If there’s one thing that smart business owners do to sabotage their success, it’s this: they keep reinventing the wheel.
Here is the scenario: you launch a course that you’ve put in so much blood, sweat, and tears into. Next, you get customers for it and you get feedback. And then you move on and create a whole second course!
Or more likely, get stuck creating it and possibly run out of money.
Sound familiar?
I know because I’ve been that business owner, and in the past, I’ve tried to keep feeding my creative beast by creating new courses and programs. The problem is it doesn’t bring the success I want and need.
Instead of following down that path of disappointment, I’d recommend you take a more profitable route: selling training courses to companies instead of individuals.
It sounds counterintuitive, but spending less time creating content can actually earn you more money.
How to Charge More For Your Existing Training Courses Without Selling More
So here’s the point: you need to become more profitable with the training courses you already have. And, you can do this without spending more time and money to develop more courses.
To do this, you have two options:
- Raise prices, so that you’re selling the same number of courses but have a larger paycheck
- Make more sales, so that your prices can stay the same, but you’re reaching more people
…or maybe there’s a third option.
By offering your existing courses to a new clientele – one that will purchase multiple course licenses in a single sale – you position your business for an entirely new level of growth.
Here’s a real-life example:The most successful online training courses have already hit on this opportunity – and are enjoying the results.
Sales strategist Marc Wayshak shared with us that selling his membership program to corporations “added another 20% in revenue in the past year.”
Repositioning your existing online courses to use for selling as corporate training tools opens up new growth opportunities on so many levels.
Let’s explore a few more examples that go hand-in-hand with this sales strategy.
5 Benefits of Selling Training to Companies and Teams
1. One training course sale = 10x the revenue
Compare the effects of making a single course sale. When selling as training to a corporate company with ten team members, the revenue of this sale is ten times greater than with one-off, individual sales.
The change is transformational: instead of trying to achieve a large volume of single-client sales to meet your income goals, you only need a few to really make a big dent in your income goals.
2. More stability in revenue projections
When you have the right positioning to focus on making big sales instead of smaller ones, it’s much easier to make (and reach) accurate goals.
For example, you might need 1,000 individual sales to reach your revenue goals, which would require your sales team to focus more on ways to reach a large volume of potential clients. Depending on your industry (and competition), this may not be feasible year after year.
If you’re marketing and selling training courses for 5-person corporate teams, you need only 200 sales to reach the same revenue goal. And if you can sell to 10-person teams, you only need 100 sales, and so on.
It’s a less daunting and more efficient way to project and attain your revenue needs.
4. A more calculated marketing process
All marketing efforts find their success in a focused, calculated message.
But when you decide to license out your membership site to teams, you focus on a niche within your niche. The smaller your target clients, the easier it can be to identify the decision-making benefits and pain points they have.
The more you focus on the end customer, their pain points, and the benefits you offer, the more success you have in marketing and sales. Having a niche within a niche makes all that a lot easier.
5. More authority in your niche
Who has more authority: the personal trainer who works 1-1 with clients in the gym or the trainer who markets himself out to training Olympic teams?
Their training methods and mentality might be the exact same, but positioning yourself a little higher on the playing field is a great way to keep building your brand’s reputation.
When you leverage this new positioning, you may be pleasantly surprised at some of the big players in your niche who would love to work with you.
What are corporate clients interested in?
If you’re aiming to sell your course to companies, the first thing to do is make sure your course looks and feels polished and professional.
This also means having impressive landing pages that convey the value and benefits of your course. Everything from inside your actual course to all of your sales and digital marketing materials should give a top-notch first impression to attract corporate clients.
This foundational approach will set you up for future sales success.
That’s because when corporate clients consider investing in your online learning courses, they’re evaluating not only the content but also the credibility of the source.
A polished appearance suggests a level of dedication and expertise that aligns with the corporate world’s standards.
Here are some key topics that medium and large companies are always investing in:
- Leadership and management coaching
- Customer Service Excellence
- Virtual sales training programs
- Business Intelligence
- Compliance training
- Soft skills training
- Communication skills
- Time management
And in essence, anything that can help them improve the skill levels and performance of their employees, optimize their sales cycle, or bridge key company gaps.
Finding the Right Offer
Although not every online training course or membership site can be packaged and sold to corporate teams, most can with just a little bit of work.
Schedule a free discovery call
Find out why AccessAlly is the WordPress course plugin that pays for itself.
The good news is that it’s often not the content itself that needs to be tweaked – but the management side of things.
For example, corporate clients’ business objectives (whether that’s businesses with large teams, realtor associations, or any industry where a group of professionals works together) extend beyond the actual course material. They’re also looking for three things:
1. Ease of sharing training with their team members
Is it easy to share the material with their team members? Does each person get a unique login? Can the team leader control access – or delete someone if they leave the company?
2. Ability to track team member progress
If your course is focused on corporate training, many team leaders would love to see how their company’s users are actually progressing through the course.
Are they completing the course material? Do they understand it?
Providing the right statistics and user tracking is a game-changer for your corporate clients.
3. Ease of purchasing new licenses
A client might start off with a basic 5-person membership subscription, but after realizing how amazing your content is, they want to add more team members.
Giving them the flexibility to do this automatically (i.e. without having to put in a phone call to your customer support) is a huge bonus to busy clients who don’t have a ton of time to spare during the workday.
[Checklist] Is Your Membership Site Ready to Sell Training to Companies?
Using the above method of licensing your membership site and online course material to teams means that you can automatically tag them in your marketing automation system as “team clients”.
Everything from unique funnels and resources will become much easier to manage and grow.
Speaking of those funnels… coming up with the best way to advertise a training course for companies might follow a similar online marketing funnel as selling to individuals, but with a few tweaks.
Here’s a quick checklist to get you started learning how to market corporate training programs:
1. Make a list of companies that would benefit from your training courses
Who are the big fish in your industry – the ones that you’re dying to have as testimonials to use on your site? Make a list of companies that would benefit from your training courses.
Do your research and make a note of who you want to approach and why you picked them. The additional “why” should add enough context for you and your sales team to tailor your sales pitch.
Example: Compare the difference a bit of context can add if, for example, you offer training for editors:
Huffington Post
vs.
Huffington Post – because our editorial training can improve X, Y, Z in their process and give them an edge on their competitors.
How to find potential companies to sell training to
Once you have completed your market research and you have the list of all of your potential customers in your target audiences, it’s time to identify the key decision-makers, who have budget and are the ones who can close the deal.
Pro Tip: The job titles for key decision makers can vary between companies, but can include HR professionals, sales managers, and even the founder or CEO.
One of the easier (and free) tools out there you can use for this research is LinkedIn. With it, you can easily find all employees from a company by their title.
2. Create an outreach email campaign
Work with your copywriter, marketing strategist, and anyone else on your team to come up with the right angle and pitch for the initial outreach email campaign.
This should be primarily designed to explain the benefits of your training offer and get you in touch with the decision maker for purchasing corporate training.
Systemize this and make it an easy process to duplicate or even automate for ongoing outreach efforts.
3. Show social proof
Businesses don’t want to hear fancy language or promises. They want to see results.
This is a key difference between selling training to individuals and smaller businesses and selling to larger corporations.
With a smaller business, testimonials like “My team LOVED working with Sarah, and we noticed such a difference in the confidence of our sales team after taking her course” are just fine.
Larger corporations wouldn’t bat an eye at a testimonial unless they see concrete evidence in words, like “After our sales team took Sarah’s course, they increased their closing percentage by 15%, leading to a 30% increase in revenue.”
4. Follow-up and be persistent with your prospective customers
Be aggressive.
I repeat: be very aggressive.
Following up with corporate clients is a bit different than your individual or one-off training sales reps.
There’s a plethora of reasons why this is the case:
- There’s a lot more noise out there that you have to be heard above.
- They’re busy, and your sales pitch might not be top of mind for them
- If you’re not on paper or on their calendar, you can easily be forgotten…forever
- Your competition is out there, too
Keep in mind that being aggressive does not mean that you toss out the human element. It’s a tough balance for the best of copywriters, but you have to be personable, likable, and persistent enough to make a hard sell.
Resources: As always, you can count on Hubspot to break the follow-up email process down into bite-size pieces. If you’re unfamiliar with how this might look, take a peek at their article to get a handle on it: 16 Templates For The Sales Follow Up Email
5. Follow-through
Big sales make more sales.
Each and every time you close a big sale marketing training to corporate teams, your customer retention team has to step it up and ensure that the customer experience for them is positive and impactful from start to finish and build strong relationships with them.
But the testimonial that you receive from a single client – if they’re big enough – can influence a dozen other decision-makers to also buy from you.
Prepare Your Membership Site to Sell Training to Companies
The final piece of the puzzle is extremely practical: making sure you have the technology in place to deliver on your promises.
It’s kind of amazing, and for the longest time, it was hard to license your courses and provide the right user experience for a corporation or group of participants.
But not anymore: with AccessAlly’s LMS features you can have a licensed training course up and running in no time, maximizing profits off your already-existing courses and creating a beautiful and easy customer journey for your clients.
See it in action:
In a nutshell:
AccessAlly offers easy bulk course enrollment and licensing options for when you start selling your online courses to corporate clients and teams. Essentially, this works the same as a regular membership subscription, except with a team “manager” who can add (or delete) team members under the account.
If you’re using AccessAlly Pro, it gets even better because the Parent user can also view and track the progress of each member on their team. Even though everyone maintains a separate user account, you can still see the training course progress of the Child accounts.
Available user stats include quiz results, how far they’ve gotten in a course, the last time they visited the site, and even questions or notes from each member.
Schedule a free discovery call
Find out why AccessAlly is the WordPress course plugin that pays for itself.
5 mistakes to avoid when selling training to corporate clients
1. Not doing your homework
Imagine entering a meeting with a prospective client armed only with surface-level knowledge. The momentary excitement might be overshadowed by the unmistakable signs of unpreparedness.
In an era where information is readily accessible, clients are more discerning than ever, often conducting thorough research on their own.
If you meet with a client and you are unprepared, it will show. Especially since this client is more likely than not researching you and all your course has to offer; you need to establish a good connection with customers from day one.
2. Not getting access to decision-makers
It is important to understand that even though a professional might like your course, that does not mean that they have any power whatsoever to involve their whole company to buy it, so you need to sell it to the people that can make the purchasing decisions.
By engaging key budget holders from the beginning, you not only expedite the sales decision-making process but also ensure that your efforts are channeled toward individuals who hold the reins of authority.
3. Misunderstanding your value
Your prospects will probably start the process with a vision of what they think your worth is. Don’t let them.
One common stumbling block in the selling process to corporate clients is the potential misinterpretation of your value proposition.
As you engage with prospects, it’s crucial to recognize that they may come into the process with preconceived notions about the worth of your training.
However, it’s essential not to let these initial perceptions define your value.
While your prospects may have a certain estimation of your value, it’s essential to remember that you possess the most comprehensive understanding of the intricate work, strategic insights, and overarching financial benefits that your training can offer to their organization.
4. Not understanding your buyer’s perspective
One notable pitfall to avoid is underestimating the importance of putting yourself in your potential buyer’s perspective.
This is one of the most important sales skills, regardless of whether you are selling a simple course, virtual training program, or onsite training.
For instance, imagine pitching a comprehensive suite of sales training courses to a company that deeply values collaborative decision-making and teamwork.
However, if your training materials predominantly emphasize individual achievement and competition, it’s highly likely that your message will fall flat.
5. Neglecting Data and Analytics
Businesses are always looking for ways to improve their decision-making through data-driven decisions, and neglecting to integrate reports or dashboards into your training course can damage its appeal to corporate clients.
By incorporating data analytics tools and emphasizing the ability to measure the course’s ROI, you elevate its value proposition and demonstrate your commitment to driving measurable improvements within their organization.
Time to Jump In
Embarking on the learning experience of how to sell training courses to companies – instead of one-off sales – is a huge shift. And granted, it’s not one that every business can or should make.
But if you’re looking for new ways to grow and mature as a company, now might be a good time to learn how to sell training to companies – and quadruple your revenue.
