Help Request: I'd lo
[2022-02-22 02:38:29 PM] : Help Request: I'd love to find a way to sell my courses (ex. Mastering Remote Leadership) directly to companies to help more individual team members get access without having to pay for it themselves.
But I have no idea how to do this or where to start. Have you done this? Do you know someone who has?
1 Reply
[2022-02-22 05:53:32 PM] : Curious if this question is more about the sales process, eg finding leads and closing them, more mechanical parts of the process?
[2022-02-22 05:54:35 PM] : All of it. Not sure who to talk to, how to make it happen, or where to start. I only know the outcome I'm going for :smile:
[2022-02-22 06:53:37 PM] : In my experience, most employees can expense individual courses up to some certain price limit with virtually no effort. They will need an invoice, and sometimes a certificate of completion to reimburse the expense. This is 100% the easiest route since an employee can just decide, "I want to take course X" and very minimal management needs to get involved.
I offer team packages and those are occasionally purchased without any questions, but in many cases it appears to be smaller consulting firms, or startups where someone can quickly okay it. Most larger companies want purchase orders or you to sign up for internal tooling they use to become a preferred vendor, or some other process they use, and in many cases you can go through all of that work only to have them purchase 1 or 2 licenses.
Personally, I have found that focusing on both audiences (indivuals and companies) was a huge waste of my time. I had significantly more success selling to individuals and making things easy for them to expense with their company. This is entirely contingent on the price being something they can expense though, or finding a way to break it up so it fits that criteria.
The few people I know who do well in my audience with corporate customers are all selling live training with an instructor and they pitch it as such. It is limited to just that corporate client's employees, usually has a headcount limit, etc. Many do remote now, but I know remote was incredibly hard in the past to the point that one person told me they offered customers a $5k discount for remote and still could only book in-person before the pandemic. I'm not sure if they get away with remote now because of their in-person success, or if starting from scratch as remote-only would be more viable now. All the people I know with success doing this were very heavily involved with speaking engagements at conferences etc before succeeding at corporate sales as well. Guessing that played a role,
but I don't know for sure.
[2022-02-23 11:53:24 AM] : Hey Jon, Yes, my students are already expensing the course to their employer. But I don't like this as the only option for 2 reasons:
1. It puts an unnecessary burden on the student. They act more as a middleman that has to take on the initial financial burden before receiving the reimbursement.
2. It's a 1:1 sale. As a solopreneur, I'm always looking for ways to save time and energy and think the course is perfect for 1:many sale approach.
I've never had trouble selling a remote experience because my target students are people working remotely, so I doubt that will ever become an issue.
Appreciate you sharing your experience! If you think of anyone who has done this successfully, let me know.
[2022-02-23 12:49:09 PM] : i haven't sold courses, but i've sold some bulk licenses successfully (for up to about $3000). My guess based on what I've seen is that some managers have the authority on their own to make ~$3000 purchases without asking anyone and that's how it happens. People generally just buy without me talking to them.
I think it's really similar to just selling to an individual, except that instead the individual is a manager. I've also heard some people refer to it as a small perk of their job ("I get access to X zine!")
[2022-02-23 12:50:08 PM] : In my experience many large companies (twitter/google etc) are happy to buy in a pretty ad hoc way without any difficult process
[2022-02-23 01:46:49 PM] : Julia, you made me want to dig further into the numbers for my team packages :slightly_smiling_face:
My process is probably similar to yours. Self-service checkout using Gumroad, then they get a link to redeem the course N times.
Historically I have sold ~6k individual courses, and 27 team packages. Each team package was between 5-25 licenses, so maybe 300 course sales that way? That definitely makes it worthwhile to me to have a self-service checkout option for team packages. I kinda expected that to be the case, but I'm not sure my original reply made that clear.
What I personally avoid spending much time on is chasing larger deals. If someone reaches out to me I'll try to help make it happen, but it isn't my focus.
To give a more recent example - I had someone reasonably high up (manages many engineers) at a large company reach out to me in late Nov about getting my courses for ~250 engineers at his company. This is someone who has purchased my courses on their own, and has had several engineers on their team purchase individual licenses and expense it. Even with that person advocating for me and trying to push a sale through, and a pretty nice discount on my end, it is almost March and there is still no clear sign that it is going to happen.
I've also spoken to more than one manager about team packages only to have them tell me they just had their whole team buy individually and expense it. Team packages have a discount, so to me this suggests the process to get a big purchase approved is quite high at some companies.
It has been tempting to put a lot of time into deals like these because each could be a substantial amount of money. I also agree that it feels like a way to save time and energy, but I have found that ebombs etc can do 99% of the work for individuals, but when I start selling to teams the person I am selling to often isn't the person who I've already earned trust with, so it takes far more time and energy to make
those sales than one might expect.
[2022-02-23 01:55:10 PM] : If I was trying to summarize my viewpoint, I would say that I feel like I can either:
1. Spend my time selling to companies making 1:many sales
2. Spend my time helping people, creating ebombs, etc that then make 1:1 sales for me.
I prefer (2) and I feel it has scaled better for me. It gives me more freedom, and it allows me to have a business that continues earning money even when I'm busy. (1) always felt like something that could earn more upfront, but becomes limited by my time. Kinda like consulting.
[2022-02-23 01:57:52 PM] : It may be possible to make 1:many sales with ebombs. It seems like talking at conferences, giving training sessions before a conference, etc all help with that. My only guess as to why is the "Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" quote. Buying from someone well known at conferences is likely the safe bet, even if it isn't the optimal one.
[2022-02-23 02:00:12 PM] : And for context, my audience is Go developers. Your audience may be different in some ways - eg individuals might have more sway in getting higher ups to approve a purchase, or the higher ups might also be people who benefit from your ebombs and trust you.
[2022-02-23 02:24:14 PM] : julia That's exactly what I was looking for! I have a bunch of questions so I'll DM you.
jon I'm the same way (want to focus on #2), but since there are so many founders/team leads following me, I think there's a way to capture the 1:many sales that way too. I'll let you know if I implement something successfully.
[2022-02-23 02:30:37 PM] : Sounds good, and I hope it works well for you. I'd definitely be eager to learn what works well there.
[2022-02-23 03:06:32 PM] : i checked and apparently 30% of my revenue in 2021 was corporate sales so it's more than I thought
[2022-02-23 03:06:47 PM] : it was only 15% in 2020, who knows why