Shout out to team members

Yikes -- I can't believe how much time has passed since I've blogged. Lots going on for sure!

As we continue to lay the groundwork for breakout growth in the next two years, I continue to believe that we have a huge competitive advantage over other language learning companies. Here is how I see it:

More and more teachers, parents and students realize that a truly great education must include world language learning. In fact, we continue to see evidence mounting that not only will learning a world language make a student more competitive as a worker and in getting admitted to a college, but it will also improve overall learning. This is definitely the driving factor behind our strong enrollment in MMLA to date. But it is also the catalyst behind the school market.

However, even as school districts feel the pressure to expand the world language offerings in their school, they are just starting to recover financially from the Great Recession which slammed school budgets. The mantra I hear from the leaders of public education policy is "Doing more with Less". We are a great solution to that!

So districts are out looking for ways to improve their academic offerings -- with pressure especially in the area of 21st Century Skills -- but need to find cost effective ways to do it. Sometimes we are the team informing them of the ability to meet that demand with online learning, sometimes it is a locally driven initiative, and sometimes (yes, lets admit it) the decision is driven by the ubiquitous advertising of The Company Who Shall Not Be Mentioned.

Districts who get to the point of looking at online language solutions (and the job of our K12 partners and our talented business development team is to find them and make sure we are in front of them) will evaluate companies based on three general criteria:

QUALITY
AFFORDABILITY
EASE OF USE

If we are the highest quality (academic performance, aligned to ACTFL standards, engaging content), most affordable and easiest to use we will win every time. We've spent a lot of time in marketing and sales looking at pricing of our own products and our competitors and while we need to constantly reevaluate, I am confident that our pricing strategy won't ever lose us a deal. I am not going to go in depth on ease of use as that is multi-faceted and frankly an area that we have both competitive advantages and challenges that need to be proprietary. However, I am completely confident in stating unequivocally that we SHOULD NEVER LOSE A DEAL based on the academic quality of our products.

But, just because we were designed by academics specifically for the education market and CLEARLY are the best product on the market that doesn't mean we always win this battle. We have been working really, really hard to make sure that everyone that demos our product knows how to talk to educators about our products so that we can explain our quality. My hope is that within the next year, we have dozens of folks on our team who can explain how our courses are built based on ACTFL standards, how that works and what that means. And we are pursuing valid third party assessments so that we can demonstrate independently that we have the corner on academic excellence. But right now, not every person speaking to a customer has the same credibility and knowledge to convey our clear strength on the quality front. One of the things we are committed to doing is insuring that when we have a customer who is buying based on quality and understands how to evaluate pedagogy, that we get our best team members with deep understanding and experience to participate with the sales team in presentations.

One of those opportunities arose this week. A district in Virginia expressed a strong interest in an online language learning solution but in the initial meeting, it became clear that they had lots of good questions on pedagogy and curriculum. So, we brought out the big guns! (And by the way, if every district in the US was making decisions by asking these types of questions, we'd not only have our explosive growth but the students in our schools would be much better off .... but that is an issue for another day).

Joining Jamie & Chad & Katie (our Sales A team) in VA were Kandyce and Aline. I can't tell you I was surprised, but I was extraordinarily pleased to get feedback from the Sales Team that Kandyce and Aline blew them away. Now, we can't have them on every sales call but they are a great weapon on the important ones! Kudos to Kandyce and Aline! Leveraging all our strengths toward meeting our shared goals is a sure recipe for success.