Mastering the B2C2B game: 6 lessons to remember before getting started

Jonathan Naymark Contributor

Jonathan Naymark is the Managing Director of Codecademy for Business at Codecademy, an online learning platform that offers courses in web development, data science, cybersecurity and more.

Launching a B2B product within a B2C company presents distinct challenges when trying to balance the success of establishing a new product with sustaining of your original activity. No one claims it's easy, but it is doable once you understand what is needed for successful B2B expansion.

I've put together a list of six important lessons I learned when launching Codecademy for Business, which should be helpful to anyone launching a B2B offering within a B2C company.

Lesson 1: To ensure B2B viability, examine the data

As you consider entering the B2B space, first determine if there is even a potential market for such an offering. How can you make an informed decision? The answer may lie in understanding how your B2C customers interact with your product or service.

For example, was a personal or work email domain submitted during registration? When reviewing your engagement data, do you notice a spike during working hours? These are strong indicators that your product has value in the B2B space, and it might be time to develop a new solution.

One of the advantages of launching a B2B offer within a B2C company is that you are probably serving a customer that already exists within your company.

We realized that nearly 19% of our user base probably signed up with a work email address. In our consumer onboarding quiz, we asked if people used the platform to help them at work, and 30% told us they did. Meanwhile, nearly 50% of current account managers previously used Codecademy as a consumer.

Lesson 2: B2B requires a whole new set of tools and new hires

Consumer companies are often marketing driven, and they often have the budget to spend a lot on Facebook or Google. However, it is incredibly difficult to build a B2B business with only paid marketing campaigns. Your tech stack will also fundamentally change.

We have implemented a brand new B2B-focused customer relationship management platform, Hubspot. But an even bigger change has come in the form of our people: we've hired a whole new division of salespeople.

It forced us to integrate a totally different culture. We have learned to leverage business performance investment funds (SPIFs) instead of focusing on customer acquisition costs (CAC) as we have in the past. Hiring salespeople and creating compensation plans to motivate them was like building brand new muscle. Fortunately, the more we exercised our commercial function, the stronger it became.