Continuing Education
Continuing education is two businesses.
Open enrollment sells like retail — a catalog, a cart, a discount code, a certificate at the end. Custom and corporate programs sell like enterprise deals — an inquiry, a proposal, a contract, a renewal. Both run on one platform, against one learner record.
Functional scope
Both motions, properly built.
One catalog, two ways to sell it.
- Catalog and cart
- Browse, pick a session, pay, enroll. The experience a learner already expects from every other purchase they make.
- The custom sales cycle
- Inquiry, scoping, proposal, contract, delivery and renewal, run as a pipeline with a forecast.
- Discount codes and promotions
- Early-bird, alumni, employee, member and cohort pricing, bundles and multi-seat rates, applied at checkout.
- Corporate accounts
- An employer buying forty seats or commissioning a bespoke program, with contract pricing and a named relationship.
- Certificates and credentials
- Completion, CEUs and digital credentials issued against the learner record, not tracked in a spreadsheet.
- Repeat business
- This year's cohort is next year's pipeline, with the history attached.
Our approach
Retail on one side, enterprise sales on the other.
- Open enrollment is retail, so we build it like retail
- Conversion is the metric. A catalog people can search, a checkout that works on a phone, and an abandoned cart you can do something about.
- Custom programs are a sales cycle
- A corporate program is a deal: qualified, scoped, quoted, negotiated and renewed. It needs a pipeline and a forecast, not a registration form.
- The certificate is the product
- Learners are buying a credential, not a seat. Completion, CEUs and the credential itself belong on the record from the moment they are earned.
- One learner, both motions
- The person who took an open course last spring may be in a corporate cohort next year. Same record, so you can see it.
What it runs on
The stack, named.
- Salesforce B2C Commerce
- Catalog, cart, checkout and promotions, on Agentforce Commerce. Part of the platform, not a bolted-on store.
- Sales Cloud
- The custom program pipeline: opportunities, quotes, contracts and renewals, with a forecast the dean can read.
- Storefront Next
- A production storefront in days, themed to your brand.
- B2B Commerce
- Corporate accounts, contract pricing and bulk seat purchasing for employer-funded cohorts.
- Order Management
- Cancellations, refunds, seat transfers and waitlists handled as orders.
- Education Cloud Lifelong Learning
- Corporate partnership management and the learner record, so a CE learner who later enrolls in a degree is the same person.
AI
Agents that sell and support the catalog.
- Guided course discovery
- A shopper agent that asks what a learner is trying to achieve and returns the right course, not a search results page.
- Your catalog inside AI assistants
- Commerce publishes catalogs into ChatGPT and Google's AI surfaces. Prospective learners increasingly start there, and this is where our AI-visibility work meets the storefront.
- Merchandising without a developer
- Promotions, product copy and search tuning handled by agents, so a small CE team runs a real storefront.
Implementation
Six phases. Twenty-one weeks to a live storefront.
- Align · 2 weeks
- Catalog structure, pricing and discount model, and how custom work is sold today.
- Envision · 4 weeks
- Current state, payment and tax scope, integration scope.
- Iterate · 6 weeks
- Catalog, storefront, checkout, corporate accounts and the custom pipeline, built in working increments.
- Validate · 3 weeks
- Tested with real transactions, real refunds and a real corporate deal.
- Onboard · 4 weeks
- Cutover, training, and a full enrollment cycle.
- Hypercare · 2 weeks
- The team that built it stays on daily through the first live weeks.
Open enrollment first. Custom second.
The storefront is the half that pays for itself fastest and teaches you most — real transactions, real refunds, real data about what sells. The custom pipeline goes live once the catalog is earning, and it inherits the accounts and the history the storefront has already built.
Insights & events
Related reading.
Case study · Nov 11, 2025
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Explainer · Nov 1, 2024
What in the Education Cloud: Applicant Portal
Education Cloud ships one portal for every constituent — here is why separate applicant, student and alumni portals are usually easier to live with.
Start here
Bring your catalog and your biggest custom client.
One of each tells us most: the program you sell a hundred seats of, and the corporate deal you are negotiating now. The first shows us the storefront, the second shows us the pipeline.