The So What? test is nothing new but I thought it would be worth covering here as it’s something I have discussed with a number of people this week.

If you’re unfamiliar with the So What? test then there are lots of great books out there on it but, in essence, it is the practice of looking at your messaging and asking yourself “so what?”  Are you talking about what matters most to your audience?  The idea is to help you focus on what’s important to your client base and communicate effectively as a result.

To give you an example, how many presentations have you seen that start with an introductory slide listing facts about the company?  A typical first slide will usually contain some company facts along the lines of:

While these facts are important to your company, the client’s response will probably be so what?  So you were established in 2012, so what?  Why is that important to me?

It’s crucial to always look through your messaging, and particularly opening slides such as these where this will often be your first contact with your potential client, and ask yourself so what?  And keep asking yourself so what until you get to a satisfactory answer.

So, for the example above, let’s do the So What? Test on the first bullet point

• Established in 2012

So what?  Well, it means we’ve been in business for a few years now.

So what?  So we’re not going anywhere, we’re established and have a good reputation.

So what?  Customers can trust us.

By asking so what you can usually find a better way of getting that message across.  In the case of the above, a much stronger opening bullet point would have been something along the lines of:

• Trusted provider since 2012 with an excellent service track record

Try it with the other bullet points and see what you come up with.  Try it with your own messaging and share the results.  I know this has helped lots of companies in the past so hopefully, it will help yours too.

We’ve been privileged to speak with even more edtech and industry thought leaders throughout 2022 as part of our #FinnemoreFireside chats, and the insight they provide us and our community is invaluable.

So thank you Jonathan Coyles of EO Consulting for talking to us about how Trusts can become more energy-efficient, hit carbon targets, and save money at the same time.

Thanks to Mike Donoghue for giving us an insight into how MATs work and what is important to directors, leaders, governors, staff and learners.

It’s great to speak with entrepreneurs from across the edtech industry so thank you Lawrence Royston for getting involved and giving us your perspective.

Thank you to Stephen Bilboe for talking to us about changes across the international and independent education sector, and what the future might hold in terms of MIS.

Our chat with marketing and PR guru Cath Lane is essential listening for everyone who owns or leads an edtech business, thanks for the great advice.

Thank you to Andy Kent for talking to us about his focus on innovation and culture to help all levels of the education sector.

We welcomed Phil Neal back for a follow-up chat to discuss changes in the world of school management systems.

We spoke with Martin Baker of The Safeguarding Company about the lessons that can be learnt from the Child Q case.

And finally, we were delighted to speak with Matt Woodruff, Vice President of Analytics and AI at Community Brands UK, for an insightful conversation about data and machine learning.

We’ve thoroughly enjoyed making the series and already have some great sessions ready to go in the new year including a discussion on school support with Catherine Tallis, Director Of Business Services at Herts for Learning Ltd – watch this space!

Have a great Christmas break, looking forward to sharing more with you all in 2023! 🎄

Best wishes from Sarah & Nick

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How good are you at predicting the future? This image has resurfaced as the article was written 110 years ago and talks about climate issues linked to coal – amazing foresight! What it doesn’t get quite right is the timeline; it says “the effect may be considerable in a few centuries” when actually we’re at a crisis point already.

How often do businesses fall into the trap of thinking a problem is somewhere out there on the horizon when it’s really about to smack them in the face?

I work with the edtech industry and there are quite a few examples I can think of:

👉 The need to access all teaching, learning and school management technology from outside of the school came into VERY sharp focus in the face of lockdowns – lots of people were caught out.

👉 With the academisation agenda, the way schools make decisions and purchase solutions has been turned on its head which has had a major effect on some company business models that probably thought they were safe (the school MIS market in particular).

👉 Free and ‘freemium’ solutions have changed what schools are willing to pay for, you need to find ways to add extra value or risk being ditched altogether.

Here’s what can you do to future-proof your edtech business:

• Listen to your customers
• Encourage employees to speak up – find out what your workforce wants
• Challenge every assumption
• Embrace imperfection
• Iterate, don’t reinvent – be agile
• Be willing to grow
• Test out new marketing strategies
• Harness the power of tech

I’ll talk more about each of these in future blogs, but we also cover all of these in detail within our coaching programme.

How are you future-proofing your education business?

Our next #FinnemoreFireside chat is essential listening for everyone who owns or leads an edtech business as it’s with marketing and PR guru, Catherine Lane.

Cath is Co-founder and Head of PR & Content at The Influence Crowd who work with some of the most well-known brands in education, including Juniper Education, Lexplore Analytics, Teach Active, SIMS BlueSky Education, GL Assessment, and Historic Royal Palaces.

The Influence Crowd implements highly targeted, integrated PR campaigns that prove their value through incoming leads and changed opinions. Using knowledge and relationships built up over 15 years in this sector, they engage and delight audiences through great coverage, shareable social content and by getting the key influencers behind edtech businesses.

This is an audio-only fireside chat (unfortunately the video tech got the better of us on the day 😕) and in it Nick and Cath discuss:

• Why selling to teachers is so hard, and why speaking the right language is so important
• Understanding your target audience
• How Covid has affected schools and the way they use edtech
• People buy from people- it’s not all about the product – and how the pandemic exposed the need for PR and marketing
• How edtech companies have become more experimental in the face of Covid challenges, which improves learning, marketing and messaging
• Cath’s advice for raising your profile as an edtech business in the sector
• How to approach getting national coverage with a whole package
• The importance of timing in creating a story and making the most of newsjacking
• Interpreting data to make it more digestible, gain investment, and help with messaging from day one
• How creating loyalty help with bumps in the road when it comes to reputation management
• Three things people should have in mind if they want to embark on a successful marketing and PR campaign
• What’s next for The Influence Crowd?

Enjoy!

What a great 2019!!

I’m now 13 months into working for myself and running my own business and it’s great. Not only do I get to work with all sorts of inspiring people around the world, I also get to wear many hats and that variety makes me love my work.

Our Finnemore Consulting business focuses on helping business grow in the education sector. Sarah and I work with Exec teams on product strategy, biz dev, sales, product marketing, channel partnering, acquisition and client management. I’ve worked directly with foreign governments and we also get to work with educators, MATs and Support Teams directly who we’ve known for years – a definite bonus!

In addition, we’re proud to be part of the CJK Associates team. We support their work with investors and trade-buyers to help them find acquisitions, and with owners of small education companies who are looking to sell. With so much market movement going on in the Edtech sector it’s an exciting area of work.

In amongst all this I work with the excellent Tarigo in delivering Product Management and Leadership training across all sectors. It’s my area of expertise and it’s great to use this knowledge with new companies, from grads to experienced product leaders.

2020 looks like an exciting year ahead and I look forward to wearing more hats as the year goes on. If anyone’s going to #BettLondon or #BettAsia and would like to catch up, drop us a line.

Almost all of the work I’m doing with businesses at the moment centres around the value proposition and, specifically, how to create a good one.  So I thought it was about time I blogged about it as it’s something which is so important but which so many people get wrong.

Put simply, the value proposition is a clear statement of the value your product will deliver and will be the main reason your potential client will buy from you.  It’s not a description of how good your product is, nor is it about how many clients you have, how many awards you’ve won or how much your customers like you.  The value proposition is about the customer, not you.

The value proposition should:

• Explain how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation
• Explain how you will deliver specific benefits
• Explain to the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not from the competition

Ideally the value proposition should be snappy and be the main focus of all engagement material, from the website through to marketing literature.  Easy peasy eh??!

Well no, it’s not.  Getting the value proposition right involves knowing exactly what your product can do compared to the competitors out there and understanding what it is that your potential clients need.  You then have to take all this info and formulate it into a proposition that highlights your uniqueness in the market and creates something your customers actually care about.  So no, it’s not easy but, when you see how customers respond, you’ll see it’s well worth the effort.

Working with a company recently, the Marketing Manager said to me “We tried an awareness raising campaign, it didn’t work”.  I asked her exactly what it was they had tried; she told me they had crafted an email full of useful tips on how to get the best out of their product and had sent it out to their customer base but had seen virtually no increase in usage at all.  I asked what else she had done, and she told me that was it.  Just the one email.

This made me think of a learning programme called Super-Memo.  It was developed by a Polish researcher called Piotr Wozniak and is based on the premise that the more often you are reminded of a word, number or fact, the longer you will remember it.  An example would be to imagine you’ve just got a new mobile with a new number which you’ve had to learn.  Without regularly saying that number over time it will become increasingly difficult to remember.  In order to remember something the ideal points at which to refresh your memory are after one day, ten days, thirty days and then sixty days.

So why not do the same with your marketing?  A single e-shot is unlikely to be successful and, in many cases, may not even be opened.  But a sustained awareness campaign sent over the course of several weeks will start to make your company and your products feel more familiar and therefore more memorable for the customer.   Which means when your customer needs the type of product or service you offer, you company will be the one that springs to mind.

Question:            When do you start to launch your solution?

Answer:                 As soon as you can.

Remember you are delivering a solution not just software.  A lot of companies make the mistake that they are purely building software and as soon as the software is ready, then they can release.

But the solution is greater than just the software, it is making sure your business and wrap around services are ready as well. This includes:

• Training materials
• Consultants prepared
• Ordering process tried and tested
• Marketing campaigns understood and ready to action. Advocates ready to help with communication, organise your PR
• Sales enablement complete and sales teams trained
• Support Desk trained and the SLA’s (Service Level agreements) and OLA’s (Operational Level Agreements) are in place
• Software ready. Are you going to trial/pilot?
• Solution feedback mechanisms are in place
• All teams are trained and ready to answer customer queries and evangelise about the solution, using the right value proposition

As soon as you have had the approval for the project to go ahead, and you have secured the budget for development, next step is bringing together your stakeholder group from around the company.  They will help you launch internally and to their peers.

Build a checklist of all the activities and add owners from the stakeholder group.  Have the stakeholders keep you updated with the current progress of their actions, you are not to deliver on their behalf!! The success of the solution will depend on the support of the business, so make sure you have it!

As EdTech companies grow and the nature of technology evolves into the world of SaaS and apps, there’s often confusion around where Product Management should sit in the organisation.

Traditional consumer organisations have had a tendency to consider Product Management in the same arena as Marketing.  However, the danger here is when Marketing is actually ‘Marketing Communications’ (sadly often the case in EdTech) – it means that no-one is involved in defining and delivering the products.

In a lot of Tech companies, the Product Management function tends to be viewed in the technical arena, lumped in with the Development Directorate.  The problem here is that the Product Managers can get tied up in functionality and requirements. They can spend so much time building products that there is no-one engaging the customers to understand their problems; no-one looking ahead and strategising as to what the business needs to do in the future to continue to be successful

To drive the maximum success from a Product Management team, you need to understand exactly what their role is.

A successful Product Management Directorate looks at the needs of the entire business and the entire market.  It’s broadly comprised of three main focuses:

• Product strategy
• Product marketing
• Technical product management

The Product Management Directorate will focus the product management team on the business of building solutions for needs now and into the future.  The team will:

• engage and communicate with existing and potential customers
• articulate and quantify market problems
• create business cases and market requirements documents
• define standard procedures for product delivery and launch
• support the creation of collateral and sales enablement tools
• train the sales teams on the product

Within the EdTech market the truth is: if you want better products in the future, and for the product management team to be held accountable at organisational level, then it must be represented at Board level in its own right.

As a consultant I spend a lot of time working with people and companies who know their product.  Most of the time they’ll know their market pretty well too – often having come from a teaching, education or tech background.  What they don’t know is how to brand, market and sell which is totally understandable (and also the reason they’re speaking to me!).

When your background isn’t in the biz dev side of things, the idea of putting yourself out there and selling is scary.  Here are my top 3 people I would recommend anyone follow to get an idea for how to grow your business.  They’re a great introduction into the world of sales and marketing and you’ll hopefully see it’s not that scary after all  😊

1.  Andrew and Pete

If having an amazing online and social media presence sounds terrifying then these guys are a great place to start.  Their videos are awesome!  http://www.andrewandpete.com/

2.  Ian Brodie

Ian’s advice on winning clients is practical and doable – none of your cheesy, chest-thumping, sales pitch stuff (I’ve just signed up to his 30-minute marketing plan checklist for my summer holiday reading)  https://www.ianbrodie.com/

3. Janet Murray

If you feel like PR is something only other people can do then you must take a look at Janet’s stuff.  There’s a lot of great info on how to get yourself featured all over the place without needing to be personal friends with journalists.  https://www.janetmurray.co.uk/