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Zoe Marshall:
Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI. They were spending the majority of their time on anything that related to an opportunity where they could close out revenue.

Jon Johnson:
So growth, yeah.

Zoe Marshall:
It was account growth and I couldn’t fault them for that in that they have a huge revenue target to hit and they’re rewarded on that, right? So, of course, that’s going to take their focus. And there’s there’s a lot to work on there too.

Josh Schachter:
But what was what was what was, what was the loss? And and and they’re spending so much time on the growth part of things, which makes sense because that’s where the incentives are. Sure. What was the impact of, I don’t wanna use the word neglect, but spending less time?

Zoe Marshall:
No. You’ve used it. You’ve used it.

Josh Schachter:
I’ve used it. I don’t wanna use it, but I’ve used it. Yeah. What was the impact of that though, the neglect on the

Zoe Marshall:
CS part?

Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. I am Josh Schacter, CEO founder of UpdateAI, here with John, mister John Johnson, my cohost, Extraordinaire. John?

Jon Johnson:
The one and only. Actually, not not the one and only. I, I just went to the DMV and they had to scroll through 29 pages of John Johnson’s to make sure that I didn’t have any outstanding warrants before they could give me a new driver’s license. And he made a lot of comments.

Josh Schachter:
Do you have any outstanding warrants? Do you have any outstanding warrants, John?

Jon Johnson:
Well, let’s just say, you know, I didn’t confirm or deny which John he was searching for. Yeah. I feel like so. It’s pretty fun. Like, I’m on page 27 and it’s like John Johnson, John Johnson, John Johnson. Well, I guess I thought I was unique, but

Josh Schachter:
Well, Christy bailed on it. So it’s so it’s you and I that are are babysitting the house here. On Presidents’ Day on Presidents’ Day, we’re filming this movie.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I, I’ve been sitting on my couch all day long playing playing Zelda, The Legend of Zelda Link’s Awakening, for the last 6 hours. I dropped my kids off and I said, you know what? I don’t want to do anything today. And then I got this little notification that says, Podcast in 10 minutes. And I said, Shit, I should put on some pants.

Zoe Marshall:
I’m pleased that you did. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
Well, you, nobody can tell, right? Because here we go. This is a topic, is whether or not John’s wearing pants. That’s been like a it’s a regular thing.

Josh Schachter:
It is. It is. It is. And so Zoe, now is our time to introduce you. I would like to introduce to everybody listening out there to Zoe Marshall. Zoe is the head of account management at Arbor Education, has a rich background in account management, but also in education. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about that. Zoe.

Josh Schachter:
Oh, so, Zoe, by the way, in honor of president’s day, you know, in the United States, we decided to interview somebody based in London. So, Zoe, welcome to the show.

Jon Johnson:
Really gonna give us your perspective.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. In fact, it was news to me that it’s president’s day. Sorry about that.

Josh Schachter:
That’s right. Zoe, the first question we like to ask everybody, especially on president’s day is who are you rooting for, Biden or Trump? No. I’m just joking. We’re not gonna go there.

Jon Johnson:
That’s

Josh Schachter:
another podcast. That’s another podcast.

Jon Johnson:
There’s plenty of podcasts about that, to be honest.

Josh Schachter:
Yes. That’s true. That’s true.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I do wanna take a moment actually. Last week, we had, Jess Cohen on our show. She was our guest. And Jess is UpdateAI’s new head of customer success and community and basically helping to shepherd everything now in in my company because she’s amazing and so structured, and and I love her. I wanna give a little shout out to Jess because she texted me a couple hours ago that her dog, Fry, passed away last night.

Jon Johnson:
Oh.

Josh Schachter:
And, yeah, you know, he was older, but not that old, so it, you know, it was something that I think was mostly unexpected, and it’s really unfortunate. We’re kind of a dog family here at UpdateAI. Like, most of our team have dogs. I’ve got my puppy that everybody’s well aware of. And so my heart goes out to Jess, and her husband and their other dog, who is out of the same litter as Fry, to the whole family. So I just wanted to kinda share that word of condolence. With that said, let’s get into it. The transition of the century.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. The transition of the century. Let’s put Zoe on the hot seat. John, you wanna kick it off or should I?

Jon Johnson:
I mean so I mean, 1st and foremost, what I always love to know, how do you define account management? That’s that’s like the old again, like, coming I’ve been in CS for 12 years. And before CS, it was always account management or these other kind of titles. And I always love it’s it’s a little bit of a flashback, some nostalgia. So that I mean, that’s kinda where my brain has kind of been sitting since I got all of the prep work on you is is, you know, let’s hear a little bit about what Arbor education is, obviously. And then I I’d love to hear kinda what your your breakdown of account management looks like.

Zoe Marshall:
Okay. I’ll go with the the Arbor education bit first and you can learn a bit about that and then try and answer the $1,000,000 question, which is what is account management? So, Arbor Education, we are an edtech company, for a piece of software for schools, at the moment in England, and branching out into the rest of the UK. We have predominantly a tool for schools to use, and multi academy trusts and local authorities to use that allows them to have, insight and and analytics of their, of their student, their staff, their parent data, allows a a school or or a multi academy trust. I don’t I don’t know if that makes any sense to you, by the way, a multi academy trust, but,

Josh Schachter:
you know academy trust? Yeah. Makes zero sense to me.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. I’m gonna go to Wikipedia halfway through this podcast. No, I love it.

Josh Schachter:
Also, John was curious why you said you’re in England, but you’re expanding beyond the UK. Aren’t they the same thing?

Jon Johnson:
Not anymore.

Zoe Marshall:
England is part of the United Kingdom, right?

Jon Johnson:
So- Oh,

Josh Schachter:
that’s right, that’s right.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah, yeah. I live Scotland, Wales. I’ll draw a little math after this, right?

Jon Johnson:
Thank you.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah, it’s not a problem. I guess in your head England, UK is just London, right?

Jon Johnson:
That’s it, right?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s fine. There’s a little bit more to it, but not a lot really. In terms of size and population, very small still. So, yeah, we we have this this piece of software that allows schools to really, understand what’s going on, in their school, and then multi academy trust. So, a multi academy trust is a group of schools with a central body, run often by a c suite, operating much more like a business would, and allows that central team to have, again, that that insight, and analysis on what’s happening across our schools. And, so our our platform will allow them to to do that and then they can make more strategic decisions on, you know, deploying resource, and deploying staffing, looking at how their pupils are achieving, looking at attendance statistics, for example. There’s also, we have toolings, we have an app for parents to use to book their child onto a trip, make payments for something, get their child’s report, all those kinds of things through through the app.

Zoe Marshall:
And so again, from a central level, for a central team, they can have that that, strategy and that drive to increase parental engagement with them and their school students, and ultimately we’re here to kind of try and boost student outcomes, so, can we save everyone time, can we make things slicker, and can we give everybody, data at their fingertips?

Josh Schachter:
So you’re helping schools run, basically.

Zoe Marshall:
Right. Exactly. And and I think, when I chatted to some of your colleagues, I was explaining to them, that the tool we have is a management information system. The the easiest way to describe that is like a CRM tool for for a school and for a trust. It’s there. Like, it it’s what glues them together. It’s the the central piece of data, and, yeah, plus plus a whole heap more. Does that make sense?

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. It makes total sense. You you joined, Arbor Education about 5 years ago.

Zoe Marshall:
Yep.

Josh Schachter:
Was that your first job outside of education?

Zoe Marshall:
Yes. Yeah. So, I yeah. Do you want me to give a bit of a rundown as to

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. Because, I mean, there’s so many, like, we hear it all the time and I think for good reason, that a lot of people are trying to get into customer success or have been successful in CS, or adjacent in this case of account management, have a background in education. And so I’d love to make more vivid your experience coming from education into the the business industry?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. Of course. So, I, I studied education at university, and qualified to teach at the same time, left university and I actually headed over to Germany and taught at an international school out there for a year which kind of, if I’m honest, just felt like more of a fun adventure kind of thing to do, when you’re 21 and, do you want to just go back home and settle down into a job? I still kind of had itchy feet and wanted to do something more exciting, so I did that. And then I came back home and took up a couple of teaching posts back to back, teaching primary school, enjoyed that but was kind of always looking for like a little bit of something else. I really love learning, I really like being challenged. So yeah, love sort of, that fast pace and learning and really, was kind of lacking that in a in a school environment. So challenged myself a a little bit, went and did a master’s degree while I was teaching, full time. That was that was kinda good fun, and a good challenge.

Zoe Marshall:
My husband was away studying for something else at the same time, kind of fitted in. And and then I, took on more responsibility in school when when I’d done that. And, actually, eventually, I ended up going to work for the local authority, and for a big local authority, not far from where I lived and, and took an advisory role there. So the role was very much about, is really focused on, special needs and children with with various, cognitive difficulties and advising schools on kind of best practice, doing assessments, making referrals, and, doing kind of a whole school training and a whole plethora of things that, that went on. One of the problems, well, 2 problems for me there in my love of learning, love of pace, excitement that I was kind of working for this quite, archaic feeling system in a local authority. So that was a little bit painful for me. But the big thing that really drove me to the career that I’m in now was that one of the questions that I asked every school, every site that I walked into when, in short, they’d said to me, help, I don’t know what to do with this group of children. They’re not learning.

Zoe Marshall:
You know, what do we do next? The first thing that I always asked was, well, tell me what they can do. And 99 times out of a 100, the person I asked, whether that was the head teacher, the special needs coordinator, the class teacher, whoever it was, they’d say to me, well, they can’t do x and they can’t do y and they can’t do z. And I said, well, of course. Right. I know that they’re struggling with things, but if you don’t know what they can do, how do you know where to begin? And it felt kinda sad because to me, that was the basics was like bread and butter of of teaching. But, what became really apparent was that, actually, teachers really struggled to just get hold of that data, and they they were so, their days are such a whirlwind of so much stuff to juggle. They didn’t have data easily accessible. They didn’t have systems that were really simple to use, kinda getting blindsided by a load of things.

Zoe Marshall:
And when something or a child didn’t fall into the mould that they had prepared their day, their month, or their year for, They kinda didn’t know what to do. And so, I kind of, you know, began this passion for, for for data, for helping people, to succeed. And that that success piece is always running through everything and found a job at Arbor, and there we go.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. I mean so I have, I’ve got kids, and we just left, California. And the California education system sounded very similar to kinda what you’re talking about is, you know, the not every kid can be treated the same. Right? You but also I love what you said about, like, identifying what they can do. What are they good at? Right? And that’s that’s kinda like the heart of of technology and what data is really good at. And and I don’t necessarily hear, like, that marriage too often. It’s like, oh, I’m an educator, so I wanna go teach people how to do x, y, or zed. Right? Instead, like, your perspective is is so intriguing to say, well, let’s start with what we do know and how do we make sure that everybody knows the same things.

Jon Johnson:
Right? It’s just the basic of customer success is is starting with a success venture. Right? And and it’s funny how we see I see so many teachers coming into the market because of these reasons, and they don’t know how to identify those things. They don’t know how to, like, say, oh, like, I build a lesson plan, so I can build the success plan or whatever that analog is. Right? But at the same time, it’s starting with just do one thing well. Find that one thing, and then move to the next thing, and on and on and on. Yeah. And it’s so funny when I you know, being in like, working with, my kids who are in school, and they’re getting frustrated with, like, well, we’ve got 19 apps and this I gotta check the scores over here, and I’ve gotta check the emails over here, and and then it goes to a text, and it’s just so convoluted, and it should be so simple. Yep.

Jon Johnson:
Definitely. How like, what is your thought process? We’ll get into, like, let’s dig into kind of the account management side and and how you, like, manage, like, your customers and your Mhmm. Your bases, you know, and and things like that. How do you think through this arc really archaic? I I’m only speaking on America’s behalf, but our education system is fucked, on every level, all the way up and down on so many areas. Right? And I hope that yours is better. But you’re walking into kind of a landmine. This is something that’s so special and so important for so many people

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
And it’s in the dark ages. So how do you bring light with technology and education and the things that you’re passionate about?

Zoe Marshall:
It’s a really good question. I think we see both the wonderful successes of that and feel the pain of that daily here. And, you know, a lot of the time, not every time, but a lot of the time, we’re potentially working with people who can be quite resistant to change. So, right, change management and the whole preparation for change management when implementing any piece of software actually is always such an important piece, right? It’s so important here. And, you we we do sometimes struggle with people not necessarily wanting to engage. Like, we you know, it’s because of the sector that we’re in, but this happens across any subscription service. Right? Like, somebody somewhere where you work says that you’ve got you know, it’s a director. Right? You have to install this thing, and you’ve got to use it.

Zoe Marshall:
You have to buy into it. You and and people either do or don’t. So I think whilst it’s whilst it’s niche, it’s also not. You know? The the problem exists across SaaS.

Josh Schachter:
But it but it is more pronounced. Right? It’s like like, if you try to sell a sales enablement tool to a to a sales team, like, it’s change management. So, sure, they have to wrap their heads around this new product

Jon Johnson:
Sure.

Josh Schachter:
Or platform, but they’re incentivized to do it. And you’re going to a bunch of educators who are they’re just trying to go from, you know, their their 1st homeroom class to the last class of the day and and keep alive.

Zoe Marshall:
Just make it.

Josh Schachter:
You just make it through and then work on their lesson plan for the day and go decompress. Right? Like so what are some of the things that you guys do given that it is more difficult to shepherd people through that change?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. Good question. Again, I mean, we very much have to really, push the the benefits of the product, make sure that, the consumers of the product are really going to understand what it is, really understand, why they would even need to engage with it, never mind want to, and and if we can hit them with that that need. Now, I guess for for most schools, they’re already using a system like this. They’re just using a a much more archaic one, and they’re using a server based system in the most part. So we’re we’re offering them a cloud based solution. So that that initial sell actually in itself is is fine because here’s a cloud based solution to do all the things that you’re trying to do and and better. They know that that bit’s better, but really having to sell with a really solid story is really important, right, so they can understand.

Zoe Marshall:
So if we can give them a a story around you know, paint a picture of a child and how, you know, analyzing behavior on, attendance, and behavior has allowed us to find a passion that that child is persistently absent on a Tuesday morning, and, well, actually, x parent picks them up on a Monday evening, or x person teaches them on that first lesson. What happens in there? Oh, there’s been a pattern of, you know, behavior incidents in the past. And and you kind of have the, again, the data there to piece those stories together. So if we can if we can sell based on the stories and, because actually the people that work in schools are there because they they want the best for the pupils. So right. So if we can tailor those stories around how can this improve the outcomes for your pupils and make your life easier at the same time? Right? So you’ve kind of got, then then actually we we tend tend to be onto onto a winner. And we really you know, everybody here really believes in the product. We really believe in what we do, and our product team already invested in in continuous improvement.

Zoe Marshall:
So I think, you know, you guys know that feeling of when you’re really passionate about something, that that sell becomes much easier as well because you can talk about it forever. And, so I I think that that really helps that, painting that picture and telling that.

Josh Schachter:
So how are you guys painting the picture? Like like, actually, like, the the mechanics of it. Are are you and and measuring who’s, you know, who’s really engaged and and who’s not. What is your protocol for that? Are you talking about onboarding sessions or hosting Yeah. Flyers on the bulletin board in the school classrooms. Like, what’s this what’s the tactics?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. That that really, you know, that level of engagement can really vary. We’ve been on quite a journey here with, trying to ensure that our our customers engage, and we’ve we’ve actually just, in the last week, completely relaunched our whole, customer education offering.

Josh Schachter:
Amazing.

Zoe Marshall:
We have a really comprehensive customer education offering, head heads up by my colleague, Claire, and, what what she’s put together is, a really excellent and extensive suite of online learning materials, that that customer can access, at home.

Jon Johnson:
On demand, you’re saying. Right?

Zoe Marshall:
So we’ve got on demand learning, and we have a really, excellent, I I would say world class onboarding service here. Especially we we have a brilliant digital onboarding service, so, you know, led by a bunch of journeys that we’ve built in Gainsight and refined and refined and refined that ensures that the customer is being, prompted continuously. They know where to go for these materials. And during the onboarding, they know what to do at at what points, so things are kind of broken down. I think sometimes the danger of online learning materials, and if if I think about my experiences with other platforms that we use here, it can be that you’re quite, you know, overwhelmed. Mhmm. You know, if you if you log into an x learning platform for big sales software, for example, like, here’s all the hundreds of courses you could do. Where where do I begin other than other than video 1? You know? So, we really try and break that down, guide guide the customer through their kind of here’s your here’s the things you need to do when you’re beginning on on the platform, etcetera.

Zoe Marshall:
So and then we can measure all that in the back end too and and share that with the customer.

Josh Schachter:
John, I just realized I remembered now why Christie, skipped this episode.

Jon Johnson:
Why is that? Gainsight? Yeah. Because it’s always

Josh Schachter:
a Gainsight customer. She’s not a client success. That’s why Man. She was boycotting us this whole time.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. No. I, you know, I I love this and I again, like, I just really love this kind of it’s an it it it seems like it’s a niche, industry, but it’s it’s pervasive around the entire world. Education is huge. Right?

Zoe Marshall:
Sure.

Jon Johnson:
And and those are the ones that are, like, kind of those moments of, like, yeah, we could this is, like, a digital transformation that we’re in. Yeah. So when you have what does account management, what is the umbrella under?

Josh Schachter:
Again, he wants to know what is account management.

Zoe Marshall:
I mean, I have a question. I know.

Jon Johnson:
I know. I just wanna know what who who should what the reporting structure is. Like, do you have onboarding managers? Do you have CSMs? Do you have sales? Like, what does your pod look like? Yeah. What is your pod?

Zoe Marshall:
Good question. And then I just talked to that before. So what’s in my pod? So at the moment, I have a team of account managers, who are split in into actually, this is more complicated, but I I work alongside a colleague who manages our enterprise and key account managers. I I manage our our scale team, if you like. So that’s a group of 8 people, 2 team leads in there, and they manage the majority, so around 70% of our accounts, shared together, shared target, shared reward for the team as well. There’s a there’s a little extra bit to my pod that’s about partner success and, measuring the success of, our schools who take their, help desk support, their technical support from, from other partner companies, that that we have agreements with. And I’ll go into this in a little bit more detail shortly, but we’re just in the process of launching a discrete CS team. So I just wanted to

Josh Schachter:
doesn’t want to admit it. She doesn’t want to admit that she’s putting c CS together there.

Jon Johnson:
Well, discreet so this is a bad day, I assume. Right?

Zoe Marshall:
So yeah. And, actually, you were asking at the start, like, what does account management mean? What does that include for us? Well, for as long as I’ve been here, it’s been completely hybrid jobs. So it it’s been commercial, account growth, and customer success. And, you know, no spoilers, but that’s really hard to do for a long time.

Jon Johnson:
Yes.

Zoe Marshall:
It’s kind of fine. You know, when I joined, we had a couple of 100 accounts. We had 2 or 3 account managers. Fine. We’re now in a in a world where, you know, we have 6,000 plus accounts. We we’ve got, like, 8, you know, 18 or so in the account management team, and we’ve got really varying, segments, varying sizes of customers, and it’s really hard to do. And

Josh Schachter:
What’s the what’s what’s the hardest what are the hardest parts of what are the most challenging parts of that so as you grew?

Zoe Marshall:
So I think we we made a really concerted effort to split the team out into that kind of enterprise level and, and and the scale team. So so I’ve gone off on a on a real focus on digital, and, sort of, like, desk based pooled account management model, and hopefully the CS bit. But do you know what? Being able to manage both of them at the same time from the same people has proved really, really challenging. And what I ended up doing, in around December time, I sort of took a did, like, a point in time analysis of how the team was spending their time. So I I sat with a variety of my account managers for several hours at a time and really just looked what they were doing, and how they were utilising their time. I sort of done that very top level. They work out of Zendesk. I can see what their, you know, what their, efficiency’s like, their engagement, their, you know, their email quality, for example, all those things, their touch rate, whether they’re being efficient and using macros, all those kind of things.

Zoe Marshall:
But, actually, knowing what they’re doing day to day, I really couldn’t get a handle on. So I did that and break that down, and what was really obvious, no matter who I sat with, was they were spending the majority of their time on anything that related to an opportunity where they could close out revenue.

Jon Johnson:
So growth Yeah.

Zoe Marshall:
It was account growth, and I couldn’t fault them for that in that they have a huge revenue target to hit, and they’re rewarded on that. Right? So, of course, that’s going to take their focus, and there’s there’s a lot to work on there too. So, they organically have a lot to work on as as well as as trying to find some white space, but mostly organically. So that was most of their time, plus a bunch of admin things and process things. That have also to your question before, Josh, like, what’s been hard as you, you know, as you’ve grown? Process systems, none of the surprising things there. But what we’ve missed is this

Josh Schachter:
What was the loss? And and and they’re spending so much time on the growth part of things, which makes sense because that’s where the incentives are. Sure. What was the impact of, I don’t wanna use the word neglect, but spending less time

Zoe Marshall:
on that. You’ve used it.

Josh Schachter:
I’ve used it. Yeah. I don’t wanna use it, but I’ve used it. Yeah. What was the impact of that though, the neglect on the CS part?

Zoe Marshall:
The neglect on the CS part is and as an aside, we’re in a lucky world where churn has been really low here, but I know it’s not going to, maintain as as low as it’s been, and we can’t get complacent on that. So I think we’re we’re more concerned about what the effect will be and what the impact will be longer term. We’re starting to see, though, like, those sort of, levels of customer risks increasing and that risk management feeling very reactive, you know, sometimes just being completely sideswiped by customer sales notice, and we just really didn’t see that coming. And we really just weren’t spending enough time on looking at customer health, spotting those trends, and being proactive. And, you know, we we kind of we sort of know the we know the journey that our customers go on, you know, particular types of our customers, for example, a few months in, will fall deeply into a pit of despair. You know? This is awful. I’ve got so much to learn. I’ve got no time to do it.

Zoe Marshall:
This is horrible. And then they, you know, they’re gonna claw their way back out of it within their 1st year on Arbor. And, actually, we we really could be doing so much in that time, you know, and at scale too. Right? You know? So we’ve got a great community platform that we’ve we’ve launched in in the last few months. We’ve got this community education customer education programme, but we just didn’t have the team of people sitting behind it to say, you know what? No. This always happens. Let’s build a webinar programme, free content that can go and catch those people, and kind of save them, from getting to the point where they become a risk that we’re not aware of happening. Let’s utilise more of that product usage and that health data, within Gainsight to really work proactively.

Zoe Marshall:
So what we’re trying to do now is, having appointed to 2 technical CSMs internally, You know the product really well. They start in a couple of months’ time. I really want to work with them, probably before they’re really in post action to identify groups of customers that we’re going to focus on, going to target, and and really hopefully see, see some some big impact for some work we can do, again, hopefully at scale too.

Josh Schachter:
Great.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. No worries. So I don’t know if I ever answered your first question. No.

Jon Johnson:
You did. No. No. And and I don’t mean, like, I didn’t mean, like, the definition of account management, Josh. I meant the, you you know, head of account management, those titles mean so many things. Right? And the the heart of what you’re talking about is the same the same kind of pillars that everybody focus on. It’s retention. It’s growth.

Jon Johnson:
And Yeah. You know, it’s it’s, health. Right? So we’re looking at these things. I guess, looking forward for this year, you’re talking about, expanding outside of your regions into kinda new opportunities. How do you see or, I guess, what what’s one of the challenges that you’re you’re really trying to focus on from the scale standpoint, going into, you know, kind of the future of the the rest of this year?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. That it’s a really great question, because it’s on my mind a lot.

Josh Schachter:
Thank you.

Zoe Marshall:
Again you’re welcome. Again

Jon Johnson:
of affirmation is great for me.

Josh Schachter:
So we’re doing it. Okay? 50 episodes, John, for somebody to say that.

Jon Johnson:
Somebody to say it

Zoe Marshall:
for good yeah. Okay. Well, well, I’ll throw 1 I’m sure I’ll throw 1 more before we finish. Big challenges for us are kind of the unknown, right? And if we look at potentially branching into, for example, whales. You know, really basic top level, they speak a different language there. You know, they use different assessment systems. They use different you know, they they might track their pupils differently. They’ll have different requirements.

Zoe Marshall:
So this this, like, really, fundamental product level things that we’ve obviously got to prepare for, the product team are thinking about, thinking about then the customer, you know, the onboarding journey obviously would need adapting. We’ve got things like help center content, our our whole help desk team, like, how, you know, how does all of that stuff look? And then within my team, what does it even mean to account manage customers somewhere else? And and for me, the bigger challenge is actually not necessarily branching out into a different region or a different country. The challenge that I’m thinking about as the year unfolds is, our portfolio is growing. And so how do we go about managing these different, businesses within our portfolio these different products, sorry, within our portfolio? And what does that mean for my team? You know, do do my team manage all of that and focus on cross sell? Do we want to and we’ve not nailed we’ve not nailed down that whole structure operationally at all. So that that’s a bigger thing for me is, you know, if most of our if all of our customers run product a, do we also wanna focus in my team on getting them to use product b, c, and c? And how do we go about doing that? And do my team become more and more commercial commercial and focused on selling those products, or do my team focus just on renewing the product they’ve got, selling a few more services around it, doing both of those things? We’ve got quite a lot of mapping out to do that.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And Zoe, you’re you’re also now running the CS team within that has been carved out from the account management team. Is that am I getting that correct?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. So they they start in a couple of months. So I’ve appointed them. They start in April.

Jon Johnson:
I love that you called them discrete CS. Yes. And and I wanna I wanna hear just I love it. And I have, like, an idea, like, an intuition to where you’re going with this, but I would love to hear I mean, even just using that term, like, how did you prepare these folks to come in? And is it are you following traditional CS models? Or is it, you know, kind of getting a little bit of a switch for for your market?

Josh Schachter:
Actually, hold on. It’s a time I I wanted because, John, she doesn’t have these guys in place for another, excuse me, these guys and guys and gals, these these people in place for another 2 months. So I’m actually curious, like, what are you doing to prep for bringing them in? Similar question to John, but, like, how are

Jon Johnson:
you thinking about

Josh Schachter:
great question. Great. I think it was a fantastic question. But how are you thinking about, like, what what are the things on your plate right now, the questions that you have and, like, your your tasks to do, while you bring them in?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. The I need to think about, at at the moment, how to differentiate. So if I’m gonna be as bold as to say a internally and externally, the remit of these teams is really clear. So if you’re a customer, how do you know who to contact for what? What does that cadence look like? And, and, again, the internal part’s important too because I’ve kind of got a feeling if I don’t do that right, internally, people just get questions addressed to everybody within both teams. Right?

Josh Schachter:
Are you are you worried, Zoe, that that that it might, by virtue of bringing in, having a separate team, there’s all the merits of it, are you worried that account management may be, for lack of a better word, shielded from some of the customer interaction, not have as much of a of a pulse on the voice of the customer as it were?

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. I I think it’s a really important point, and I think that they will that their contact with the customer will reduce. And the point about really not being you know, having their finger on the pulse of that is is true. I think when when you asked about what’s on my plate to prepare, one of the other things is about understanding the cadence of how the 2 teams will have to interact really effectively because if a, you know, if a key focus for the account management team is about renewals and ensuring our current customer base renews their contract with us, they’re gonna have to absolutely understand the current health of that customer and what’s happened with them. So I haven’t quite mapped that out, but we’ve got to really nail that down really effectively. At the moment, a lot of the team are trying to have really regular reviews, business reviews with customers. In account management, that that over time will steadily start to reduce, and they’ll likely have an annual review of the customer where they focus on renewal, account growth, etcetera. And the customer success managers will focus on usage adoption, health, and ensuring, of course, with agreed customer outcomes and achieving those outcomes.

Zoe Marshall:
So I think you’re right, the contact with the customer will likely reduce. Whether they would be worried about that, I’m not sure. I think they really feel like they’re spinning a lot of plates at the moment, so I don’t think they they or some of them may be worried about it and I think there’s probably going to be a bit of a natural split in their skill set as well as the 2 teams sort of embed and and form. But, yeah, the the the key piece is about how those 2 teams interact for me.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. When you even said it you know, when you did your listening sessions with your team, you found that most of them were focusing on the growth, and the the AMs were sitting in this role that that is their natural alignment. And to to the thing that you said at the very beginning of this episode is, like, what are you good at? What are you doing really, really well? And then let’s start building out processes and segments that support that so that the AMs can focus on Yeah. This part of the business. But then this thing that’s kind of not had the attention that maybe it’s needed or, you know, has been fine, but could be better. Mhmm. Let’s bring somebody else in.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. For sure.

Jon Johnson:
I love that. Well, we can get it to, like, you know, macro macroeconomic, you know, European labor party, Kia Starmer policy, discussions if you’d like.

Josh Schachter:
Brexit or no Brexit?

Jon Johnson:
Brexit or no. Yeah. What does post Brexit, London look like in a in a labor led, education system? Kidding.

Josh Schachter:
You don’t

Zoe Marshall:
have to answer that. Please don’t. I I I could, but I won’t. Yep.

Jon Johnson:
That’s a whole another podcast.

Zoe Marshall:
Right. It’s a a whole other podcast for sure. Right?

Jon Johnson:
Yeah. Where do you go the like, where do you go to learn this type of stuff when it comes to your organizational? Like, who are you listening to? Who are you learning from outside of education? Is there somebody that you listen to or, you know, a framework that you’re following or that you’re kind of aspire to?

Josh Schachter:
John still really wants to understand what account management

Jon Johnson:
Oh my god. Josh.

Zoe Marshall:
Look. We can pick that up offline, Jodar. Yeah. I can’t promise to help you, though. So I, yeah, I I mentioned to you at the beginning, I love to learn, and I I’m really kind of, hung hungry to to do that. And I think probably sometimes to the annoyance of my colleagues, I absolutely love to network with people and Yeah. Learn from colleagues, and I’m very, very keen to do that outside of education and outside of EdTech. Mhmm.

Zoe Marshall:
Otherwise, you become really siloed and really blanketed in in your view. So, you know, yes, internally I have excellent colleagues to learn from and in fact I feel really lucky that the, the group of of managers within our customer team that I work with, and and my boss that I work with, I I learn loads from all the time. They’re really capable bunch of people. So that’s excellent as, like, a really good starting point for me. They’ve all come in from various different places and offer so much, so I I love that. And then I also you know, I’m a bit of, a sucker for, LinkedIn and, you know, following various people on LinkedIn, reading what, what they’ve got to post about regularly, listening to podcasts. I find events like so, yeah, we’re Gainsight users here. We’ve been to Gainsight Pulse Conferences as a team for the last couple of years.

Zoe Marshall:
That’s an excellent event just to meet up with other people in the industry, and by industry, just SaaS as a whole.

Jon Johnson:
So you’re

Zoe Marshall:
kind of, getting a whole heap of knowledge and information and actually finding that, yes, schools, education, and that maybe the way we work sometimes can be niche. The majority of it is the same, that we’re trying to solve the same problem. We’re all, you know, hitting the same snags when we’re trying to scale. You know, engagement still hits the same issues. We’re still trying to engage with the right people at c suite. So, I really like that level of of engagement with varying different people sometimes for a bit of reassurance, but certainly to learn lots from, and then various books and things to pick up. So, yeah, as a game site user, Nick Messer has always got all sorts to post on. You know, follow people like Christie, on LinkedIn, and, of course, you, Josh, and your team, and and there’s there’s loads to read about all the time.

Zoe Marshall:
So, yeah, I’m the one constantly scrolling, screenshotting stuff, sharing it with my team. And, yeah, I I feel lucky to be, passionate and excited about it, so it doesn’t feel like hard work. You know, I’ll happily do that in an evening, because it’s interesting to me. So, and there’s loads out there now.

Jon Johnson:
There is. Yep. I love it. It’s good. Well, Josh, she answered all my questions.

Josh Schachter:
That’s that’s all I got. I mean, should we ask her some more questions about the UK and the geographical breakdown of of all the countries there?

Jon Johnson:
I I don’t need to hear that.

Zoe Marshall:
I also don’t know if I can answer that, so let’s not.

Josh Schachter:
I did learn last night, from my girlfriend, Jessica, that Ken Kensington Palace is where, William and Kate. Kate. Oh my god. That was a that was a I’m turning 40 in a month, and that was, like, that was the first sign of it right there.

Jon Johnson:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
I heard that that’s where William and Kate I learned that’s where William and Kate live. I wasn’t aware of that before, so we can

Zoe Marshall:
There you go, right?

Josh Schachter:
We’ll leave it on that note. That’d

Jon Johnson:
be great. That’s a great that’s such an impactful statement, Josh. I’m so glad that you shared that with us.

Josh Schachter:
And my ex girlfriends now we’re now we’re now is the real podcast. Now it begins. Her cousins were the flower girls in Harry and Meghan’s wedding. And if you look online at the wedding photo, the official wedding photo of the family afterwards. Everybody’s so dapper and regal. And then you have these 2 like beautiful, half Indian girls that are there. It’s like, you know, which one is not one you know, which one of these is not one of the other. Right? And, outside

Jon Johnson:
of the On your quest to be, like, what, 15th in line to

Josh Schachter:
to to raise this ticket? I keep on leveling closer and closer to to royalty. Yeah.

Jon Johnson:
No. That’s good.

Josh Schachter:
Okay. On that note, have a great have a great day, everybody. Thank you, Zoe. It was great hearing your story, and best of wishes to you in Arbor as you guys continue to grow.

Zoe Marshall:
Yeah. 2 different countries.