Most early-stage EdTech companies build in a familiar order: product first, sales next, marketing whenever there's budget left over. It's an understandable instinct in a sector where school budgets are tight and every dollar needs to prove itself quickly. But that order also means many companies spend years chasing the credibility they could have built from day one.

Karen Borchert, founder and CEO of Alpaca, a school culture and teacher retention platform, took the opposite approach. When she started the company four years ago, her first hire wasn't an engineer or a salesperson. It was a marketing leader, brought on the payroll before Borchert herself was. That decision has shaped how Alpaca has grown into a trusted name among school leaders with a small team and a category that didn't fit neatly into anyone's existing playbook.

The conversation traces how that early bet on marketing played out: a listening-first culture that shaped Alpaca's brand before it ever built software, a resource library that earned trust with principals long before any sales conversation began, and the hard lessons about when long-term brand building needs to give way to a more direct sales motion.

What You’ll Learn

• Why Alpaca's founder hired a marketing leader before she was even on payroll, and what that decision signaled about how the company planned to grow
• How a "listen first" approach, including days spent interviewing educators for what became a book-length story, shaped Alpaca's brand and messaging from the start
• Why earning trust with school principals meant giving away complete, standalone value, like a full resource library, instead of gated previews of the product
• How pairing every resource download with CRM data turned free content into a warm, ready-to-call sales pipeline
• Why Alpaca initially avoided conferences, and what changed once the team started booking meetings on the spot instead of just showing up with a booth
• How keeping marketing and sales leaders working side by side, rather than in separate lanes, kept both teams aligned as the company scaled

Why it Matters

Most EdTech marketers are told to prove ROI fast, which often means marketing gets treated as something to add later, once there's revenue to defend it. Alpaca's experience complicates that narrative. Every dollar the company put into brand and listening before it had a sales team became the foundation that made later sales conversations easier, not a distraction from them. For marketers working with tight budgets and skeptical school buyers, the lesson isn't to skip short-term tactics like conferences or paid outreach. It's to recognize that the trust those tactics eventually convert depends on credibility built well before anyone asks for a demo.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

• Alpaca Resources Hub
• Free downloadable resources created for school leaders and educators, including the staff recognition and culture-building tools referenced throughout the episode.
• The School Culture Report 2026
• Referenced during the discussion of educator wellbeing, leadership confidence, and school culture trends.
• The Secret to Sales & Marketing Success? A Shared Revenue Mindset
• The earlier LCG episode with Dan O'Reilly that Elana references when talking about sales and marketing working in lockstep.
• Little Wins Newsletter
• Alpaca's weekly newsletter for school leaders, the same low-lift, high-trust channel Karen described building from 200 subscribers to thousands.
• Alpaca
• Karen's company site.
• Karen Borchert on Substack (Team Letter)
• Karen's real-time chronicle of building Alpaca, referenced when Elana points listeners to it for more of her story.
• Karen Borchert on LinkedIn

Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. I'm your host, Elana Leone, and I have had the honor of working alongside education and ed tech brands for almost two decades. As a marketer, I've built lasting connections with educators, innovators, and leaders who are all shaping the future of learning. And I don't say that lightly. On this podcast, I bring those voices forward so you can learn from their experiences, shift your perspective, and put those things into action.

Well, hello, friends. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. And today we have a very special guest. And I know I say this a lot. I really do, I know. But this is such a cool story. It's like marketing is finally the bell of the ball. Sometimes we're like this, like, all right, it's nice to have marketing, but really sales is the person or whatever it may be, or engineering. But no, we are talking about marketing being.

fundamental to growth. Today I have Karen Borchert. She is the CEO of Alpaca, which is a school leadership platform that's fundamentally powered by Teacher Voice. You'll learn a lot more in the episode, but I want to tell you that I have wanted to have her on the show as soon as I heard that their marketing person was their very first employee they hired. They're a four-year-old company within that first year they

The marketing person was the first person on the payroll. And that just stopped me in my tracks. And I knew I had to tell the story, especially because four years later, they are killing it in marketing with a very small team. I won't spoil what everything we said in the conversation, but I will say that the number one theme resonating from their marketing strategy is value. And guess what I talk about? Value, value, value, value. How value

Like how they really honed in on creating as much value for their primary target audience as possible. And guess what? The way they do that is through constant listening. And I know this sounds like super simple and fundamental, but there are so many tips and tricks and high-level strategy in this episode you do not want to miss. So that is enough. I don't want to spoil it.

Enjoy the episode. I know I did. Everything that she mentions will also be in the show notes. Enjoy. Welcome to the show, Karen. I'm so excited to have you on. I have literally been wanting you to be on the show for a long time because what we're going to talk about is really exciting. So welcome.

Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Yeah. So many years ago I met your head of marketing, Kimberly Bailey, and she started talking to me about the journey that you all were on. And she said, you know, I was their first hire. And I said, What? That is amazing. Because usually in our industry we see first hires maybe being engineering or or potentially staying never marketing. And it always makes me mad as a marketer.

And when she said she was the first hire, I was like, that's an amazing story I want to tell on the show. So let's start there. You started alpaca about four years ago and to walk me through your decision of like, I need to I need somebody. I need specifically a head of marketing. Cause you didn't just hire an intern or a coordinator. You hired someone on a strategic level who grows your company. So I'll pass it to you to kind of talk about that. Cause that is.

Yep,

Could go.

Yeah.

to me and I think it will be for our audience as well. Many are trying to build their own companies or they might have robust marketing teams and understanding what the value of marketing is if you truly invest in it.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so it it's it might be helpful to to tell you that, you know, when we started the company, when we when I was starting the company, the vision for it originally was actually not as a technology company exactly. So the original idea for this company was kind of like stitch fix for teachers. So it was a physical good. It had a a platform that allowed parents and community members to pay for it via a kind of via a parent pay kind of platform. And

Part of that was, you know, so so what we were producing were these really beautiful, really professional looking, but really delightful care packages for educators. And so I was running a pilot and we I was running it out of my basement with like one or two schools and creating, you know, 30 to 50, you know, of these care packages every month.

And I'd worked with Kimberly in a former in a former job. We worked together at a company called Flywheel many, many years ago, where she was our staff photographer initially, and then she moved into a marketing role at Flywheel and then or like kind of a more full full cycle marketing role. And so she and I knew each other really, really well. And she knew what I was working on and what I was building and this little pilot that I was doing.

And she called me one day and she said, She said, Are you doing your packs tonight? And I said, Yeah, I'm gonna do them, you know, this evening after work. And she said, I'm coming over with my camera. And I said, You are? And she said, Yeah, friends don't let friends have bad product photography. And I said, Okay, pr all right, come on over. So she did, and she came over and she like set up this whole little thing and she photographed these little packs and she and they were beautiful. I mean, her she made them look and feel so professional and so stylized and so like so so real.

And so from that from then on, she kind of helped, she kind of was helping out and working on it and and doing things. So we were, you know, we were, we were working on it when we decided when I decided, okay, we're gonna go for this, you know, we're gonna raise some money, we're gonna start the company. And we were talking about, you know, who's the who's the first person on board. You know, we we needed people to help with like this actual, like the actual warehouse on packs and some things like that. So we had some like really specific, you know, kind of boots on the ground work that needed to be done.

But we also knew that if this thing was going to take off, it was going to take off because of growth and because of a great brand. And that was the only way. I mean, I knew I knew exactly one thing mattered when starting the company, which was growth and revenue in order to get it off the ground and to get real customers in the door. And I knew that that wasn't going to happen. You know, this was kind of a strange idea, like Stitch Fix for Teachers. Like that doesn't, it's not like we were competing with, you know, 10 other Stitch Fix for Teachers companies.

And so it was a really new and weird concept. So we knew it had to have a brand that stand stood out and we knew that it had to be focused on growth from the very beginning. And Kimberly had been there from from the very, very beginning, the pre-beginning in a lot of ways. And so I said, you know, why don't you come come be employee number one? And she literally was. She was on on the on the payroll before I was. So she's she's really and truly employee one.

That is awesome. Yeah. And I I love it organically. A lot of the times too, it's can I see myself growing a company with this person culturally? You know, can we really get into the hard times and the good times together and make it work? Roll up our sleeves. And I'm wondering, so Kimberly's officially on board.

What is her charge? Like what is her like first six months or first year look like? And I know you all do a lot of reflection too in your company too. Yeah. Now that you're four years old and you look back, you're like, well, why were we focused on that? But from the outsider perspective, you all have laid such a wonderful marketing foundation that sometimes I work with companies ten years down the road and they don't have half of what y'all have. So I'd be curious to hear of like, what was what was the marching orders in the beginning?

And then we'll get into what's the focus too afterwards.

Well, I would love to tell you that like I had a perfect vision for what the marketing plan was gonna be like or what the first, you know, three months, six months, you know, a year were gonna look like. But honestly, neither Kimberly nor I had any idea what it would look like. And so we said, you know, what we know is that we need to get this thing, we need to get schools to say yes, and then we need to get, you know, it was kind of a double-sided marketplace at the at the beginning. So we needed schools to say yes and we needed

Parents and community members to say yes also. And so the original charter was like, we gotta figure this out together. Like we're gonna figure out how we're gonna make this work. How are we gonna do this? What's it gonna look like? What's it gonna feel like? And to be honest, that's been in a lot of ways, that's been Kimberly's charter and like the marketing charter from you know, from from day one, and in some ways still is. You know, we are, as I mentioned, you know, we pivoted and and be sort of became this software company about a year and a half, two years after we started. So

In a lot of ways our company is four years old, in a lot of ways our company is two years old. But it was sort of the same thing when we when we started to make that shift over to software, was that you know, we said, okay, you know, we've built this brand, we've built this identity, this idea, this positioning, this website, all of these things on the premise of a company that does not make or sell software. And we're about to make and sell software. So we like, so how are we gonna figure this out now?

So the the question has always just been, okay, let's figure this out. And what's, you know, what's remarkable about about Kimberly and about and about the I think our partnership overall is, you know, Kimberly will is is a absolutely do whatever it takes person. So, you know, if she was if she needed to be, you know, in the warehouse making packs or, you know, photographing them or, you know, learning how to build out HubSpot for us or, you know, all of those things like

It whatever it took to get it done is what it took to get it done. And so and that's that's what we did. We just kind of jumped into that together. And you know, there were some things that I knew, you know, that like I don't do. Like I don't design things, I don't name things, I don't brand things that we have like strict rules about that. Kimberly is like, I do not decide what goes in the packs or raise money for the company. And we were like, okay, great. Anything else is fair game. So yeah, I'm not allowed to name things and she doesn't build the packs.

That's not so yeah. So

Core tenant of what you all really value is listening. And you know, it's built into your platform, obviously, because you're listening and gathering from your educators on the ground and saying, Hey, what is it really like to be in this classroom? What is it really like to be a part of this culture in the school? Yeah. But how is listening informed how you've been able to tweak, you know, your marketing? And I mean, say plan in quotes, because you said you didn't have a plan in the beginning, but you have.

created a multi-channel plan that's growing robust channels now. But like in the beginning and as you go along, how what did you learn in terms of insights that you're like, they really need this? Or this is the most way to gain their attention.

Yeah, well, I mean, it so as we once we started to really get into at first really about understanding who our audience really was, that was that was mission critical before we knew what they needed. So, you know, we we evolved as you know, we've evolved, but once we really started to understand that our school principals or are really are really our kind of the chorus of our core audience. We sell to principals and we sell to school districts, but when we're selling to school districts,

We're often often selling to the person who is the leader of the principals, like the principal's manager. So, in a lot of ways, everything we do and and the heart of of how we work has to resonate really deeply and really beautifully with princip school principals. And so that's that's really where we focus. And then and listening is really, I mean, it is exactly what it sounds like. We have spent one of the best things that we did really early on. And this was actually only possible because

of the I think kind of Kimberly and my my unique partnership here. But we met a superintendent of a of a single school district here in Nebraska. She runs a a school, now it's now it's a couple of schools, but she runs a school that that she helped create. And we I met with her and she said, you know, are my the th a thing that's right here in front of me right now that I have got to do is I have got to capture the story of this school. And I don't know how. I don't know how exactly to capture this story.

And I said, well, I'll tell you what. I said, we're starting this company and we have no photography of educators or teachers or principals in classrooms. And we have a lot of listening to do to understand what is what are what principals need, what schools need, what teachers need. So I said, How about this? I said, we also have a a very talented photographer as our head of marketing. So I'll make you a deal. If you give us access to your school.

for several days and you let us interview whoever we want and listen and ask and understand how this school was built and photograph your teachers and your, you know, your school in its entirety. We will deliver back to you a story and we will deliver back to you a set of photographs. And in exchange, we'll use those photographs as part of our marketing. You'll give us permission to to use those and and to and to take that input and learn from it. And

Honestly, that's exactly what we did. We we kind of wrote a book together with these guys called Scholar. And it was really the beginnings of a lot of foundational work for our positioning, our messaging, everything that we that we write and make and do really stemmed a lot from from this initial from that initial work. And it was it was days and days of just listening and listening and listening.

Wait, did I hear that you wrote a book? I'm not a

Well

sort of. We helped them write a book. Is it or is it you can't buy it on the internet, but it does it it does exist. It's if it's around here somewhere.

Right.

But that's taking extreme to a whole cool level. I wrote a book.

Yeah people it was a really strong way to do it. No, I

well, we didn't know it was gonna be a book when we started. We thought it was gonna be like a PowerPoint presentation and that we were gonna help them tell the story, but the story was so rich and it was such a beautiful, like such an amazing story, honestly, about educators and about educators building kind of the school of their dreams together.

that we like we kind of couldn't stop. And so we spent we spent the time and and the energy doing it. We ended up doing a ton of it, you know, kind of on our own time. But it also like we came away with it from it with hundreds of these beautiful rich photos of educators that we were allowed to use in our marketing. And that was that I mean that was it was better and more authentic than any photography we could have ever bought. And so I I think the authenticity of

of this story and the and the images really honestly it was a huge help for our brand early on.

Yeah. And I I think in a way, like if you had to look back, you didn't start as a tech company. So you didn't have the tendencies to say, wow, let's talk about all our amazing features all the time. Like you went in with a human lens and said, Let's tell these powerful stories and let's humanize our brand, not only with the people behind the brand making it happen, but the people that are making the like the impact that's happening as a result of your brand. Yeah. Human centric stories.

Almost like tear at the heartstrings type of thing. It really gets back to why why we're all in this profession to begin with. So I just want to point that out to our audience of like she keeps talking about like stories and pictures. That's a that's a thing. And I actually when I was thinking about it, it's like maybe it's because you didn't start as a tech company. So you're not like having to say, stop talking about the product. You're like, no, let's talk about the impact. Let's talk about it and how it aligns to the solutions to your stakeholder, your school principal's problem.

Well, and I think that's exactly right. I would also say that that, you know, our so first of all, two of our five core values are listen to teachers and tell stories. So it's literally baked into the DNA of the company to to do that. But but part of the reason that that is the truth, like the part of the reason those are our core values, is because if we're thinking about like even before it was technology company, but a as any at at any iteration of this company, what we have wanted to do is elevate the profession of education.

But that's that's always been the goal is that what if being an educator felt like an absolute top-tier, sought-after profession that everybody wants to do? What would the world look like if that were the case? That's kind of the question that we've come into this company with from the beginning. And so, because of that, part of that is, you know, you want the profession you we want to show education and educators looking absolutely fantastic.

Fantastic, like absolutely glamorous, honestly. And we want we want educators to see themselves in beautiful headshots, in you know, stunning photography, in a beautiful brand, in a modern software interface. Like it, it those that's how educators should feel in their profession. And so the brand is really based on that idea of you know, what would it look like if if they if educators had, you know,

best in class tools, best in class imagery, best in class everything, in order to feel like their role and their work was as elevated as we believe it should be.

Yeah, it's it's frictionless, but it's also like aesthetically fun, right? It's yeah, all right. So another question, it's it's something that people come to me all the time. And you, you know, you're raising money, you're starting out, you pivoted to a tech product that, you know, you probably need investment to create this new tech product. Yep. With all of that comes the need for quick traction and sales.

But at the same time, you want to build your brand and you want to build long term lead generation and pipeline. And the the age old question is, is like, how do I make sure I'm building long term enough to not jeopardize like, or sorry to say this right, I'm not investing too much in short term that wouldn't jeopardize my long term investment brand and pipeline. Like for example, as people are like, what is Alana even talking about? Sometimes you might come in and just say, I need leads quick.

Yeah.

Let's go to paid conferences. Let's go into paid ads, those types of things, right? But they're not sustainable over time. And when you take them off, they go away.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I it's a it's a great question. So I think as far as traction and and how we thought about it, I I the most important thing for me to say is I think that I think we've honestly made a ton of mistakes along the way. I I think we probably are still making tons of mistakes along the way. And we'll we'll talk we'll talk in a year and find out. But I think, you know, early on it was really hard to get our heads around exactly w especially with the software platform, what exactly it was that we were selling and who we were selling it to. And so

It was from the very beginning, there was a time where we were like, we don't think that we are conference people. We don't think that that's really where people are gonna buy us. We don't think it's the right, it's the right motion for us. And we were super wrong. I mean, we just we were just super wrong about that. We also kind of thought that the way to sell and the way to, you know, the sales motion was gonna be a little bit different. Like we we thought that it would be a lot more.

Of you know, people just raising their hands and coming to us and saying, you know, hey, we love what you do and all of those things and knowing that we existed in the world. And so a lot of our early effort was, you know, we had some great earned media and we had a great brand. And we, you know, we had people, you know, we we did a lot on social and all of those things. It just wasn't producing us actual meetings that we could actually have with principals or or district leaders to talk about the product and to and to sell the product. So

We got much more intentional and much more sophisticated about that over the course of the last, honestly, over the course of the last year, it took us a lot of iterations of both kind of the marketing and sales motion. What I will say about it is because we were, you know, kind of had that brand and marketing DNA from day one, we were, we've always been sort of stair-stepped. We've always been, you know, kind of, you know, marketing sales, marketing sales, marketing sales, marketing sales.

And so it's it's never been, you know, it's not like we have this great big long term strategy over here and then our short term sales strategy over here. They really work really very much in tandem all the time. And to the point where, you know, our marketing leader and our sales leader are on calls together all the time. They both work on events. They both work on, you know, publications, they both work on demand gen. Like they're they're they're both very involved in both, which I think is is very good. I think that helps keep

that, you know, there's that kind of classic sales and marketing with the fence between them kind of thing where it's like, you know, it's like leads aren't high quite enough quality, like sales, you know, gets upset because leads aren't high enough quality and and marketing gets upset because, you know, you're not doing enough with the leads that we're giving you and all those things, right? So we don't have that. We we are very much, you know, very, very much those two things work in lockstep.

Yeah. And I I've been head nodding as you're talking and then I was like, in honor of like maybe the Mandalorian, I'd be like, This is the way. Like this is truly the way because you have to and I've done a couple of podcasts and for those of you listening, I'll drop in the show notes, but I've done one specifically with Dan O'Reilly where it talks how they have to be marketing fails. You can't a lot of the times they end up competing.

And that is definitely not the way. Like it has to be together and collaborating and helping each other and being able to be flexible to help each other and learn from each other. And I've heard that. So thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. Also, when you're starting out, it you know, when you're when you're a startup, we're you know, we're twelve people in this company right now. And it's so you're too small to make there be like the super specific, you know, designation between this and that, you know, between marketing and sales and customer success and all these things. All of us, you know, everybody's got the same problem to solve. We're all just trying to grow. We're trying to build a company that grows. That's it. That's the only goal of the entire year. So it's all hands on deck.

Towards that. Yeah. And so I heard, gosh, a lot of our assumptions were wrong in the beginning. And I actually read your Substack on that. That was really helpful. Because you you were able to reflect on those things. It's like, shoot, we don't have it figured out. But if you have listening at your core, it can fundamentally help you flexible, like be as flexible as possible to align with your audience needs. Yeah. But so you started into conferences. I heard, I know you've got a newsletter. And

It's consistent and it's weekly. I know you create consistent resources. I know you have workshops. I know you do reports. So, like tell me a little bit about investing in these long term things because I know it's a commitment. I know because I I convince people on weekly or even just at the beginning, monthly newsletters for their audience. Yeah. What gave you

So

like the gumption or the confidence and say, yes, we might not see leads for a bit. We need to build it up, but let's do this. Because I see you investing in those long-term channels as well as you're doing things that convert like conferences to complement.

Yeah. Yeah. So the newsletter and the resources, they're very much an experiment at first. I mean, to be honest, almost every single thing that we do as a on a true cadence and as a true, you know, kind of consistent basis now started off as an experiment at some point. And there are dozens of experiments that we haven't taken forward. Right. So there's a like there's a there's lots that we've tried and that we've just haven't done. And then and but then there are some that have really resonated. So what

the the secret weapon to the newsletter and the resources and the consistency of those is that that motion is generally run by a former educator. And she is the most consistent human on the planet. And so she very early on we when we hired her actually, we said, okay, well we think we want to do this thing. We think that one of the things that would be great is to just deliver value to principals. Again, because we are an unknown quantity. We're like that we're, you know, we're a teacher

recognition engagement platform. Like, what the heck is that? Again, we're not, we're not really competing with a whole bunch of other ones of those, right? And so we knew that if we're going to reach these principals, we're going to have to show them value before they before they ever bought from us. So we had to show them value for free. That was the goal. That was honestly the that was what the problem we were trying to solve is how do we deliver value for free to principals

on it that will make them want to talk to us. So what so we we had this idea for resources because at Kimberly and my last company, we had a really successful marketing strategy with ebooks. And so we said, okay, we could bring the ebooks concept over to this company, but with actual resources that a principal could use. But and then we had we had hired Alyssa and she had just come out, you know, literally had been in the classroom the year before and she said I we said, you know, what would be valuable? What would be what would be useful?

for principals and for and for educators. And so we started talking about it. We started brainstorming it. She and Kimberly came up with it and started designing a couple of them. And then the the way that they really figured out what to build is they lurked in Facebook groups for forever. And so what they it was amazing to watch them do that because what they would do is they would be in the Facebook groups and they would they would be like watching what principals were asking for. So again, they were listening.

And listening and listening and listening, what her principal's asking for. And then Alyssa would come over here and they had this template and she would build it. And she would build this little resource and we put it on our resource on like this little resource page on our website. But she would build this little resource and then she'd go back to the Facebook group and she was like, Here, try this. You know, here, you know, here are five icebreakers for your next staff meeting. Here's, you know, a fun thing to do for for your team around Halloween. She had all of these ideas herself, but then she listened to and watched what.

what the Facebook groups were asking for. And that's honestly how, like how that started. And part of the ways that we got people starting to come to the site and download those resources is just by talking about them and posting about them in various educator groups. That's not a super automated process. It's not a super scalable process. It's really hard to do that. But we were little and we just and we didn't need to do a ton of it. And so Alyssa would just do that and she would, she'd go find them

We would, you know, we'd say, you know, send us your email, we'll we'll send you that resource. They did over and over and over again. And so that that's how those started. And the newsletter was really there to surface a few of them. So the newsletter was was kind of came on the heels or right kind of right at the same time of that. And we said, you know, we've we're starting to, we've got some good folks in our in our list, and we're and we are asking people for their email address when they're downloading this resource. What are we gonna do all with those emails that are kind of starting to grow a little bit? And so

We started the newsletter with I think 200 people that were in our list or in, you know, based on Facebook groups and and people who had willingly given us their emails, of course. But we started there and then it has just grown and grown. And so then that now that resource library, like you said, has 300 plus resources in it, which is a lot of fun and is going to get a a very exciting makeover in the near future. So that's really fun. But it's really been the team saying, you know, this is really

No, you can see it. Like you can see educators and principals who have, and we this was before we had like a sales team that was calling anybody. So, but we could see in our in our system that we had principals who were who were, you know, downloading one, 10, 20, 30. You know, now we have people who've downloaded 150 resources. Those are people that care about school culture, they care about educator well-being. We know that because they're already looking for those resources.

And so now when we call them and we say, Hey, would you like to hear about some of the other things we do? It's a really easy easy conversation.

I in my head I was like, wow, talk about a warm lead. Imagine someone like sometimes, you know, for for us a win is like if they downloaded several resources. If they downloaded a hundred and fifty of your resources, they are your EFF. Like they have trust in you. They definitely know you. And I can imagine that your conversion rate is very high when it comes to people that have downloaded your resources.

yeah.

They are.

We have a team that that that calls a lot of principals and superintendents every every day and their very, very favorite list to get is the high resource downloaders. Those are those are the most fun people to call.

From

a nerd technical perspective, when they download a resource, does that go into your HubSpot CRM? So then you have all exclusive awesome. Because then you have your self pipeline, perfect. So I want to back up for those of you because Karen said a lot in that. Really good stuff, Karen. No, but in the beginning you said, I want to lead with value. I didn't go in saying, hey, let's make sure they know where we're at with conferences or we just got some press. Let's talk about ourselves. And it's okay if you do that in some newsletters, but if you go in and focus and say,

Well

What do they actually want? What's the problem? How can I help them just and and you call it little wins? I love it. Because you're not like changing their whole day, but you're giving them a little win. And that's all you need. And little wins over time make huge change. So focus on that because if anyone knows me, I say value, value, value, but I did not pay you to say that. And you said it

Yeah, just wanna

No, I you did not pay, but I will say that some of the best, best sales and marketing advice I ever got. And I think is, you know, I think something we carry into every part of the company is that, you know, you have to you earn trust by delivering value for free. That's that's how you earn trust. And that doesn't mean free giveaways, and it doesn't mean free trials. It means that you find a way to build trust by giving something of value that is.

completely of value, right? Like it's val it's it's a one complete valuable thing, not like a taste of what your software platform is, but then there's a paywall to it. That that's fine. You can you can also do those things, but as as far as building trust, giving somebody something that creates a full amount of value all the way through. And we we think about it as value and we also think about it in terms of hospitality.

So, you know, if you think about if you think about the experience that you have at a restaurant, at a hotel, at, you know, on an airline, you know, it's the so much of whether you go back, so much of whether you trust that, you know, that restaurant, so much of whether you recommend it to your friend or talk about it at a party is how you felt, the experience of how you felt while it was happening. So we look to deliver value, but we also make try to make that value feel wonderful and feel.

you know, modern and and beautiful and and we try to make it feel hospitable. We try to make it feel like hospitality when when an educator gets that. And, you know, I think all of us that work in ed tech kind of know that that that hospitality is not, you know, the number one thing that that a lot of educators will say is a huge part of their jobs. So it also helps us stand out.

Yeah. And I really really having that focus of making them feel special.

Mm-hmm.

And

then building frameworks and features to make it easy to do that. Like what a wonderful mission. Let's get into a couple of more tactical questions and then we're going to hit you a really fun lightning round. With everything you know now, and you know, every month, every sometimes week is different. But like, well, what would you say to other education and ed tech companies who like want to invest in marketing, but there's always something that's a higher priority for them? And they can't

I'm excited. I guess

putting it off. And really, it's that age-old argument of jeopardizing, you know, that old that long-term pipeline for short-term wins. What have you learned in this journey so far around that?

I think that what I would say to somebody who says I there's just other things that are higher priority is I would say what's higher priority than growth if you're an ed tech company. If you're trying to build a company and you know you're going to spend all of your time and energy on on your product, on your software, and you and you and you skip out on marketing or sales any sort of you know kind of revenue motions in order because you're because you're so busy over here building the product.

There's really no way to know if you're building the right product if you don't have customers who are using it. And so in my opinion, the customers have to come first or or you're not doing your job. And so the and so I like I I think what I would say is there's there's literally nothing more important than than growth and whether you call it, you know, marketing or sales or or any of that, really, and you don't have to put into place a, you know, a two-year plan.

You you've put in place something that might deliver some value to some potential customers this week. And that's it. And then next week you just need to do that again. But that but that has to happen all the time. I mean, it's a probably the thing that we invested not soon enough in was salespeople and and a team that that would call people up and say, Hello, would you like to hear about our company?

Yeah, but vice versa, like if you invested in sales early on and no marketing, the salespeople really wouldn't have anything to deliver to them beyond your product and be like, we got a product, let me tell you about my product. I don't want to hear about your product. They don't know who you are, they don't trust you.

Yeah.

yeah. I mean marketing for our first few years like was marketing and and sales. Like it just we just didn't invest in sales, a dedicated sales for probably a year longer than we should have. But but that's you know, that's what you learn.

Yeah, that's awesome. All right. I know you have developed this school culture report. And I looked at it and I was like, whoa, how did they have time to do that? You were over like 30,000 data points on teacher check-ins and s and the school leader surveys and things like that. And I looked at that and I was like, I bet you there's some really cool insights that marketers would love to learn that people that are navigating leading ed tech and education companies. Can you talk a little bit about

what you learned in those insights.

Yeah, it's man, it was it's been such a process. This is our first one, first time doing it. We came up with it, you know, back in December and we thought it was gonna be a small project and then it like it was a project that ate New York. It was huge, but it was also so deeply educational for us too. So it that was really wonderful. But you know, we what we learned really is just is just truly how complicated the profession is, how difficult and challenging the profession is, and so and because of it.

It, you know, it also helped us shape a lot of what we're building and what we're doing for the future. So, you know, you didn't talk about those resources. We can we have a beautiful roadmap now of exactly which resources to build and also when to publish them because we know a couple of things. You know, we know the areas of teacher well being and educator support that are that are highest and lowest. We know where teachers feel the best and where they feel where they feel the the least good.

And we also know a lot about leader confidence. So we know, so we know that the where the area where teachers feel the the most challenged is in their health, their mental, physical, emotional health, where they feel the best is as learners. They're growing, they're progressing, they're, you know, they are learners. What we know from what we know from leaders is that the place where they feel the least confident as a leader is in figuring out how to support health.

And well-being in a way that feels really excellent and right and impactful for their educators. And so for us, I mean, as an ed tech company, it was the report we needed. Honestly, we we kind of built it for ourselves in a lot of ways. I do think it's incredibly valuable for anybody working in education to understand these are the times of year where things are going on. This these are the areas where what where leaders need more help, these are where teachers need more help. This is what they're talking about.

when they're talking about work. And it was the first time we've ever had that much data available to us, honestly. As we've grown, we've we've kind of always known, wow, if we can really get, you know, ahead of steam behind this thing. And we've got lots and lots of teachers taking this thing all of the time, we are going to have a really extraordinary data set for to understand what's going on with educators in a in a much more comprehensive way. So that's why we built it and it, but yeah, it's it's been really valuable for for us too.

Yeah. And as a marketer, I'm looking and going, gosh, a lot of the times I'm creating a plan that aligns to the buying cycle generally. Yeah. And then I'm looking at, okay, how are my users feeling if I'm gonna have a two-pronged thing where I'm talking to my buyers and my users and say, what are the how do I make it timely? How do I make it relevant? I might look at events, all of these things that shape it on top of the buying cycle. Yeah. But you're going a layer deeper and saying, What's the psyche like? And how do I know, like with significance that

Th these are problems that they're dealing with at this time. And I love that. my gosh. I love it. It's making my head spin and wanting to like make our planner even more robust.

With

yeah, yeah. Well

It I can't it's like such an amazing not weapon, but it's an amazing vantage point to say, I need to connect with this buyer as a human. They've got problems, they've got challenges, they have concerns, they have things that they're vulnerable about.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And and and then then you have a better idea again, like kind of going back to that value or going back to hospitality. You know, how do you create hospitality for educators in the month of November? I know, like I know exactly how, like I you you address health. I mean that's that it's the lowest point of the year overall, and it's the lowest point in the year for health. And so, you know, what what can we do to create to create hospitality and value for educators and leaders?

in the month of November around health, well that's a fun problem to solve, right? Like that we can we can work on that problem. So it's a it's it's fun to get to have that insight. We're honestly we're really grateful for for for the insight from

Yeah. And it it made me think of like, I love teacher appreciation month, but at the same time I hate teacher appreciation month because it's like, okay, check it off your list one month. And for those who like those are long term listeners know that we don't play that way. But at the same time, you're saying, gosh, there's pivotal times that they really need our support. And so for those of you listening, I'll put the link of the report in the show notes as well.

And you can also go to their website, look them up, Apaca Education. What I want to do next is really fun, is a really quick lightning round. We didn't get into some little things. So I think this will tease out some of that practicality our listeners like too. Okay. All right. So what is one marketing channel you wish you would would have invested in sooner?

events. Like I said, I think we thought that that wasn't our the right place for us or the right or the right motion for us. I don't know why we really thought that. And then we started we started going to events and it was good. And we learned how to actually book meetings and conversations with our customer at those events. And that was game changing. And I wish we had done that specific motion of booking meetings at events from the very beginning.

And the way you're talking, this is all organic events, right? It's not those pay to play events out there.

Right. So well I mean we we pay for a like a booth. Like we're going to events with you know, where we've got a booth and all of it is

RCM, IEI,

Dolly's. Okay, great. Yeah. What is the most expensive and overhyped way to get a school leader's attention?

sponsoring event and not booking meetings at it. I mean, if you if you just if you just pay the, you know, for the booth and you put the most fabulous booth up there at the best conference in the entire, you know, of the entire year, and then you just stand there and you say hello to people and you don't ask them for time on their calendars, then it's the worst money you've ever spent.

For those of you, I know they're l they're thinking about this, but how does she get the meetings? Do you do it in real time or do you do a whole prep campaign where you're booking the meetings in advance? Or is it a little bit of

Do you have time to talk next week? yeah, just grab out your phone. Let's just find a little bit of time right here while we're standing at the booth. Okay, great. I will here's the link and this is gonna send you a confirmation and we are so excited to connect with you next Tuesday.

so you're in you're you're booking the meeting at the booth for for the I love that. That's right.

Yeah,

that's right. We learned it we learned it from another ed tech company. No, no. we don't do any we don't do any demos at the booth. We don't we we do we only we only get time. It's noisy and it's and and you're and you're part of a lot of other things at that time. So we look for time on your calendar while we're standing there.

Yeah.

is there?

Genius. Okay. This is supposed to be lightning, but I'm like nerding out with you here. The best advice to you give your sales and marketing teams to keep in sync. And you've already talked about this, but like that

Yeah

spend time together. So, you know, like I said, our sales our sales leader w weighed in very like very strongly on the culture report, even though the culture report was very obviously like a marketing, a marketing project, a marketing motion. They book they they make the plan for events together. The our our marketing sales leader, they do they both work on so many things for one another and with one another. And that's that's the key to everything. Just be together. That's that's what that's the advice I'd give.

Awesome. What's the word, the most popular word you think for 2026, 2027 academic school year that the school leaders will use the most? Like maybe some would argue it would be like AI or something this year. But like what's that word you think we're gonna evolve into that school leaders will use most?

I mean, of course, everybody's talking about AI. That's that's definitely true. I'm gonna choose the word human is the word I will use because I think when it comes to when it comes to like everybody talking about AI, what everybody's actually talking about is is how how do we understand how we are educating humans, that humans are educating humans and how are we doing that and what's the what's the connection there? What is that what does that look like?

When it comes to how their kids feel at school, when it comes to how their teachers feel at school, when it comes to even how principals feel at school, it it really is about human connection at this point. It's the thing that we, you know, we we have gotten to a point where, you know, we don't want to put an additional burden on educators. We don't want to put one more thing. But because of that, we've lost a lot of the opportunities for for personal and human connection.

among leaders and because of that, they're feeling lonely, right? Like they feel isolated in that in that way. Sometimes you're if you're the fourth grade teacher and you're in your classroom, you're the only adult you see all day long. And that's really hard. That doesn't make you feel good. It doesn't make you feel healthy. So I I'm I'm choosing human.

Awesome. All right. And I'm gonna round it out with what is the best way school leaders can support teachers that actually works? And I know there's so many ways. This is gonna be hard for you, but if you had to choose one, like one thing, it's the best way school leaders can support teachers.

It it's really easy for me actually. My answer to that is listen. It is listen. It really is. I I mean I think find you know, that's whether that's one-on-one personal connection, listening, whether that's through, you know, in a in a group, in a meeting, giving teachers a voice at the table, giving teachers opportunities to truly weigh in with their ideas, creating opportunities for autonomy with voy and voice. That's it, that's all.

Yeah.

That's all done with extraordinary listening and that's what makes a difference, I think.

Awesome. Well, Karen, thank you so much for your time. I I'm trying to really unpack in my head everything that we talked about. And there's so much good stuff. So thank you. I think that a lot of times I have leaders come to me on the the tech side, on the company side, and they say, How do I know what results I'm gonna get? And if I put this in, what am I exactly gonna get? And you are demonstrating that you just go and you go fast.

And you learn with intention and you make pivots all the time. But you committed to long-term marketing channels in combination with some short-term things like conferences and book in the meeting. And you all are sailing with multi-channels growing at the same time with great brand, with great recognition, great trust. So I just wanna thank you for you know being this like poster child for what I talked about.

Yeah.

About. Well, thank you. I will pass all of that praise over to our head of marketing. But thank you very much. And it's such a pleasure to to be with you and talk about nerd out on all this stuff with you.

Yeah, so for those of you listening, I will put everything in the show notes, the link to the report, also put a link to some of their resources so you can get a sense of the value that they deliver, and then a link to their newsletter that happens weekly. And anything else too. Karen has a substack you can learn from her and follow her on LinkedIn as well. So thank you, Karen, for coming on all things marketing and education. Thank you all for listening. We will see you next time. Take care.

Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at Leone Consulting Group.com backslash podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter at Leone Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and Libra review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get.

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