From Product to Buyer Personalization: Alignment Across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Drives 23% Revenue Growth at SchoolStatus

Engagement Highlights

• Supported 23% year-over-year growth from $40M+ revenue base
• Invested ~$125k to secure ~ $3M in 2023 incremental sales revenue
• Developed buyer personalization playbooks to foster positioning alignment across the marketing, sales. revenue enablement, and customer success teams
• Developed sales and customer success playbooks to move from product-driven conversations to conversations focused on buyer value
• Integrated 7 Distinct GTM teams and trained 40 Sales & CS members through targeted team training and individual skills coaching 

Problem

SchoolStatus faced a significant challenge after completing four acquisitions (Operoo, TeachBoost, Smore, SI&A). Suddenly, SchoolStatus went from a small technology company with a few million dollars in revenue to a high-growth company with tens of millions in revenue and a nationwide footprint. It went from a niche player with a single solution provider to an important company in the K12 education market with broad and deep product capabilities.  

A key challenge was having different positioning frameworks across five teams. The new School Status had almost 50 different standalone product capabilities and the new set of capabilities connected the SchoolStatus team to dozens of different buyers and offices — from teachers and principals to offices including Communications, Curriculum, Educational Services, Student and Family Services, and Professional Development, as well as Assistant Superintendents and Superintendents.    

A second key challenge was the lack of a repeatable selling system for the sales team and lack of scalable approach to managing renewal and expansion business on the customer success team training side. The combined companies had seven different sales and customer success teams that needed to be combined, as well as many varied and disparate marketing activities.

Solution

Winalytics partnered with SchoolStatus over 15 months to address these challenges. The partnership was sponsored by SchoolStatus’ Chief Revenue Office, and involved work with the CEO, Chief Marketing Officer, SVP of Sales, VP of Customer Success, and their teams.

A key guiding principle for the partnership was the recognition of the value not just from SchoolStatus’ product or services, but from the outcomes their products or services created individually for its buyers. And, the related agreement that you will never really know what outcomes your buyers and customers value unless you ask them.  

The focus: 

• Creating a positioning framework with shared value propositions and value stories by goal and persona.
• Developing customer stories with trusted superintendent partners to validate value propositions.
• Training the entire Sales and Customer Success field team.
• Development of a skills coaching framework with front-line sales leadership.

Results

The results of the engagement were impressive:

• 23% YoY Growth: Despite team transitions, SchoolStatus achieved a robust 23% year-over-year growth.
• 7 Distinct GTM Teams Integrated: Winalytics helped SchoolStatus successfully integrate seven distinct go-to-market teams, aligning them for cohesive operations.
• 40 Sales & CS Members Trained: The entire sales and customer success field team underwent training, enhancing their skills and alignment within the new framework.

Phil Charland, Chief Revenue Officer of SchoolStatus, recognized the pivotal role a unified playbook would play in aligning the company’s disparate teams. He emphasized, “Without having a common playbook, it was going to take us a long time to figure out how to unify the teams. We were pretty fragmented in our messaging, and really felt it was inhibiting overall understanding for both customer success and sales in terms of driving cross-sell and expansion growth for our customers.”

Phil underscores the significance of integrating efforts across departments and commends Winalytics for its proactive approach in facilitating alignment. “One of the things that I am probably most pleased with our engagement with Winalytics is that it proactively helped me drive better alignment across all of our go-to-market functions, including our work with the CEO.”

Reflecting on the tangible results, Phil says: “We’ve had really solid sales performance this year, have delivered double-digit growth, I would estimate, from the investment and just overall engagement from Winalytics, roughly a $2 to $3 million kind of impact on just overall kind of top line performance this year.”

Acknowledging Winalytics’ hands-on approach, Phil notes: “Winalytics did great work with our teams around stepping through the elements of the playbook and training on various aspects of the sales process. And they did a really good job making sure that the insights from the team were always shared with our sales leadership team.”