What I learned from visiting another edtech startup
Team Letter | March 27, 2023
March 27, 2023
Happy Monday, Alpaca Team!
Iiiiiiiit’s Monday alright! And we’ve got a big week of work ahead of us. The last week of the month AND the quarter. This week will be about finishing STRONG and setting up for a high-growth second quarter.
Last week, we spent a lot of time planning for the quarter ahead, including looking hard at things we’re doing now with the questions: “Are we good at this?” and “Does it help us achieve our growth goal?” From here, we started to build processes around how we grow, how we measure our success, and how we achieve our goals together. In addition to that, I took 2 days to visit another company to learn more about something that will be key to our strategy this year: how to sell to school districts.
How to sell to school districts.
Last week I got the chance to spend two quick days with the team at another edtech company, which creates software for school districts and sells primarily to superintendents. They’re quite aways ahead of us – they’ve been around for about 9 years, and their revenue is, well, like 90X what ours is.
Their approach to sales is both extremely aggressive and highly focused on hospitality - a combination that fascinated me completely.
School districts are a relatively “closed” or finite market, meaning there are only a certain number of potential sales to make. There are about 14,000 in all. When you have a finite market, your marketing and sales has to both stand out from your competition, but also create a truly positive experience. Because if you lose the trust of one district, there are a finite number remaining! And you don’t want to lose a single one.
Their sales team targets every district several times per year. That idea would feel pretty bad if they did so with traditional selling concepts: calling and emailing and calling and emailing, trying to set up meetings with a bunch of people who aren’t decision makers. So, they don’t do that!
They reach out with creative approaches like making short videos, mailing “save the date” cards for their demos, and printing cookies with the district’s logo on it. It’s all about getting attention and showing districts the type of hospitality that both surprises and delights them. And you should SEE the production lab they’ve built for this - the Alpaca crew would LOVE it!
Their success is also about their work ethic. Their sales reps create 15-20 creative outreach pieces EVERY DAY, and make more than 100 calls a day. Their team is at work, in the office at 8 am, ready to go. And they are aggressively hospitable about visitors too! I was one of a few visitors at the office last week, and every single one of us was picked up from the airport, given a full itinerary of meetings, and taken to dinner by relevant members of the team. It was impressive.
They also have an impressive event strategy, attending more than 300 events every single year. The goal is to be present, be everywhere, and be THE solution for school districts.
Are their strategies perfect for Alpaca? Probably not all of them. But one thing their CEO said really resonated with me for Alpaca. He said:
“We are in the business of creating demand, not fulfilling demand.”
What this means for us is that most superintendents don’t wake up each morning thinking “I wish there was a way for us to send a pack of supplies and teacher appreciation to every teacher in our district every month.” They don’t have another provider for subscription boxes for teachers that we’re competing with, right? We aren’t showing up ready to “fulfill a demand” that already exists. Instead, our job is to CREATE the demand, by showing districts a) that what we do is really needed; and b) that we’ve got the best solution to fill that need.
How might that change the way you think about selling, marketing, or operating Alpaca this week? I really encourage you to think about this, and think about how you can build creation of demand into your day to day work.
Value of the Week
Last week our value was “Elevate Every Educator” and I think the ideas that came about in our team meeting about ways to do this were awesome! I particularly like simple the idea of connecting our teacher survey information to Slack, so that we can more easily see feedback when it comes in from teachers. I’m going to work on this one!
This week, I’m suggesting we come back to basics with our value of the week: WRITE THANK YOU NOTES. I’ve got some fun thank you notes and gifts to send to the crew at Apptegy and at OPS. This team is SO good at extending hospitality through thank you notes. So my challenge for you this week is: THANK YOU CONTEST!
The challenge: Send one thank-you note to someone who has supported your work at Alpaca. It can be for something teeny or something big. $15 budget to make your thank-you note memorable, hospitable, and creative. Share a picture of them in our channel with an explanation about your thank-you. Winner gets a free pack of thank-you notes! :)
Other stuff last week:
Visit to the Luminarium to form a partnership for the April pack! We’ll be partnering with them in April on a pack focused on STEM supplies for teachers, AND co-hosting a wonderful night for teachers in May.
Marketing Q2 planning: BIG clarity here on some areas of focus for the coming quarter. We also did the “walk to the number” for our Q2 goals. You can walk through that math here!
1:1s: Thank you for making time to walk through your work with me. I learn something from every single 1:1 I have with you.
One of my favorite things about Alpaca is how much I feel like we get to learn every single week. When I look back through my notes from a week I often think “all of that happened in ONE WEEK?!” A desire to keep learning, stay curious, and be open to new things is something I think we have in common as a team, and I think it serves our company so well. Thank you for learning together with such joy and enthusiasm!
Let’s make it a great week!
Karen