasks like billing and reporting. To help you grow your revenue – without growing your team – you need the technology to build a scalable business that doesn’t require extra manpower to run.
This includes repetitive processes such as:
- Client onboarding
- Learner enrollment
- User management
- Reporting and analytics
- Certificates and credentialing
- Invoicing and payment tracking
That’s where all-in-one LMS’s like Thinkific Plus can give you the edge over your competitors. With all the features you need to deliver training at scale and manage your business at the same time, Thinkific Plus frees up much-needed time for your team, helping to reduce digital friction and help you run your business efficiently while maximizing your revenue.
You’re selling to learners, not buyers
If you’re making the switch from selling B2C to B2B, you need to make sure you know who you’re targeting in your marketing and sales strategies. Many successful B2C businesses struggle with B2B because it requires shifting from the ‘learner as buyer’ mentality.
B2B buyers are less likely to buy based on emotion and more likely to buy based on concrete outcomes. This means you need to be prepared to demonstrate the ROI of your B2B learning experience and convince buyers that your product will help solve their needs – not just sell a quick fix solution to a problem.
Take the time to develop a detailed buyer persona so you know who you’re targeting, why they should care, and what makes your product or service the solution to their needs.
You’re missing reporting and tracking tools
B2B clients need to justify training spend to executives – and to do that they need hard data. If you can tie your online learning to business results, you can demonstrate the value of your training products and retain your clients as recurring customers.
To scale your B2B business effectively, make sure you have advanced analytics and reporting tools integrated into your LMS to help you track and monitor learner progress and results.
This not only helps you strengthen the case with your existing and future clients but also gives you a feedback loop for refining, improving, and adjusting your learning products based on data.
Why scalable B2B online learning experiences are the future for learning businesses
Building a scalable, successful B2B training company is no easy feat – but with the right tools and tech behind you, you can make the shift to a more sustainable and profitable business.
Selling B2B online learning experiences come with the benefits of high-ticket contracts, lower churn, and the chance to make a deeper impact on the organizations you work with. Making the shift to B2B also allows you to focus on creating high-quality learning experiences while benefiting from predictable, recurring revenue for your business.
By creating and selling B2B ready programs, you can set your business up for long-term success and reliable recurring revenue. Now and in the future.
Start Growing Your Revenue With B2B Online Course Sales Today
Thinkific Plus is tailor-made to help you scale your business and your revenue with intuitive technology that helps you manage, deliver, and sell B2B courses with ease.
With advanced TCommerce features like Invoicing and Group Orders, as well as advanced analytics, and roles and permissions, Thinkific is the only platform offering a fully integrated B2B selling experience.
Keen to get started?
Learn how to market, price, and sell your courses to B2B customers in our free course.
This was originally published Sept. 28, 2022 and refreshed in 2025.