In my last post I talked about how perceived risk is a huge factor in corporate decision-making. And how adding an online course to other work you're doing like live training or consulting makes it an easier and less risky purchase.

You can apply that principle of decreasing risk in many different ways to make it easier to sell your online courses to corporates:

• It's almost certainly worth doing a lower-cost pilot of your course to quickly get testimonials and build a track record so that future buyers see the course as a proven quantity.
• It's usually a good idea to have a small, “easy to buy” product that lets potential clients dip a toe in the online course water without having to get budgetary approval or go through a bunch of procurement hoops. Then when your small course has delivered for them, buying a bigger more extensive one becomes much easier.
• If you're thinking about which potential corporate clients to offer online courses to, focus on the ones where you're already seen as a safe pair of hands and inherently less of a risk to work with.

That last point is all about trust and it's absolutely vital when it comes to selling to corporates.

Corporate decision-making is often slow and complex and involves multiple stakeholders jostling to get what they want from the process.

In fact, perhaps the most common outcome of corporate procurement processes is that no decision is made at all. They just can't reach agreement or they run into other internal stumbling blocks.

So at minimum, you need to be in the loop and understand the different perspectives of the most influential decision makers. Ideally you want to be in a position to facilitate the buying process and help them get over internal barriers and roadblocks.

But you simply won't be able to do that if those key decision-makers don't trust you enough to be open with you about what's really going on or worry that you'd be following your own agenda rather than genuinely trying to help them.

More trust = less risk = more sales.