Corporate clients are the best!
They are:
In corporate training, the customer is not the individual employee, but, the Human Resources, the Manager, the Procurement Department or a Chief Learning Officer. Training budgets in those departments are growing, either to re-train current staff or new hires.
Today, companies are looking to invest in their employees’ training to improve performance, wellbeing and some time to follow policies on health, safety, and data protection. Employee training can be a major part of the perks they offer.
Can I Sell my Course as Corporate Training?
YES!
… in most cases. As long as your course can be seen as a value to the company or the employees, it can be sold to corporate clients.
Companies are looking to improve each of their employee’s skills, interpersonal communication, and train/re-train people to be suitable for an ever-changing and competitive work environment.
Your goal is to find the sweet spot and pitch your course to a corporate client in any of the above ways.
In some cases, you can also add more content to better suit the company, and customize the course content for their employees. It can be anything from a branded landing page to a few extra learning activities.
For example, if you are teaching sales tactics, you might want to add a few specific points on the company’s products or services. Those can be industry-specific or position-specific.
Selling Seats to Corporate Training – How You Get Paid
Selling to companies, where your customer is a manager or a department, means that they will be buying your course in bulk for their employees.
The company will be buying “seats” or “licenses” for your course instead of a single course. This can skyrocket your sales, as those can range from a single digit to hundreds or thousands of premium pricing courses.
Wire Transfer / Bank Payments
Due to the high cost, many companies will be looking for an invoice and will pay through Wire/Bank Transfers. When you are pitching your course to a company, be prepared for a longer payment process.
For example, expect that there will be some paperwork involved such as a contract, an invoice, and multiple communications. The process might take a bit more, but the return of the investment is much greater.
Selling Pre-packaged Training Seats
If the cost is between 3 to 4 figures, then the company might also want to pay digitally with a card payment. This is where you might need to set up a specific checkout for the seats.
Setting up pre-determined seat packages will make it easier to manage payments. You can create an empty course just for the purpose of handling the payment, with the price you would ask for specific intervals e.g. 10 seats, 25 seats, 50 seats, 100 seats.
Let’s take the example of selling a “Communication Skills Course”. The normal price would be $100, but selling it to corporations for multiple seats might come at a discounted price for bigger orders:
The person responsible in the company would buy the course which comes with instructions on how to give access to their employees after they bought it.
There are two ways you can give access to their employees, depending on the control or the flexibility your customer wants it:
Accessing the Course
When a company buys in bulk, they either have a group of employees they want to take the training or they want to offer it as a perk to anyone who would take it.
Importing a Group of Employees
In the first case, the company already knows who they want to give access to. In this case, you will need an excel file with the names and emails of the employees to manually enroll them in the course.
You can also mass import users to create them an account. LearnWorlds will send them an email with their new account and further information on how to log in.
Access Codes
Some times, the company might want to buy licenses to share with their employees. It can be a wellness or family course they want to offer as a gift to their employees or they want to keep some licenses for future use.
In both cases, it’s a much better idea to use coupon codes as access codes. You can create a discount coupon for 100% of the price of the course, this way, a user can create an account by themselves and use the code at the checkout to get access.
Custom Online Checkout
If you don’t want to offer pre-determined packages and your customer has a deal with you and they are going to pay online, you can create a private course with a link to the checkout.
Let’s say, you have agreed in a 100 seats for $5000 with Bob’s Local Supermarkets, and they want to pay with the company’s credit card.
You can create a Paid course for $5000 and then change the “access” to Private. The course will keep the original price but will not be accessible to anyone without a direct link to it.
Also, you can send this course to your contacts, and they can use the private course to pay the amount owed. After that, you can choose whether you want to send access codes or manually enroll the users to the course.
Premium Private Courses
On the subject of private courses, a corporate customer might require a customized course. You might be adding content, branding the existing content or login pages or offering a different experience altogether.
This is the purpose of having a private group for specific audiences. A ‘private’, or ’unlisted’ course is created for a dedicated group of people whose learning needs are industry-specific, measurable and different from those of the majority of your students.
The creation of a private course serves a unique purpose – that is, to educate a group of students who need to build and develop the knowledge, abilities, and skills that are needed to carry out an industry-specific activity or task.
These courses stay ‘hidden’ from and are ‘not listed’ on your course catalog, which means they are only accessible to a selected group of people whom you choose to include.
A private course makes it easier to manage specific groups, their reporting, usage, and specific needs.
More Benefits of Selling to Companies
Selling training to corporate customers has many advantages versus selling to individuals. The obvious benefit is the higher ticker sale, but this is just the beginning.
1Upsell with Physical Training
A satisfied customer will be a repeat customer, and in the corporate world, this might lead to many opportunities to be invited for an in-office training which can be priced even higher than the online training you already offer.
2Authority / Logos
Having a recognized company as a customer means you can add their logo on your website. It is one of the best forms of testimonials you can get. A logo along with an officer’s testimonial will bring you more individual and corporate clients.
3Be Invited as a Speaker
You can also get invited to a corporate event as a speaker, which will give you even more exposure and you can ask for a good price for your presence there too!
4Coach C-level Executives
Higher ticket course sales are the holy grail of online education but think of landing C-level executives as your customers. These are the people who are investing even more heavily on themselves and are willing to pay premium prices for top training and coaching.
Selling corporate training courses is a very profitable business to be in and it requires a high-touch approach. Getting the right connections in place, pitching your ideas to the right person and arranging meetings to structure your offering.
Most courses can be pitched and re-packaged to suit a corporate client. If you are looking to move into a higher ticket, this is where you need to be.
But, remember, high expectations need the right delivery. Choosing the right course platform to deliver high-quality e-learning experiences is essential, and you might need to revamp your content too.
