Lessons from an EdTech Leader: James Stoffer Shares Abre’s Customer-Centric Approach to Growth

“At the end of the day, educators want to know that you give a damn.”

– James Stoffer

It is not often that you hear a highly successful sales leader mention the words ‘patience’ and ‘high growth’ in the same conversation. Yet, James Stoffer, President and Chief Executive Officer of Abre.io is no ordinary leader and on this week’s episode of the On Work and Revolution Podcast, he shares his unique approach and position on finding product-market fit, growth and hiring.  

His insights offer valuable lessons for other EdTech companies looking to scale and make a meaningful impact in education.

The main themes that emerged in this conversation include:

  1. Customer-Centric Approach to Sales: The importance of understanding customer needs and pain points, even if it requires experimentation and flexibility in product development and go-to-market strategy.
  2. Empowering your Customers to be Your Top Sales People: The power of customer advocacy and word-of-mouth marketing in the education sector, emphasizing the need to build trust and credibility with educators.
  3. Hiring Strategy to Build Sales Teams that Overdeliver: A focus on hiring experienced sales representatives with established relationships and a deep understanding of the target market, rather than relying on a large team of junior reps.

Give this conversation a listen, and don’t hesitate to Contact Us if you have any questions, comments, or feedback. 

About our guest, James Stoffer:

With a passion of leading and scaling social impact companies, James has spent nearly 20 years in education technology. James has served as the Vice President of Sales and Client Experience at DreamBox Learning, where he successfully led sales, customer experience, and business operations. Under Stoffer’s leadership, DreamBox experienced significant growth and user adoption across the business. He has also held leadership positions at Hobsons and MasteryConnect.

Today, James is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Abre.io, an award-winning education management platform that delivers software solutions designed to be easily adopted and used by everyone in the learning community.

Helpful Links:

Follow James on LinkedIn
Learn more about Abre

Open for Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Debbie Goodman: Welcome to on work and revolution, where we talk about what’s shaking up in the world of work and ed tech. I’m your host, Debbie Goodman. I’m CEO of Jack Hammer Global, a global group of executive search and leadership coaching companies. I’m also an advisor to venture backed ed tech founders. And for those of you in ed tech who are hiring, we have launched a fractional leaders offering.

I’ll put the link in the show notes. for joining us. My main mission with all of my work is to help companies and leaders to create amazing workplaces where people and ideas flourish. And so today it’s really great to have James Stoffer as my guest. James is CEO of Abre, which provides a really incredible fully comprehensive data solution for K 12 schools.

James has recently led the company through an impressive series A capital raise, which really deserves kudos considering the current market climate. But the company has not always been on such solid ground as with most it’s been turbulent. And we’ll hear more about this in a bit. James has spent his entire career in the education industry.

Prior to Abre, he was with DreamBox Learning, leading sales, customer experience, business operations. He’s also led sales leadership positions at Hobsons and Master Reconnect. The three line with all of his roles is helping companies scale. Companies that are focused on improving the lives of students and educators throughout the world.

And today we’re going to chat to James about how he’s applied a very commercial approach to driving success at Abre, which makes sense given his background in revenue leadership roles. Welcome James. 

[00:01:52] James Stoffer: Pleasure to be here. 

[00:01:53] Debbie Goodman: Before we get going, please won’t you to share a little bit more about Abre and why it’s such an amazing product, why users love it so much.

[00:02:01] James Stoffer: So Abre is Spanish for open and that’s actually, I think, foundational to our story. We’re really open to experimenting. We, our founding story was actually, our two co founders were a head of technology and a math teacher in a school district, just north of Cincinnati, Ohio, about seven, eight years ago.

That we’re basically sitting around going, we need to experiment with how we solve this data silo problem that we’re seeing within our school district. They didn’t like what they saw when they scoured the marketplace for student information systems, learning management systems, even data systems.

Largely because a lot of those had really unique specific use cases and their use case within their respective district was first and foremost trying to connect all stakeholders to data, like heaven forbid students actually get access to their own data, to parents driving better engagement and better dialogue and better empowerment at the parent and the family level.

To staff members, not just building teacher dashboards, but also thinking about counselors and you know, various staff members from counselors to intervention specialists to those that you bring in from the outside and community based partners who help students in and out of the classroom to then also starting to build some of those data visualizations and dashboards for building administrators.

So we like to say that we’re a company born from a product, not the other way around. This was a product that they built and used within their respective school district for four years before the chatter started happening. And the chatter was positive in that all of these neighboring school districts said, what in the world are you doing and how can we get our hands on it?

And that kind of birthed the company back in late 2017 and it immediately shot up with some kind of early adopters in around the Ohio area, because that’s the way that K 12 works, they often tell their friends and their colleagues and neighboring districts and in their region, what’s working for them.

And it quickly shot up to be really a quite prominent company in Southwestern Ohio, and then the pandemic hit in early 2000. And we’ll talk about this obviously in terms of how we’ve learned to commercialize, not just in the state of Ohio, but obviously outside of the state of Ohio. But our founding story is again, a bit unique in the sense that they never really set out to be a company they were setting out to experiment and solve their own problems around data and connecting users to those data to basically provide better outcomes for kids.

And that led to birthing a really amazing company and amazing opportunity that when I first saw it three and a half years ago, now at this point, I just kind of couldn’t pass up the opportunity. 

[00:04:35] Debbie Goodman: Wow. I mean, isn’t that just the best way to start a company? Everybody says, you know, you find a problem and then figure out how to solve the problem.

And if you can do that, then you’ve got something good. Then you’ve got something real. But, and I think that that is the ultimate. Story, really the ultimate origin story is it’s kind of similar to the sort of the narrative around the, you know, the kids in the garage who are tinkering around and they find something cool.

And then really the spreading of the message, the chatter, which is actually the word of mouth, which isn’t that also just the best way to get something off the ground. And yet we see so often that that it’s really hard to find that amazing product that then actually gets traction through word of mouth.

And so there’s so many other things that need to go into play in order to get something to the next level. So you came in and you were not the founder, you were introduced to the product. You thought it was amazing. You couldn’t pass up the opportunity, but what was it like to come in at this point, because it was pandemic time.

It was sort of, in late 2020. Was it with things my understanding is that it wasn’t entirely on solid footing and that cashflow was was starting to look pretty bleak. 

[00:05:49] James Stoffer: Yeah. So it was interesting because the product was on amazing foundation footing. The current clients that we had, which were about 37 at the time, 36 of which were in the state of Ohio, loved us.

But we had no brand, we had no pipeline, we had little cash all we had was kind of a hope, a dream and an amazing product that if we could find a really great product market fit, really have an opinion around who our persona targets were that we were going to start you know, selling to and commercializing around and harnessing the word of mouth that we had from some of our early adopters, that it could be something that we could, you know, figure out over the course of time.

And so it took us about 18 months to, as I like to equate it to find our belly button with a lot of experimentation around product market fit around value proposition around personas, like why they would care about us. And the problems that we can help them solve within their respective schools and districts and ultimately what our value is in the marketplace for superintendents and their executive staff.

To principals, to frontline staff, to families and to students, we had the functionality, we had the product, but we quite frankly, didn’t have the wrapper, the package, the go to market strategy to be able to figure out how we could scale it outside of the word of mouth momentum that we had created pandemic.

And that was the challenge with little cash. You do a lot of AB experimentation. You do a lot of hands on conversations, a lot of in person conversations. Once, once we were allowed to travel again and go and meet with educators, one, there was this kind of pent up demand in the marketplace from educators to want to meet again, face to face.

But then when we got the chance to meet with them and throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall, having them as kind of a voice in this experimentation and this Evolution of finding our belly button and our product market fit. I think that empowerment of some of our early adopters was really quite unique because they experienced quite a tumultuous time during the pandemic in which they bought a lot of things.

Now they were generating a lot of data and they were trying to advance some of the questions within their board and within their executive cabinets around what’s working and what’s not working. We’ve grasped at a lot of straws and quite frankly, we’re now seeing the definition of school has changed.

It’s no longer just about math and ELA test scores. What about social, emotional learning, mental health? What about behavior? What about chronic absenteeism? What about you know, some of the things that might be more foundationally important into helping students achieve better on math and ELA test scores?

But from a, it takes a village, I think was a kind of the mindset that the pandemic brought on, and no longer are we thinking about buying tools just for teachers if building principals can’t use it, or no longer are we interested in, you know, and this is what they were telling us, no longer are we interested in buying data dashboards for building administrators, if district administrators have access to it and there’s not that kind of vertical alignment and strategy.

So because the strategy needed to change because the pandemic and because they bought a lot of things during the pandemic to try to fill holes, plug gaps, all of those good things, it was. It was really a neat opportunity for us to just say, Hey, like, we don’t know what our value is, but let’s throw a lot of spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks.

And ultimately what stuck were our administrators and our current clients and prospects that we were talking to saying, we need better help in identifying what’s working, what’s not working around our time, treasure, and talent. How much money are we spending and why? Where are we putting our resources in terms of talent and where are we spending our time, which is incredibly fleeting these days and what ultimately is moving the needle for kids in and out of the classroom.

Those are some really robust, hairy questions to try to unpack. And unless you have a data platform like ours it’s really difficult to do that internally. 

[00:09:46] Debbie Goodman: Okay, so, and on the one hand, I’m hearing some of the basics around the need to find product market fit. And in order to do that, first of all, decide who are the personas, who are your buyers, who are you targeting in order to even have the conversation, but then once you’re there and opening the doors and having the conversations themselves directly.

When you say throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall, which is something that some companies are afraid to do because it feels like you’re unfocused and you don’t know what you’re selling and yet you managed to carve out the time to obviously have enough of those engagements and conversations that you managed to find product market fit.

But nevertheless within all of that from the mush of spaghetti to getting to okay what do our customers actually want and need? There was a lot of experimentation what and a lot of a lot of those tests that must have failed so what insights did you gain out of that process during the first year?

[00:10:47] James Stoffer: I think you have to have a absolute pulse on not just what the market says that they want, but ultimately once you start throwing some of those things out there, like around, I’ll just give you an example. We knew that exiting the pandemic that first year that a lot of school districts were starting to use the phrase whole child.

And we would go to a lot of different districts, current partners, prospective partners, and there were 50 different definitions under the sun as to what whole child meant. Right. You can’t really create a gravitational pull around 50 different definitions of whole child yet here we were kind of experimenting with.

We’re an administration platform that helps the whole child and it’s like, in some districts, they said they equated whole child is just being social, emotional. In other districts, they thought whole child was more around like MTSS, you know, multi tier load systems of support for helping improve learning outcomes and other districts.

It was like, well, you know, because of the pandemic brought on academic gaps, this is all about like intervention and RTI type stuff. And so I think just because the market was creating this dynamic where everybody was like, Oh, we should think about the whole child didn’t necessarily mean that buyers and therefore users.

Understood what that meant in a practical implementation. And so after about 18 months of trying to go after whole child, once we realized that, Oh no, what they actually meant was a place where they could create their own definitions around using and leveraging data to support students in and out of the classroom and answering these specific questions that might be really specific to their respective district.

What we realized was, Oh, there needs to be some malleability here, some flexibility here, which then took us to a positioning of let’s just become a data platform that accommodates that malleability and that flexibility need as opposed to telling them what they need only for them to come back and say, that’s not our definition of what we need.

So that’s just a, that’s a new kind of example, but it actually is a really critical one because it set us on a completely different trajectory as a business. Once we started identifying that all districts, even though they have similar challenges thematically from chronic absenteeism to social emotional, to MTSS, to learning outcomes, to learning gaps, to I could go on and on and on.

The point is. They all have a little special kind of sauce as to how they think what their definition is and how they want to go about solving those unique problems. And so it was really kind of more from a service oriented approach to identifying what they were saying that then became product ties with how we went to market.

About 24 months after I joined, which was only about 24 months ago now. And it completely changed the complete direction of our business and the value that we bring to the marketplace, because I think it shows a certain level of understanding and listening that districts are unique and therefore, if you create more of a platform type of an approach that has flexibility to that.

Much in the same way that Salesforce did 20 plus years ago, when they walked into all of these companies that were using Oracle or SAP or whatever, you know, and said, well, what is your definition of success look like in sales and marketing and customer success? And then giving you the power to kind of create a level of customization without needing to customize a platform through custom dev.

That flexibility, I think, ultimately, is then what led to a change in our go to market structure, our go to market strategy, our go to market voice, and quite frankly, amplifying our current clients who love that flexibility that we weren’t necessarily capturing in a voice of customer type of a motion into the market.

And so, yeah, I think that’s a prime example of listening to the market. It doesn’t mean that you’re unfocused. It means that you’re malleable and being malleable and being flexible is difficult for companies who are backed by venture capital or backed by a private equity because they want to encourage focus.

And that’s right. But our focus was on the flexibility because that’s what the market told us. 

[00:15:11] Debbie Goodman: Yes. I mean, that’s such a great example. And on the one hand listening to your customer. Cause I mean, that’s the ground rule, right? Listen to your customer. But then the key part of what the 

[00:15:24] James Stoffer: spaghetti against the wall, right?

We all have opinions. And by the way, my opinion was wrong. Our head of product opinion was wrong. Doesn’t mean that we were wrong. Eventually we might still have that opportunity down the road for us, but that’s not what the market said that they needed right there. And I think having a value based system, when you when you bring on new people onto the team, when you have an entrepreneur spirit, mainly because our backs were against the wall, we had to, you know, even though we had a great product and we had opinions around what we should be doing with the product and how our users should be using the product, that doesn’t necessarily mean a hill of beans if they don’t actually buy it or they don’t actually use it.

[00:16:00] Debbie Goodman: Right. 

[00:16:02] James Stoffer: I think our market is really plagued with, you know, there’s a lot of over promising and under delivering and there’s been a lot of selling and buying, there hasn’t necessarily been a lot of implementing using an impact that’s come as a result of it. So that was really our main motivation was let’s not just figure out a way of how to sell it.

Let’s maybe go slower to go faster later. Figure out a way to sell it and make sure that it’s implemented. 

[00:16:29] Debbie Goodman: Yeah, it’s all hard work, but the lesson there is the fundamental strategy, which you deployed, which was speak to enough customers, get their input, listen to them. But then just hearing what they say is sometimes not enough.

And then being able to take that next step of going, hold on a second. We’ve got to do something else here. What we are hearing is not necessarily what they actually want. So let’s apply another layer of listening. And once, as you said, not all companies can do that. They get locked into, okay, this is the strategy.

Now we’re going for it. And then sometimes it’s really hard to turn away from that or to turn around from that, because you’ve burned a whole bunch of cash and In that one direction. So the next lesson I’m hearing from you is sometimes you actually have to take things a little slower, which is so hard, so damn hard.

When once again, you’re running against time, there’s certain amount of cash. You’re moving as fast as you can, but you’ve also got to be patient. So wow. A ton of lessons there. So when we spoke a little earlier you mentioned a play, I wouldn’t say the playbook, but just around a engaging with the market, with your market, with this ed tech market, with educators as not the same as D as a B2B play, even though you’re selling software as a solution it’s B2E.

And so share a little more about the mindset of selling to educators and how it’s different from B2B. 

[00:17:59] James Stoffer: Well, in a way it’s similar, but in a way it’s really unique. And what I mean by the unique part is if you think that just selling and then just throwing a logo up on your website with who bought you is going to be, what’s going to propel you to sell more, I think you’re fooling yourself.

You go to all these B2B websites and you see all the logos that they’ve landed. Right. And it’s like, Oh, that’s the credibility. For our take, the credibility is actually in the voice of customer. And so it’s not our word, it’s our customer’s word. So what I mean by that is there is a wall that is inevitably put up by educators and rightfully so, by the way, because if they get it wrong, we’re talking about students and educators and outcomes of lives and communities, but there’s been increasingly a bigger wall that has been put up.

Um, Largely around, like I said before, companies kind of coming in and over promising and under delivering. And if you don’t think that that under delivery impacts your business, you’re fooling yourself. In my experience doing this now for 20 years, your best salespeople are your customers, not your salespeople.

And it’s weird to say that having been an executive over four different sales teams, right? With really great performers, but they’re the ones who build a really great relationships with your buyers are the ones that don’t over promise. They actually under promise so that then the business and the product can over deliver.

They’re the ones who know how to leverage that to get into Other districts. So your pipeline build initiative is not through your traditional demand gen or lead gen or traditional marketing through SEO and SCM and some of the stuff like you might leverage social selling within your traditional B2B.

The best way of generating pipeline is getting a microphone in the hands of your customers at conferences and events. It’s teeing them up to be able to share their story. And then it’s quantifying their story in terms of what did the before then what does the after look like? And then how you leverage that to go out and find other districts who want that before after story within their respective districts.

B to E selling to educators, you’re selling to people who aren’t all that comfortable with technology, you’re selling to people who are working for a nonprofit, you’re selling to people who are not in it necessarily for the financial gains, you know, I mean, and all of these create this equation of if you think that they buy the best product, that’s going to get them the best return immediately.

I think you’re kind of fooling yourself. There’s a brand, there’s a brand need to build. And the only way that you can do that is not by saying we’re growing so fast. The only way that you can do that is by having your clients validate and substantiate that the reason why they love you is because you’ve delivered for them.

They don’t really care about how fast you’re growing, nor should they. They care about their customers and their ultimate customers should be the students and their educators. 

[00:21:06] Debbie Goodman: Yes. I think that’s such a great line that your greatest sales people are your customers. And I think sometimes that’s forgotten in the process, because this view that you’ve kind of got an endless number of doors to knock on in order to in order to sell to, but you could focus on

lower volume, high quality, and really over delivering to your key customer. And then that drives your growth, which sounds to me like it’s being a core part of your growth story. And so that’s a really great segue into you’re a very customer facing CEO. I imagine that’s just an innate part of your DNA driving revenue, being a revenue leader.

So, James, you’re a very customer facing CEO, which I know is an inbred part of your DNA. You’ve been a sales leader, a revenue leader. So it’s core to who you are and what you do. But what is the view of your, the role of CEO in relation to just being consistently you yourself in front of customers?

[00:22:22] James Stoffer: I mean, at the end of the day, this is why we exist. It’s for our customers. It’s not for ourselves. It’s not for the innovation we think we can create. It’s not for some desire to exit down the road. if that’s your motivation, that’s going to be sniffed out pretty quickly by educators, I think.

At the end of the day, educators want to know that you give a damn, right? That you understand the complexities of their role, that you understand that they are, overworked and underpaid they want you to show up and say that you’re willing to roll up your sleeves because they roll up their sleeves every day.

And it’s not glamorous. Like this is hard, hard work. but is it worth it? Yeah, it is. And I don’t know if it’s innate, or if I, if I grew that passion over the course of time, I grew up in a family of educators. My mom taught kindergarten for 38 years. I can still smell her classroom right now.

And damn it, if we don’t have a responsibility that requires us to get on airplanes or to do the windshield time, the long drives from meeting to meeting or to go to those extra conferences to hear their challenges and then not just hear them, but actively engage and actively listen to how that shapes what you do next.

Because like we were talking about before, we have a lot of ideas. We have a lot of ideas around AI. We have a lot of ideas around machine learning. We have a lot of ideas around tech consolidation. But it doesn’t mean anything if it’s not anything that would actually be bought, implemented, used, leveraged to drive better outcomes for kids.

I don’t know. I think it’s super easy once you get to scale to say up the client team has that are up the sales team has that. That’s just not my DNA. I think it’s so critical for me to get out there and not necessarily be the face of the company. Cause I don’t necessarily want to be the face of the company.

I want all of our clients to be the face of our company, to be honest with you. So I think that comes with them hearing from me that you’re empowered to go out there. Tell your story. The thing that I do, I think that is maybe a bit unique to us is every time a new partner, a new district partner signs with us, I send them within the first 48 hours of them coming on board an email to the superintendent, the entire executive cabinet with a copy to my entire company

that says, welcome to Abre. We’re so happy and lucky and fortunate that you have decided to partner with us. A lot of edtech providers over promise and under deliver. That’s not us. Here’s my direct cell phone. Here’s the reason why you partnered with us. And if ever we’re not meeting and living up to that promise, I want you to call me directly.

And so I think that there is a certain level of vulnerability that comes with that. And there’s a vulnerability that comes in any relationship when you, I think, look each other in the eyes and you say, we’re trying to figure this out together. We’re not trying to get rich quick. Like again, we’re a company that was born from a product.

I think that that’s critical. And I think we benefit from that in the marketplace with, superintendents and clients who partner with us, I think that they understand that there’s a genuine interest in us to be able to deliver on that promise and help them move the needle for them in their districts.

[00:25:29] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of companies say, yeah, we have fanatical customer delivery, but sounds like you’re definitely walking that talk. I mean, I know you, you’re a big conference attender, like 20 conferences a year, and that’s damn hard work. It’s exhausting to travel. And to actually do that yourself and to walk the floors and to have the meetings, that’s really testament to you walking the talk around that.

And listen, maybe that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. But clearly being part of the recipe of success. I want to use the last bit of our time to talk about your approach to building sales teams and to building the sales team, because I know you’ve done it differently this time to To previously I know that a lot of chief revenue officers, sales leaders will talk about the size of their team as some kind of measure of how well they’re doing.

And I know that you’ve got a slightly different approach to that. So I’d love to hear more about that.

[00:26:24] James Stoffer: Well, again, I mean, it may go back to the analogy of go slow to go fast. I think it’s much easier to bring in and I’ve experienced this both ways, right? I think it’s easier though, to bring in people who have been there, done that. Who have a Rolodex, but who can also go out and use the power of their own personal brand with a great product in their hand to go out and get more Rolodex.

But there needs to be intentionality behind that. Right. So instead of again, hiring, like we could have hired 20 sales reps who are more junior reps, we would have just done a lot of this over Zoom, but we sell to superintendents guess who doesn’t want to buy over Zoom or build a relationship over Zoom superintendents.

Now it might be different depending on your product and your go to market and your persona and all of that. But for us, we realized. Oh, probably about two years ago that, wow, we’re an enterprise product that sells via the executive cabinet. That has an implication on all grades, all students, all staff, all stakeholders.

And so we have to sell at the right level. So instead of going out and hiring 20 people, we went out and hired five. We pay them a lot of money. Right. And we have high expectations for them, of course. But they’re the ones who can get us into our ideal client profile. And I think that that’s part of the selling motion, which is, do you have an opinion on your ideal client profile?

 The other part of the building a sales team is, do you have an opinion on what geographical locations you should be focused on? Everybody wants to go after Florida, New York, California, Texas. I’d argue you should stay away from Florida in the early days. It’s too big. It’s too politicized.

There’s too many incumbents there that have deep relationships with superintendents and their executive teams. Not to say that Florida isn’t of interest to us. I just don’t know if they’re as important to us as say a Colorado would be in the first couple of years. Where there’s 180 districts, many of which look like the district that we were born in and many of which have, you know, 5 to say 20, 000 students that are meaningful enough in terms of buyers size impact that you can have

 with less red tape that you got to jump through and with less cooks in the kitchen that you have to win over. And by the way, it’s easier to implement them too, after you bring them on board. So I think what is your pathway to easier success, both on the sales front and the marketing front?

That’s the kind of the reps that you bring on and where they have relationships and where they can focus their time and start finding some lighthouses within respective geographic areas, because you need that beachhead via that lighthouse to then start building the word of mouth and the brand.

And so I see too many ed tech companies, especially, you know, kind of early days that are like, Oh, we have an amazing product. Everybody loves it. We need to sell it to everybody. It’s like, no, you don’t. you can become a pretty big by only selling 10 percent of the market. 

[00:29:23] Debbie Goodman: Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:29:24] James Stoffer: You don’t necessarily need the states of Wyoming or Utah, and that’s nothing against Wyoming or Utah.

I live in Utah, right? But like what you need is more of an opinion around ideal client profile, the personas that you’re selling to geographically, where once you land that lighthouse, it quickly could build a domino effect through brand and through word of mouth. And then over the course of time, think about taking on 10 target states, not just five.

And then after you land 10, then think about 20 and then 25 and then 30. I think too many companies spread their resources way too thin. Go deeper in certain clients, in certain prospects, in certain territories, pay your people really well, because quite frankly, building a brand and building a name recognition within edtech takes time.

So give yourself that time and not run out of cash. By hiring 20 sales people, because you have the cash in the bank account now. Unless all 20 of those people are firing on all cylinders, which good luck, they’re not going to. Give yourself more of a likelihood that the 5 people that you hire are going to, and then 5 becomes 10, 10 becomes 15, etc.

That’s how you build intentional scale within a go to market motion without running out of cash. 

[00:30:44] Debbie Goodman: Yeah, well, we’re definitely aligned with regard to that. I have experienced over the last few years, all the different ways of growing and scaling and certainly in this very particular market and particularly in the K 12 niche, or I think it’s similar in higher ed, I think it’s similar in enterprise, is relationships are gold.

They take time to develop and cultivate. And if you can hire people who have, though, access to the That is going to just expedite your go to market substantially. So, it’s totally worth the extra dollars to pay good experience people with actual relationships. Certainly at the outset. So James, we are so running out of time.

[00:31:28] James Stoffer: Yeah. The last thing I’d say is there continue to show up, have it like spend the hard work on the front end to determine where and why you’re going to where you’re going. And then go and then go again and then go again. I hear too many labels of sales, especially entrepreneurs who may not have experience selling into education where it’s like, we’ll try to go to that conference up, no return on investment there.

So then we’ll try to go this and you’re constantly chasing the ball of return on investment. Where return on investment in K 12 education comes and develops over time via relationships, by finding the silver bullet conference or event to go to because none of them produce early on, but if you keep going back and you keep going back and you keep going back, inevitably people will say, Hey, we know you.

And at the core of what we do, it’s a people business. It’s not a technology be like software’s people at the end of the day. 

[00:32:20] Debbie Goodman: I think that’s just the greatest advice regardless of which sector you’re in. And I think in particular for companies that are questioning where their investment should go, just stick to something and keep showing up, show some consistency, show the substance that ultimately matters

instead of flip flopping around. Wow. So many pearls of commercial wisdom today, James. Thank you so much for that. I wish you and Abre tremendous success. Sounds like you have found your product market fit, but at the base level, it’s all about people and relationships and over delivering and all the great basics.

So I have no doubt that you’re going to continue to fly into the future. So congratulations and all the best. 

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