How to sell online courses to businesses, not just individuals

Selling a course to an individual is usually simple: one person, one card, one enrolment. Selling to a business is different. Someone buys on behalf of a team, someone else pays the bill, and an administrator has to show later that everyone finished. Get those pieces right and one client can bring you dozens of learners and repeat orders. This guide covers how business buyers think, pricing models that suit them, a worked example and how to set up delivery.

How business buyers differ from individual learners

A business rarely buys “a course”. It buys an outcome for a group of people, such as onboarding done or a compliance requirement met, and it needs to show that the outcome happened.

That difference leads to five practical needs:

• Seats, not single sales. Clients think in numbers of learners and want to add people as they’re hired.
• An easy way to pay. Many organisations would rather approve one payment for a balance than a card charge for every enrolment. Expect questions about receipts, tax and purchase orders.
• Their own administrator. The client’s L&D lead wants to enrol, remind and remove people without emailing you each time.
• Reporting. Who is enrolled, who has finished and who is overdue, with certificates to back it up.
• Branding. Some clients are happy to see your academy’s name everywhere; others want training to feel like part of their own business.

Pricing models for business clients

There’s no single right model, and many providers combine two or three.

Per learner

A set price for each person enrolled. It’s easy to explain, scales with the client and keeps your margin predictable. The catch is that each enrolment is a small transaction, so you need a way to collect payment that doesn’t mean raising an invoice every time.

Bundles and volume pricing

A lower per-learner price for a bigger commitment, such as 50 enrolments paid up front. Bundles reward larger clients and bring cash in earlier. Make sure even your lowest price covers your costs, and decide in advance what happens to places that aren’t used.

Prepaid credit

The client pays for a balance in advance and each enrolment draws it down. This suits organisations that want one approval and a clear record of spend, and it lets their administrator hand out credit to learners without involving you.

Sponsored learning

Sometimes a course should be free to the client or learner, for example as part of a consulting engagement or a membership. Someone still pays; it just isn’t the person enrolling. Make sure learners can see who provided it, so the value doesn’t go unnoticed.

A worked pricing example

The figures below are hypothetical, in US dollars before tax, and only illustrate the arithmetic.

Say you sell a 40-minute workplace privacy course. Part of the content is licensed from a specialist author, who is paid $6 for each learner. You sell it to businesses at $39 per learner, dropping to $33 per learner for 100 or more.

Two things the table doesn’t show, but your pricing should:

• Costs that aren’t per learner. Your platform subscription, payment processing fees, and the time it takes to onboard each client’s administrator and answer their questions.
• What a discount really costs. The larger client pays $6 less per learner, but your cost per learner hasn’t changed, so your margin falls from $33 to $27 per learner. Discounts come straight out of margin.

Give every client their own space

Putting every client’s learners into one shared list soon causes problems: reports need filtering by hand, and you can’t give one client’s administrator access without exposing everyone else.

Give each client a space of their own instead, with:

• their own people and administrators
• only the courses they’ve bought
• reports that show their learners and nobody else’s
• branding that suits the relationship: yours, theirs or both.

It also discourages login sharing. When adding a person is easy and every learner has their own record, clients have little reason to pass one account around.

Deliver SCORM content securely

Your courses are your product. If you email a SCORM zip file to a client to load into their own LMS, you lose control of it: it can be copied, reused after your agreement ends or passed on. You also can’t fix or update it for them.

Hosting the course yourself and giving clients access keeps you in control. You update one copy, every client gets the change, and access ends when the agreement does. Look for a platform that serves SCORM files privately, not from public links.

What your clients’ L&D administrators will expect

Before you pitch to a business, make sure you can answer yes to the questions its administrator is likely to ask:

• Can I add, invite and remove my own people?
• Can I enrol people and give them a deadline?
• Can I see who has finished, who hasn’t started and who is overdue?
• Do people get a certificate, and can I check it’s genuine?
• Can I see what we’ve spent and what’s left?
• Can I control who is allowed to spend our balance?
• Who do I contact when something doesn’t work?

How Acadenix supports selling to businesses

In Acadenix, each client is an organisation beneath yours. Selling courses needs the Silver or Gold plan and your own Stripe account, connected with a restricted key. Here’s how that covers the needs above (see the platform’s selling features):

• A space for every client. Each client organisation has its own people, administrators and branding. You can invite a client to set up their organisation themselves, and choose which clients receive each course. Clients can’t edit the courses you share with them.
• Per-learner pricing and margin. Each course has a price for your own learners and a per-learner price for organisations below you, and you can record what a course costs you per learner. Your margin shows as you price, and the Sales tab shows received, cost and margin for every sale.
• Prepaid training credit. Client organisations buy credit in US dollars through Stripe Checkout, paid to your Stripe account. Enrolments their administrators make come from that balance, and they can allocate credit to learners once or monthly. Learners can request more, or top up with their own card where that’s allowed. Card details never enter Acadenix, and low-credit warnings go out before a balance runs dry.
• Sponsorship. Make a course free for the client organisations you choose. You pay from your own credit, and their catalogue shows Free, provided by your organisation.
• Protected content. SCORM files are served from a separate, sandboxed address with short-lived signed access, so they can’t be hot-linked or shared outside Acadenix. There’s more on this on our security page.
• Your name on the certificate. Certificates for your courses carry your organisation as the issuer, with serial numbers anyone can verify.

One cost to remember: a client organisation without a plan of its own uses seats on yours, so factor your per-active-user cost into your course prices.

Key takeaways

• Businesses buy for groups, so they need to pay for, administer and report on training, not just take it.
• Per-learner pricing is the easiest to explain; bundles, prepaid credit and sponsorship give clients flexibility.
• Work out your margin per learner, then allow for costs that aren’t per learner before you offer discounts.
• Give each client their own space, and keep SCORM files on a platform you control rather than handing them over.

If you’re ready to sell your SCORM courses to organisations, see how selling works in Acadenix and compare the plans. And if your clients want the platform itself, read our guide to reselling an LMS.