Sean Lane 0:02
Today's episode is sponsored by the DevOps experts at full cast with me is their Head of Customer Success. Tyler Simon's Hey Tyler, revenue efficiency, sales productivity are everything today. How does pull casts go to market planning platform help DevOps teams achieve these types of goals?
Tyler Simons 0:19
Well, forecast lets you build better territory so that the right resources are always focused on the right opportunities. When reps are motivated and zeroed in on their targets, they'll be more successful and bring in more revenue.
Sean Lane 0:32
That sounds great. I do a lot of that planning and spreadsheets today. And I'm pretty happy with my spreadsheets. How is full cast any better than that? You
Tyler Simons 0:41
must get rid of the spreadsheets because spreadsheets create lag and errors with forecasts planning and updating happen automatically, all in one place. Best of all, it automates all common headache inducing planning activities like territory rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So when you're faced with those go to market plan changes which you know what they happen all the time forecast has your back.
Sean Lane 1:08
Alright, yeah, me convinced? Where do I learn more about forecast?
Tyler Simons 1:12
Our website forecast.io.
Sean Lane 1:28
Hey, everyone, welcome to operations, the show where we look under the hood of companies in hypergrowth. My name is Sean lane. It's so easy to get used to the echo chamber that is b2b tech companies selling to other b2b tech companies. I know I'm guilty of it, you learn a certain way of doing things you sell to people and companies that are just like yours. It reaches the point where you even know by name which sales methodology someone is using on you on a call. But what are some of your typical tactics don't work on a different type of customer. It's important to get outside of that echo chamber and acknowledge that other people buy software too. Which is why I'm excited to explore the world of edtech. On today's episode with not one but two guests who are building an edtech companies go to market together. Those guests are Rachel Jordan and Lawrence Hall from Teach FX, a tool that captures and analyzes a teacher's classroom instruction, and then provides insights about talk time patterns, and instructional feedback to teachers about their classroom. Rachel is the head of marketing, and Lawrence is the head of sales. And together they're bringing some b2b tech flavors to the EdTech space, but only the flavors that make sense. In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be mission to mission instead of b2b. We outline how they fight the tendency to go whale hunting, and how it's actually easy to find unicorns when you know we're all in unicorns hang out. To start though, let's set the stage by outlining what Rachel and Lawrence have found to be the differences in go to market approaches between typical b2b and edtech.
Rachel Jordan 3:11
I came to ad tech from enterprise b2b. And there are definitely similarities and there are definitely differences. And I think the biggest differentiators are that when you're in b2b, you can easily make the case to your buyer and very kind of bottom line terms, you're talking about the literal cost in dollars of not solving this problem. And, again, the literal value in dollars of solving the problem. So like when we were marketing, you know, early childhood centers to large employers, or the value of backup, elder care and backup childcare, it was very much in terms of here's what it costs if your employees are turning over, or if your employees are, you know, not as engaged as you would like them to be. And here's the investment, right? When you're in ed tech, that's not how the math is done at all. And I have heard stories of folks in ed tech who are seeing ads online about stuff like Oh, our AI can help you replace teachers. That is not that's a standard ad tech pitch. I think like, we're on a mission, and we're amplifying the mission of the people that we're talking to. So for us, that means you know, we're on a mission to create more meaningful, equitable dialogue in every classroom, and for a host of reasons we can get into about why that matters in education. And so the educators that we talked to, are also on that mission. They want to see, you know, equitable education happening everywhere, and they understand how hard that is to solve. And all of the ad tech brands I see that people love and trust the most are the ones that can really clearly articulate the mission they're on. And they're balancing that, you know, profitability that has to exist in a VC backed startup with the way that they can prove in both qualitative and quantitative ways the impact they're making.
Sean Lane 4:58
So Lauren's as the sales leader are in that type of environment? How do you change the way that you sell to meet what Rachel is talking about where it's not necessarily going to be this bottom line ROI calculation?
Laurence Hall 5:13
Yeah, it's difficult because you have a lot of salespeople that are so focused on getting deals to close and, you know, having that magic stat that they can throw and say, if we increase x by 3%, then the number speaks for itself, you should just sign up, right. And that's the best way to do it pays for itself, it pays for itself, right. And that's just not the case, you might have the best product in the world, you might even have alignment, at times from your potential champion or the person that you're selling to. But there's so many other things that need to happen, for change to be made at that school and or district or the folks that you're working with, where there's a lot more stakeholders to get involved. So really kind of to Rachel's point, you have to not only have something that works well, not only be able to show the value, but you have to be able to navigate the internal politics that occur at times, or being able to just know that it's bureaucracy, and there's 1001 steps to do. And once you do 1001 steps, you'll have the greatest customer and greatest experience, but you really can't skip at at times. So I kind of always just encourage my team, my mantra is politely persistent, you know, stay on in front of folks always be providing value to them. And, you know, it might take two months, it might take two years. But if you do the right things at the right time, it's usually going to come back to this. Okay,
Sean Lane 6:25
so some components here are very similar to the typical b2b emotion and others are quite different. Rachel told me that in edtech, its mission to mission, not just b2b, that mission alignment means you're selling an impact, and not just a calculated ROI. This means for Laurens and his team that they have to approach their sales cycle a little differently as well. And what's more, there's usually quite a bit more bureaucracy involved in the sale itself. You think you have a challenging enterprise sale, because you've got multiple stakeholders procurement security, a CFO with a tight wallet, try tackling public school budgets, elected officials in school committees, district offices, it's a whole different set of potential hurdles in your deals. But the solution isn't actually so different. Lauren says like most sales, it all comes back to good discovery.
Laurence Hall 7:20
So my big focus is always just on doing diligent discovery, we again don't have something that as soon as people see it, the numbers speak for themselves, they just purchase, they have to see it, they have to understand it, they have to understand the value of why pitching that out to those other stakeholders, whether internally or, you know, school board members, parents, sometimes other folks that are involved, why it's important enough for them to do that. And so usually what we do is we try to end the discovery process, understand what normally happens, if you want to buy our platform, if you want to partner with us, walk me through the steps of what normally occurs. And usually what we're trying to do is identify those hurdles those obstacles, and work ahead of them. Hey, you know, normally we just we say yes, and it's good, and we partner with you. Okay, but are there any it forms that we have to get through? Are there any board decisions that need to be made? And then they say, Yeah, well, you got to do that. And so really just trying to quickly identify all the things that can go wrong, think ahead of them, or at least start the process earlier than the second that they say we have the money, let's partner. Because even when that point happens, that might still be a lag of a couple of weeks, a couple of months, if we haven't done those things beforehand. It's
Rachel Jordan 8:29
also in how we've defined and redefined our ICP as we go. Yeah, Shawn, you mentioned that there are all these factors, right? If you're talking about the district level, or the charter management organization level, like that enterprise kind of analog to be to be down to the single site school. And a lot of times Ed Tech's really just want to focus on that whale hunting, right, they just want to go out and land those districts, even if it might take a really, really long time. But there are so many factors involved between the district level and the school level. And you know, that principal might be on one kind of mission and the superintendent might be on another. So we found that by defining our ICP really clearly as a single site school where some very specific alignments are in place, right, as far as the instructional vision that the leader has the culture that they've built with their teachers, who are our end users, and how we can fit into what's already happening, not trying to force a change to what's already happening is super important. And once we have that focus, that's totally changed how we made decisions about the channels and tactics we were using in both marketing and sales.
Sean Lane 9:35
And I want to get into some of those tactics in a second but go thing that you mentioned, Lawrence, that made me think of a little bit of an analogy to a software sale is just people's exposure to buying stuff like this in other parts of their job or in previous years, right, like, even in a software context, like most people are not good at buying software, right? Most people don't do Do it all the time. And so they need kind of help guiding them through that process. I would imagine that's got to be even more the case for you as you're selling into schools, or am I making a bad assumption there?
Laurence Hall 10:12
No, that's exactly right, Shawn, I know that everyone, every salesperson in the world wants to say, we're consultants, we're not salespeople. But it is so true in edtech, because you have these great educators, these great leaders of schools and children and teachers, who probably never really trained in, you know, working with vendors, they were never really trained in, you know, negotiation of contracts, and you know, how to get things approved. And even if they were maybe sometimes they're newer to a district and how they did something at the last district is just day and night different on how they would do it here. So our job is, like I said, in that discovery process, not just listening and say, Oh, this is what happens. Great. We'll follow your playbook here. It's also saying, Have you thought about this? Have you thought about that? Is there something that we can do to take that off your plate? You mentioned that you have to do an internal pitch and show it to your other directors? Do you want us to join that meeting? So maybe we can pitch directly? Do you want us to provide some sort of executive summary? Should we record a video that answers the question they have? Should we give you an example of maybe a survey that we did to find out if the pilot works successfully, so there's so much that we need to do to support them, because first of all, maybe they don't have the experience doing it. But also Shawn, maybe they just have 1000 Other things to do. So if we can take something off their plate, it just the time in which they can partner, it goes from 190 days, maybe down to 90 days, which is we'll take it as a win. Yeah.
Rachel Jordan 11:31
And our champion, who is often the one closest to the pain is not the buyer. And as to all of Lawrence's points, like might not be practiced at all, and making that effective pitch and understanding like how to put themselves into the shoes of the buyer, who's usually the principal who owns the budget. So even if they've used this tool, and they love it, and they've seen how it might change their own practice or their teachers practice, we still have to figure out okay, how do we bring that principal to the table and have a good conversation with them. And that takes all of that kind of champion enablement stuff that's a partnership between marketing and sales to make it work.
Sean Lane 12:06
I feel like in b2b Tech, it's easy for us to get used to our own little bubble. Everyone we know uses loom videos, or sends emails through SalesLoft. And outreach, it's easy to make assumptions about what your buyers know, and what they use in their day. But Lawrence and Rachel's teams are incredibly thoughtful, not just about the needs of their ICP that their product can solve. But also the needs of their buyers for the buying process itself. When you're creating a category in tech are not half of the battle of the sale can often be teaching people something they don't know, they don't know. That's what Rachel Lawrence and the team at Teach FX are tasked with. And they're fully embracing that task and how they go to market.
Rachel Jordan 12:52
We have a couple of ways that we do that, because we've learned that, as is the case for a lot of category creators, right? People don't know what they don't know about what we're doing. And they might think they understand what this app is or how we, you know, pair app with in person support to make this all work, but they really don't get it until we show it to them. So we have a free trial signup, which a lot of our champions and buyers will sign up just to see like, what is this thing? And what would it look like if my teachers used it. And then the next layer that we just added is regular live walkthrough. So every two weeks Lawrence or someone on the team is online to lead a quick 30 minute walkthrough of here's what this thing is. And here's how we pair this with professional development for your teachers to kind of not only show them what's happening in the classroom, but also help them learn how to change their practice based on what's happening in the classroom. And we've only done our first year so far, but our early data is showing us that definitely solving this like in between place where maybe I'm not going to sign up for a free trial. But I'm also really not ready to ask a real live salesperson for a one to one meeting. And so what's the way that I can actually see like, what would this do for me,
Sean Lane 14:00
the other thing that I think is probably challenging for not just you guys, but anybody who's kind of playing in this AI space is, you know, you have to teach people what I teach FX does no matter what, but now you're also introducing this whole new set of language around AI, that, you know, teaching them your product to your point is teaching them something they don't know, they don't know, teaching them the AI layer on top of that, right? It's like teaching somebody that the sky is not actually blue, it's red, right? Like there's a whole other educational component there. So Lawrence now that you've kind of narrowed in on that ICP, and you're getting these kind of educational walkthroughs in place, like is the AI thing, just another layer on top of that, how do you blend that in?
Laurence Hall 14:45
Yeah, I mean, I think we're still learning it and discovering internally in real time because what AI meant for many folks three months ago versus what it is now what it means three months from now. It's just constantly evolving. I think usually what we try to do is Less is more. So if it doesn't make sense to complicate the sales cycle or the discovery process, with too many details on how the sausage is made, what the AI actually does, just talking about, look the end value to your teachers if they're going to have this as a result, and how do we get that in place usually works pretty efficiently. But what's interesting, and Rachel and I were talking about this the other day is, there's also a big market of folks that are specifically going to conferences that are focused on AI or focus on new tech, because that is what they're focused on. And they want their teachers to have access to the latest and greatest as it relates to AI. So I think by and large, mostly, we try not to overcomplicate things by saying, here's the AI and how it works. It's no, here's our app, AI or not, it works well. And here's the end result. And for those folks who are really want to nerd out with us about AI, then totally we'll spend the time and energy doing that. But I think most often, we focus on what is the end result, it's getting their students in our case to talk more more engaged in class. And there's great ways to do it. Even if you don't know what AI means in the background.
Sean Lane 16:03
Like any other sale, it's about the outcomes your customers get from using your product. Whether you're using AI or not, don't sell me on the tech happening under the hood, sell me on what I can do with it. Now, all of this advice is great. But I want to make this real for you all. I want to know the specific tactics that Rachel and Lorenz are deploying to translate this approach into real results for Teach FX and its customers. Surprisingly, they had those specifics
Rachel Jordan 16:34
to back it up. We do focus on single site schools. But we also want to find the places in the country where we're really seeing really good momentum that can expand from one school to the next. And then eventually it could be a district level partnership. And that's what we were seeing in Atlanta, it started with a really amazing forward thinking principal who have really good relationships with other principals in the district. She actually got us on the agenda for the superintendents meeting of principals. And so we landed there with this amazing video case study that got the other principals really excited about what we were doing in her school already. You know, they saw teachers talking about how much it was changing what they were doing in their classrooms. And then we had all these principals at that meeting going, This is amazing. Can we do this? And then we get a video. And I'm like, of course, everyone was really like, let's tell everyone's story. But first, what's the next step from this meeting? Right? So we decided to do something very similar to what's worked in b2b but modified for education, of really targeted invite only webinar campaign. So there about 100 schools in this district, we invited the principals and assistant principals from every school to come to this webinar, there was going to feature this one principle they all know and love. I mean, we literally had some people reply. So of course, I've come to a conversation with her. This is amazing, we love her. We also decided to do in person swag drops to basically as many schools as we could get our amazing amazing sales rep or SEO to get to in the time we have for this campaign, she made it to 50 schools in person out of 100, which is really incredible. So drops, you know, a really lovely little package of teacher facts, swag, and a Starbucks gift card for the principals we were inviting out of these 100 schools, we had 30 school leaders register for this webinar, we had 24 attend. And at last count, we had close a good bit of that business, we closed several deals just out of that campaign. And there are more that are already in the pipeline that she will close this year for sure. So I think our ROI was at last count, I think it was 12x. What we spent.
Sean Lane 18:41
So Lawrence is that mean that we need to have local reps to pull off something like this.
Laurence Hall 18:48
I don't know that we necessarily need to have local reps. But I do think for a company, especially our sizes, we're a startup and still growing, we absolutely do need to have an intentionality on focusing on local, either districts or regions of the country. So for us, focusing and running that play, like Rachel said, and trying to penetrate that district as much as possible. If I have a rep that lives there, I have a rep that lives across the country that focus in on that area, they should definitely go and visit or habit, you know, priority to make that happen again, year over year. So I think instead of trying to be so broad, and we should work with every district across the country, and so we have an opportunity to maybe staff out and have a rep in every state or every city being able to say here's your I always ask my team, what is your top 10 Focus districts for this year or focus areas? And how do we run a campaign similar to what Rachel just shared? Which each of those and do it well, instead of doing, you know, 100 different campaigns at surface level? So I think a little bit deeper, instead of going wider. And ideally, yeah, if that person lives near the district grade, it's easier for them to be able to drive but I gladly would spend budget to send them out. You know where that place is spent a week there. Do the same things that Rachel just mentioned and probably through this similar return, and
Rachel Jordan 20:02
being really selective about where we do those kinds of intensive campaigns to Lawrence's point like we've tried outbound where we don't have traction, and there's just so many steps from I don't know anything about you to I want to engage with you, because we're so new that that totally cold outbound is really hard to do. But outbound, when we have people really talking about us who love us in a state or district, like that makes a lot of sense. So we will definitely keep doing that. And then we balance that with these like wider more national scope webinars, we have some coming up with kind of luminaries in the field. The
Sean Lane 20:36
thing I like about it is everything that you're talking about operationalizing is not betraying what you found to be your ICP, right? Like the ICP, you picked his heart, you have to win these schools over one site at a time. But you found these very high leverage channels to do that in a way that allows you to reach them, not one at a time. And so I think it's pairing together like what you know, to to be that true ICP, with, you know, the analogy would be like an ABM or a target account strategy, but leveraging these very high leverage channels to get to them more efficiently as opposed to cold out. Yeah,
Rachel Jordan 21:14
yeah, it's very high touch at high volume with a lean team and not a lot of time, moving really fast. And that's where adding an SDR really changed everything for us.
Sean Lane 21:27
More on that str function, and the team around them after the short break. This episode is sponsored by fool cast the company that helps operators build better sales territories. Their platform focuses the right sellers on the right opportunities, making them unstoppable. And the cherry on top forecast automates common go to market activities like territory, rebalancing, account hierarchies, routing, and more. So the plan is always in sync with operations. With forecast say goodbye to go to market planning headaches, and hello to your own personal planning assistant. Learn more about forecast today by visiting full cast.io. Okay, back to Rachel and Lawrence. Before the break, we were talking about the differences between the typical b2b go to market and the EdTech go to market. And so far, we've covered both the go to market strategy and some specific tactics that Rachel and Lawrence have employed in growing TF x as business, the missing ingredient we haven't covered yet, the people. Earlier in my career, I worked at a tech company that sold specifically to restaurants. And over and over again, what I found, regardless of the role that we were hiring for, was that an X factor in our hiring processes was whether or not someone had worked in restaurants before. They understood what it was like to work in restaurants. They knew the language that front and back of house employees used. They knew the industry firsthand, and we could teach them everything else. So I was curious, how did Laurens and Rachel think about staffing their teams at a company that sold directly to schools, and more specifically to teachers? Here's Lawrence.
Laurence Hall 23:11
So I think there's certain things that you want to see everywhere. So I'm looking for people that, especially what working on the sales team are driven, they're not complacent, they don't say, oh, you know, I've made enough condition this week or this month, right? Folks that actually do want to be successful people that are hungry, and you know, autonomous, there's certain things that with any employee on any company, I think you would always want to search and find on what I do find, however, different Shawn is that the type of salesperson I might hire at, you know, ed tech company versus what I could have done in private sector, there are some key differences. And I think it has to do with just how aligned they are to understanding our ICP or understanding our customer, and being able to really sympathize and empathize with them from a lived experience. So I in a perfect world, I thought that hiring someone just the best salesperson under the sun, plugging them into an ad tech company, they're going to be the best salesperson they have at the company, right? But in reality, although they have the sales skills, and maybe they have the passion and the drive to manage a pipeline, there's certain things when you talk pedagogy, the certain things when you talk about, you know how to follow up and how to be politely persistent, but not overwhelming. And, you know, leaning too heavily on stats on what do you mean, like this is the cheapest solution on the market, you should definitely be buying it, it's a no brainer, really understanding a little bit more about what does a day in the life look like for someone that we work with, is just so crucial. So what I saw kind of the perfect solution is, maybe I can go and just hire someone right out of the classroom and hiring right out of the classroom means they'll know that already. And I can teach them the sales skill. It's not as easy to do that either, because then you have to teach them how to stay on top of the pipeline how to close business. So what I've settled on, at least so far, and I think I've been pretty happy with and I'd like to continue for a while is finding folks that have experience in the classroom. They can talk the language of our customers and what they know but also has been trained or has worked in sales. So they know how to do it, I don't have to spend 1000, you know, hours every week just teaching them how to do things that most salespeople know already. And also, they know that that's the career they want to follow. I know that some instructors that come out of the classroom, they want to work in edtech, they want to work for a software company. But then they realized that maybe the work life balance that's needed, or the things that they have to focus on are not in alignment with what they thought they would be. So by hiring someone that's worked in sales, or worked for a software company already, and was a teacher, I think that's been a really good balance to hedge against people that might turn over quickly, or people that would take too much time and energy training on my end when I have, you know, different people on the team to manage. Yeah,
Rachel Jordan 25:39
this is part of that whole mission to mission thing, again, that like, the education community is very insular, they do not want to be sold and marketed to by people who feel like they're very outside of them. So you pull in sales people, even if they can learn the language, if they seem like they're play acting, the commitment to the mission and purpose that we're bringing to the world, it will be really obvious from the beginning. And the same is true in the top of the funnel, you know, the content that we're putting out there, the way that we're telling educators stories, has to feel real. So I have one person on my team who's a former teacher and instructional coach, he gets every part of our use case. And he is amazing at drawing educators in a conversation where they can tell their story really well. And then he also happens to be incredible at video content, has told our story in a whole bunch of great ways already. And then I have someone who came from b2b Tech, and is an amazing marketing ops person, because there's also a ton of stuff to do. And she's very committed to our mission, she's amazing part of the team was she can run really fast on building out our ops capabilities in a way that has totally changed what it's like for me to be able to leave marketing here because all of that stuff is off my plate. And she's also an amazing teacher. So teaching her colleagues stuff that they need to learn about the systems, the tech stack, and how we're structuring the pipeline, and all that kind of stuff. She's incredible,
Sean Lane 27:09
different kinds of teaching, for sure. A different kind of teaching. Yeah. That sounds amazing. On paper to me. In reality, you guys are looking for unicorns, right? Like you guys are looking for these very specific people. And so how do you stay committed to that profile? And you know, what I would imagine is probably drawing out your interview process drawing out your hiring missing target dates to get people in the door like, or have you found the right kind of place to find these particular people who are on this path?
Laurence Hall 27:43
It's a really good question, Shawn. And when not done right, you're absolutely right. It can take months and years right to hire for position. However, ad tech is such a small industry, that once you've worked that I've worked at two or three different ad tech companies now, and I go to the same conferences is the same folks I used to work with, we keep tabs on each other, we say, Oh, you're going to this company. Now how's that company doing your company about our company, that's amazing. So once you've done a good job of really kind of learning the folks in the industry, keeping track on the ones that do extremely well, building a relationship where they trust you. And if and when you have an opportunity for them, they'd be happy to follow you, then I think that's where the magic happens. And actually, before I put up a posting, sometimes now, I usually might have someone already in line, that might be a perfect fit. And we've been talking, you know, a month or two, as soon as the opportunities available as long as they don't have anything else lined up. It's a really short recruitment process. So I would say although it is a unicorn that we need, if you go to the well, where all the unicorns drink from consistently, and you keep tabs on them, and you're always just trying to build out your bench, then it's actually pretty easy.
Rachel Jordan 28:48
Yeah, and unfortunately, we're not, there are a lot of educators trying to leave the classroom right now and get into ed tech. So that was how I landed one of my folks. And I went into my first marketing hiring process here saying, Wow, I'm looking for a unicorn, how am I gonna do? And it was actually, I mean, I received, I think it was 300 applicants for the first role I posted. And it was an incredibly hard decision, because there were so many people who had this really good mix of education experience, and the kind of creative content experience that I knew I needed to add. Because I'm not an educator, I needed someone on my team who can speak the language more naturally than I do, even though any great marketer can learn the language of your market. It's still not exactly the same. And the same thing was true for this marketing ops person, you know, we knew what we were looking for, and it still needed to be something of a unicorn. And that hire took a little while but we landed the exact right person.
Sean Lane 29:49
I would also imagine to Rachel, the inverse is probably even more true of the example you gave, which is like if they have that foundation of being in the classroom Truly having done that job can speak that language, you're probably also then able to train them in a bunch of different cross functional needs, regardless, like because you've got that foundation to build on. So yeah, maybe they have skill sets that lean more towards sales or marketing, or customer success, but like, you can teach a lot of the skills you need to do those jobs, you can't teach the foundation without them having. So I would imagine that also gives you some flexibility to put them into different parts of the organization without having to compromise on that kind of core mission.
Rachel Jordan 30:32
Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, it's funny at Bright Horizons, we always talked about hire for heart and train for skill. And I've definitely carried that with me through my career. And like, I think the question for a hiring manager is, when are you leaning more towards one than the other? You know, it's hard in an early stage startup, when you're really trying to scale fast, you have a little bit less leeway, and time to train people up on that skill set than you would when your enterprise you know, we're series A when I was at Bright Horizons, I think we were 500 people just in corporate headquarters, it's just the math is different, and what you're hiring and how. But we do have teachers throughout the organization, including in our products, which is probably the biggest unicorn rate to find someone who has education background and is an amazing product developer, but we've got those. So we have that like true empathy, in every part from who's building the product to our success team who actually goes out and works with teachers and leads inquiry driven workshops, teaching teachers how to adopt the kinds of teaching practices that our app also shows them are making a difference in the classroom, all the way to marketing and sales.
Sean Lane 31:41
I will have Lawrence's line. Yeah, we're looking for unicorns, but if you know where all the unicorns are, they aren't that hard to find. And whether you're in edtech, or selling restaurant technology, or selling b2b software to marketers, that industry experience can offer firsthand knowledge that is really difficult to teach. It's really impressive that teach FX has committed to this type of hiring throughout every function in the organization, especially in an early stage company where resources are precious, and every hiring decision can have an outsized impact, positive or negative on the company. Now, nowhere in is alignment on those types of resources more important than between sales and marketing. So I couldn't let the sales and marketing duo leave without asking them how they make tough resourcing calls between the two of them.
Laurence Hall 32:32
I think the conversation is the approach. And the answer to that question just in general, as long as we're having conversations together, and we're talking and I'm not making a decision and saying this is a priority. And we have the same boss and saying, Hey, this makes more sense and trying to sell against hires, with Rachel, us coming together and saying, here's what we're thinking, here's what our team can currently do. Maybe here's where the need is, do we go and do it something with a contractor? Do we outsource first? Do we even buy software that's going to help with this? Do we have the team that can handle it. So it's not as easy as saying like, you know, here's the magic solution. And here's how we prioritize and we make a list. But I think just having the conversation and making it as a go to market team instead of as a sales team or a marketing team or success team is the best way to go about it. And I think even going back to the point about hiring and the decisions we make is just knowing that it's going to be different in three months than what we think is happening now. And so having either team members that we bring on that are flexible or processes that are flexible. I know what we recently did, Rachel was really helpful as before we hire for an SDR, we spent a lot of time and energy, kind of building out what the role is going to look like, what's going to happen, and what are the norms, then we hired that person. And we realized that, gosh, now that we have someone that's doing the work, let's collaborate with them on how to iterate upon it. So I think it's just knowing that we should always be communicating and always making decisions together. And then iterating, because we know that things are gonna change over time. Yeah,
Rachel Jordan 33:56
yeah, we talked about this in the use case for how teachers and instructional coaches use our app, right that like, you could have an instructional coach come into a teacher's classroom and watch them teach and say, Hey, this is what I saw happen. And the teacher could go, Well, that's what you think you saw, but I think I saw something different. Versus if they're both looking at the data from our app, they're sitting on the same side of the table together, reviewing this data saying, Okay, what do we want to do with this? And I think Lawrence and I have very much taken that approach. And every step of our partnership is we're looking at the data together, and then making decisions, everything from how do we architect the pipeline, like weave together to our chief growth officer and CEO and said, We want to change the pipeline stages. And here's how we wanted to find them. And here's why. And this is, you know, this fits both the data we're seeing as well as both of our experience in how to make pipelines move faster and be more measurable. And then we went into right, how are we going to build out like, when does the marketing sales handoff happen? And how do we make that really clear to everyone you know, and what does that look like? And how do we decide when that moment is how do we decide how the data is going? To show us what a sales ready lead actually is, or even, you know, potentially qualified lead. And then we keep looking at that data together quite regularly to decide like how do we need to improve our systems processes, and our actual marketing and sales to get more volume, velocity and value out of this pipeline?
Sean Lane 35:27
Before we go at the end of each show, we're going to ask each desk the same lightning round of questions. Ready? Here we go. Best book you've read in the last six months,
Rachel Jordan 35:38
just one, I'm gonna say the creative act by Rick Rubin. It's amazing. Everyone needs to read it. Lawrence, you got one.
Laurence Hall 35:45
The score takes care of itself. Phil off wall story. A lot of folks know about it really good when it's my second or third time reading it.
Sean Lane 35:53
Revisit all the time. All right. Normally, I asked folks their favorite part about working in OPS, but you guys are, you know, honorary operators here with your go to market ties. So Rachel, favorite part about working in ops or with ops,
Rachel Jordan 36:06
I think it's the larger picture, like everything that I do, and all of the nitty gritty stuff of like, looking at all these numbers. And, you know, optimizing the email flow or landing page, or any of that stuff is all to this, like to service of the larger goal of getting this product in every single classroom, so that every kid and teacher benefits from it. And it's that purpose that keeps it all interesting and worthwhile.
Sean Lane 36:31
It's a great answer a little more motivating than refreshing a dashboard. Yeah, Lawrence, I'm gonna give you the flip side least favorite part about working with ops?
Laurence Hall 36:41
Oh, my gosh, just so I really liked being organized. You look at my bed every morning. It's made you look at my inbox. It's clean my text messages, they're all answered or at least opened. And so that's just how I operate. I like to write Yeah, that's just that's kind of how I am. So like ops and sales ops, especially, that's something that I care a lot about. But gosh, it's just something that you are never finished. There's never a point where you're like, wow, I built it. Our pipeline stages are perfect. And now everything's going to work. And now we can go focus on hiring and doing all the other things are closing business. It's like, yeah, now this thing broke. Because we did that, or now we're looking at this report. And being that we worked with higher ed, now we have to do this. So it's one of the things where, although it's fun, and it's nice and important to make sure things are operationalize, it's just something that is never finished. And it just, it can take hours and hours and hours just sometimes feel like you're at an operational stage and not even necessarily improving at times.
Rachel Jordan 37:37
Sometimes it's oh, wait, HubSpot just released 500 new features for inbound. And we've learned all of that. Or
Laurence Hall 37:46
conversely, like, hey, the tool, not appspot. But another tool we were using just went out of business, are they? So now we have to find another tool to use right?
Sean Lane 37:55
All right, Rachel, someone who impacted you get into the job you have today.
Rachel Jordan 37:58
I'm gonna say this, I'm gonna reach really far back the HR manager at my first job. I started my career in nonprofit. And I was in this, you know, globally focused little nonprofit 50 people had been there for years. And she was the one who said to me, you are ready for a bigger challenge. And you need to go into corporate and I was like, I'm not corporate. What are you saying that I can't even imagine that. And she was totally right. And I knew someone who knew someone and learned about Bright Horizons and took this crazy leap from a 50 person, nonprofit to this 25,000 person publicly traded company. And it was the best leap ever. And there are many twists and turns that got me from there to here. But none of it would have happened if I hadn't had this person who said, I see this in you. And I think you should try this next step.
Sean Lane 38:46
That's awesome. All right. Last one, I'm gonna ask both of you this one. So I'll come back to in a second Rachel Lawrence, one piece of advice for people who want to have your job someday,
Laurence Hall 38:54
honestly, take a really good glance or ask yourself seriously, do you want my job someday? Because you see it as a career progression? Or do you want your advice run? Yeah, not necessarily run, but you know, make sure you're really unsure about what the job entails. And not just the fun part of oh, great, I manage a team or I have this title or whatever, really makes sure that the things that like we talked about the hours we spend doing operations, you know, late at night, the hiring, the HR issues and things like that, which it's all worth it. I love my job. I love working at my company. I love working with Rachel and our partnership, but making sure you really understand that there's so many things behind the scenes that are not always fun, that either you need to make sure it is a good fit for what you'd like to do. Or maybe along the way, start preparing for that. So maybe you start taking some HR one on one courses, maybe you start taking some you know how time management how to manage people and employees, so that once that happens, you don't feel like you're drinking from a firehose, but ya know, if you want to do it, and it's something that aligns to your skill set, very, very rewarding position. Then job, but also really have an honest question with yourself about is it the perfect fit? And why?
Unknown Speaker 40:05
That's a great answer. Rachel, how about you?
Rachel Jordan 40:08
Yeah, you definitely you have to love it. And not just the part of marketing that you've loved, that's gotten you to this place, you have to want to eat, sleep and breathe, part of marketing on a regular basis. You know, my kids are probably tired of hearing me talk about marketing, but they're gonna be marketers when they grew up, because that's how much I talk and think about this, I think that's a big part of it, that will just keep you going. Because there are so many parts outside of the thing that you're doing. I think the other thing, especially if you're going to take the startup route, and not like the established brand route is, there's no roadmap, you can't have this expectation coming into any of these roles, that anything is going to be planned out, you come into this kind of role going, I know what I know about marketing, I know what the best practices are, I'm gonna try to apply that stuff here. And I know that I'm going to also need to be inventing on a daily basis and have to be really comfortable with that, you know, one of my favorite Seth Godin quotes, I don't know if this is his quote, but I always attribute it to him as this might not work because it was something that we said in the alt MBA all the time. And that's the mindset that I have to bring to this every day, no matter how long I've done it, and how many successes I might have, whatever I'm doing today might not work. And I instill that mindset in my team too. And not everyone is wired for that level of uncertainty.
Sean Lane 41:34
Thanks so much to Rachel and Lawrence for joining us on this week's episode of operations. And thank you for sharing the TF X story with our audience. All right, I got something special for you all. Before we go today, in conjunction with our friends at full cast, we just released a new ebook about mastering your Reb ops career. There's a lot of fluff and a lot of information about robots out there these days. But it's hard to find great insights from practitioners like we offer on this show every other week. And so between myself and the team at full cast, we put together this ebook, I wrote the foreword, and then some great lessons and insights from practitioners who are actually in these roles and doing these jobs. Check it out. We have a special landing page just for operations podcast listeners. It's at go dot full cast.io/ops podcast that's go dot full cast.io/ops podcast. Check it out. Let us know what you think. All right. If you liked what you heard, make sure you're subscribed to our show. So you get lessons from practitioners in your feed every other Friday. Also, if you learned something from Rachael Lawrence, any of the folks in the eBook, make sure you leave us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts six star reviews only. Alright, that's gonna do it for me. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.
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