Are you creating products for large businesses or organizations? This article will outline Thinkific features that can be used to set up your online business for Business to Business (B2B) Selling.
In this article:
About Business to Business (B2B) Selling
B2B Selling Using Alternative Methods
Student Management and Progress Tracking
About Business to Business (B2B) Selling
B2B selling can help you increase your revenue by allowing you to sell multiple seats in a learning product, such as a course, to one organization. We have a number of creators who are providing training courses or learning products for companies, institutions, universities, etc. where access to the product is being sold as a license.
Thinkific offers numerous features that can be helpful in every step of B2B selling process.
Creating B2B Products
Before you start selling your products to other businesses, you will need to decide whether you want to sell already existing products or if you want to create new products, branded to your customer's organization.
Memberships
If you are interested in selling multiple products, or a mix of different products (e.g. courses and communities) in one single package with a recurring payment, you can use our Memberships feature. This can work great for bundling courses and/or communities together for one organization.
For example, you may want to create a series of courses tailored to a specific topic and combine those together with a community for students to discuss the material. You could also create a membership of communities to address a range of skill levels that employees will move through in your organization (beginner, competent, proficient, expert).
If you would like to group products together but charge a one-time payment, you can create a bundle.
Product Access
When selling to an organization, you might not want your learning products available to the public. You can use our Hidden Product feature to prevent your learning products from being publicly displayed on your site or your Home Page. You can also make your products Private to restrict access to your products and prevent any outside enrollments. Note, however, that when the product is set to Private, the checkout is completely blocked and students will need to be enrolled manually.
If you have content outside of your course material that you would like to share with specific organizations, a Private Custom Page can be created that is exclusive to users enrolled in a specific product.
Branding
If you are selling to multiple organizations and would like to customize the Course Player branding by organization, you can duplicate your courses and brand your training content per course using our Individual Course Player Appearance Customizations feature.
Duplicating your course is also great if you have an On-Lesson Discussion component that you would like to have private per organization.
In some cases, you might need to create a separate Thinkific instance that is completely white labelled for your client. This would involve creating a new Thinkific site with a unique domain for your client and copying courses from your original Thinkific site to your new site. This creates a more personalized experience for your client and can be great if your client would like to manage their own students and build content on top of yours. If this is something you are interested in exploring, learn more here: B2B Selling: Best Practices with Plus and reach out to our team to learn how our Plus plan can help by clicking on the button below.
B2B Selling Using TCommerce
The easiest option is to sell multiple seats at a time using the TCommerce: Group Orders feature. The Group Orders feature makes it easy for your customers to purchase multiple seats for a single product and seamlessly assign them to others - no extra tools or manual workarounds required. Everything is managed through Thinkific’s built-in group orders checkout and Seat Manager dashboard, so you can effortlessly grow your B2B sales while delivering a streamlined, professional experience to every client.
To access the Group Order feature as well as other great TCommerce features, enable Thinkific Payments on your account: Thinkific Payments.
B2B Selling Using Alternative Methods
If you are using Stripe, Paypal, or an external payment solution, you can still sell your products in bulk, however, you will need to take additional steps to ensure that the payment is collected and students are enrolled.
Bulk Selling
If you are using Stripe and Paypal to accept payments, each buyer can purchase only one seat using Thinkific checkout. If you want to sell multiple seats for your product at the same time, there are a few alternative ways to accept payments:
- Invoice manually outside of Thinkific
- Use our built-in Stripe or Paypal and set up an additional product price for the total bulk price you would like to charge your client
- Set up an external payment gateway of your choice that supports bulk purchasing
Enrollments
Once a payment has been made, your client will need a way to allow their students to access the product. We have a few options for enrolling students:
- Issue coupon codes for 100% off your product
- Import students from file and bulk enroll students
- Manually enroll users after accepting payment (not recommended for more than 10 students)
- Build a custom solution using our Public API
We recommend option 1 or option 2 for the simplest and most efficient solution to provide access to your content.
Managing B2B Enrollments
Regardless of the enrollment method used, Thinkific offers several features that can help you manage your B2B sales and enrollments.
Group Enrollments
We have a Group feature that can help you organize and segment students if you are working with different businesses. This can be very helpful for managing students and measuring progress by Group. You can enroll students into a group manually or by utilizing Group Share Links to help automatically assign students to a specific group.
If you are enrolling students using a 100% off coupon method, you can apply both a group share link and a coupon to the same link. This link will allow students to enroll on their own, while automatically assigning them to your desired Group!
Student Management and Progress Tracking
If multiple and different companies are enrolled in the same products, our Groups feature can be used to manage student enrollments, and for courses - track progress. Progress reports can be run per group and you can assign a Group Analyst role if you would like your client to have the option to run their own progress reports.