Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the teacher is assigning this reading through your product, is the student doing that reading at home?

Stuart Udell: Before COVID, about 46% of our reading was done after school hours. Since COVID, that number jumped to the high 80s and even touched 90%. The nice thing is, there are lots of flexible models that can really work here. The student can read individually at home. Then the discussion can happen in the classroom the next day. The classroom can mean physical or remote. Then there are lots of teachers who will tell kids to silently read for 15 to 20 minutes and discuss in the classroom. It’s a very flexible implementation model.

Sramana Mitra: Could you talk about your go-to-market strategy in a bit more detail? You talked about a bunch of segments. You’re selling directly to school administrators. You’re selling to teachers. You’re selling to prison systems. Do you sell with a direct sales force?

Stuart Udell: The primary go-to-market model is a direct salesforce. We have about 40 quota-carrying sales reps and a regional sales structure above them. We support them in a number of ways. From a top-of-funnel perspective, we have one product that’s a freemium model.

As teachers within a building start to engage more, we then try to branch out to the building through sales development reps. Ultimately, we try to take it up to a district-level conversation. The other way that we try to drive highly-qualified leads is through events. Most of those events have been virtual.

Our mantra for any event is there must be something newsworthy in it. If we’re going to do a webinar or a live get-together, we want something to talk about. It could be a new research report. It could be new features and functionality in our product. It could be almost a market research type. We often bring in thought leaders. We have an academic advisory council. We also have partnerships with some of the most noted thought leaders and professional speakers in the space. That tends to drive a lot more people to the events.

We might generate 300 to 500 leads in the typical online webinar. We have our sales development reps [SDR] qualify those leads further with the ultimate goal of providing a meeting for our direct sales representative who is out on the field. Then at that point, the handoff occurs. The outside or direct rep goes out to meet with the customer either virtually or in-person.

The other thing that we’ve done is, we tend to do a lot of work with these large organizations. We also have very complex sales in a lot of cases. We have a strategic sales team that focuses on large opportunities. They overlay with the direct sales team. We have a commission-sharing arrangement where everybody gets a big enough cut that they’re presumably happy with the outcome.

As a hundred-million-dollar business, we maintain a very flat organization. I, along with several other Vice Presidents and Chiefs, am very active in the sales process. We get out there and engage. Despite a fair bit of success, we want to stay as close to the customer as possible.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Online Education: Achieve3000 CEO Stuart Udell
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