I last wrote here 18 months ago. It was my final week of living in Tokyo, something that now seems like a distant memory.
That transition wasn't just a new chapter. It felt like a whole new book.
I was returning to Liverpool after 14 years away. Embarking on a new startup, School SCR. My first baby on the way.
It has been an intense 18 months, and writing here is something I've really missed.
My little boy is already 15 months old, walking around, and on the cusp of his first words. I'm pretty sure his first word is going to be 'Jay.' He's not yet got the J sound but the rest is there. If 'Jay' is his first word, some might say it's a reflection on how much my wife calls me from the other room... I couldn't possible agree with that though. I'm strictly answering No Comment!
Beyond learning to survive on far less sleep than I thought was possible, professionally it's been an interesting year.
School SCR is up and running, and we're scaling into MATs with our small team. Selling into schools has never been easy but I feel we're in perhaps the toughest period I've seen in 15+ years of being in the sector.
This isn't just me talking from a School SCR perspective. I supported 9 companies last year and some of these were genuinely transformational products. And more recently I've been catching up with a lot of founders I've known over the years.
The story - it's hard across the board, regardless of what you're selling or how big you are.
I've been thinking on why this is for a while. There's 3 big trends I'm seeing that I wanted to share with you:
1. "Email marketing is dead" says Exited Founder
I couldn't argue with what he was saying. He scaled his previous company to 1,000+ schools. 8 years ago he did loads of emails and events. He's starting fresh with a new product. £20,000 in email marketing / agencies later and he's not got a single lead.
I've experienced something similar myself. Spending time crafting good emails only to get nothing back. It took me down a deep rabbit hole of how to improve deliverability. I changed marketing platform 3 times. I used 2 email domain warm up services. I enriched the data through a 3rd party. I tried sending from 2 different domains. The result... none of it worked.
I'm hearing this trend with every company / founder I speak to. Emails aren't working and more and more people are going down CRM and automation rabbit holes.
Sometimes the solution is the most obvious. Email marketing just isn't effective any longer.
My advice is to keep it simple. Keep doing internal email marketing (keep the newsletter topped up), but I wouldn't invest additional spend in email activities going forward. The return on investment is terrible from what I've seen these last 18 months.
It's led me to overhaul our marketing activities at School SCR and I've implemented some of the wins with other companies too. Happy to share these with you over a video call if you want to know more.
2. Demonstrating tangible impact is becoming critical
Churn, even at established EdTech companies is rising, and rising fast.
From my position, this isn't AI disruption or even an aggressive competitor entering the space. A lot of schools are cutting subscriptions and going back to traditional methods, even if these are analogue and manual processes.
I've even seen cases were a company was providing positive impact on student progress or time-saved (efficiency gains), schools were still choosing to cut the cord. The impact wasn't deemed value for money.
It seems crazy that a school would choose to forgo technology and risk increasing workload but that's their decision. As EdTech companies we can only meet them where they are. Double down on positive stories and impact with your customers.
3. Managing upwards - keeping MAT leadership engaged
MATs are really starting to pull the strings from behind the scenes. 50% of all schools in England are part of a MAT (Secondaries it's 80%), and managing upwards - that is feeding MATs positive information and keeping them engaged is really important.
You don't have to build a MAT dashboard or functionality. Don't view it as a product problem (be careful with MATs because they will ask for new features around reports / data but won't pay for them)
I think of this as the evolution of your customer success strategy. It's no longer enough to have your account managers or CSMs reactively supporting schools and managing renewals. An element of their work has to be about engaging the MAT.
Even if it's a 1-sided conversation where you don't hear back from them, it's important to keep it up. Keep communicating positive news, impact, little wins, and new opportunities. Over time these really pay off.
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I've gone on longer that I expected today so I'll wrap things up. I'm looking forward to sharing thoughts and learnings with you again. I hope it helps (tell me if it doesn't - I won't be offended)
I continue working with a number of really exciting EdTech companies and I've got a little bit of time opening up soon if you'd like to chat.
Book a virtual chat / coffee with me here
Best,
Jay
