D2L served as my first major industry experience working with education technology.
Where I started:
- I started as a business development representative to learn the environment and take an opportunity to join D2L
- I had notable success selling to some of the biggest and most innovate/prestigious schools with innovative and focused outbound sales efforts
- I was able to win a “BDR Rockstar” award both for sales statistics and innovation/cultural success
Education Partnerships and Integrations as a product:
- Sales was a great place to start but my mind focused on how we could build something better, better technology can sell itself
- I joined a newly formed partners team dealing with the entire end-to-end experience for integration partners
- These partners ranged from innovative startups like CodeGrade to major industry players such as Zoom and McsGraw Hill
- I treated this program as it’s own product offering from how it was marketed, to how it was delivered
- We succeeded in exponentially increasing our new partnerships to the point we needed to expand our team to manage them
- Marketing
- Working with our team to build a full marketing strategy for partnerships allowed us to become a value center
- Strategically tiered partnership packages allowed us to cater to a diverse group of partners with obvious value
- Iterating and evolving the holistic marketing approach from ads, to events, website, and beyond kept us competitive
- Demo & Onboarding
- I managed all demos and onboarding manually at the start but saw opportunity to operationalize this for repeatability
- I build a well-documented and semi-automated process to quickly allow partners to self-service reducing our costs
- The time opportunity generated from automation and process allowed us to evolve all of our resources to truly suit the needs of both our long-term and our brand new partners equally
- This included a pre-configured many-to-one demo/dev/learning environment with valuable populated data, quickly deployable custom demo/dev/learning environments for higher-tier partners, and many custom resources
- Resources & Support
- Marketing webpages
- Marketing advertisement campaigns
- Integrations sales resources to start and win more deals from our interoperability value
- Focused developer resources for integrators
- Multiple tiers of demo/dev/learning environments from many-to-one to custom site deployments
- A comprehensive self-starter hands-off package
- A detailed comprehensive package and support offering for large partners
- More I am not authorized to list
- Outcomes
- Ability to onboard more clients per-week with less resources per client
- Notable reductions in support ticket volume
- Increased usage of demo/dev/learning environments
- Higher NPS from partner clients
- Higher net-revenues for general sales by increasing the value of our integrations ability and suite
- A repeatable process that could be maintained with a small number of resources
Moving On:
- Working closely with product teams and product managers inspired me to pursue Product Management
- With limited opportunities internally I moved on to a local opportunity with Shinydocs Inc.
- Read more in my other blog posts to see how the story unfolds!
Jesse Dennis Sheather 