Jeremy Balius: Hey, welcome to the B2B Tech Marketing Talks podcast, where we engage with leading marketing channel leaders to get fresh perspectives and practical advice on the latest trends, effective strategies, and best practices for B2B tech marketing. I’m your host, Jeremy Bayliss. Today’s theme is SaaS value proposition.

I’m very excited because I’m joined by Gil Rogers from GR7 Marketing.

Gil is a fractional CMO helping edtech companies refine their messaging, define unique value, and drive revenue growth. He’s got a strong background in enrollment management and digital marketing. He’s led record breaking recruitment cycles. He’s played a number of roles across ed tech companies.

This was such a fascinating conversation. The way that Gil is articulating value proposition, its purpose. How to think about it, what it’s for and really bringing insight into how it should be rolled out and what type of timeframes and time to impact to expect from it, I think is really important.

Let’s get straight into it.

Hey, Gil, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Gil Rogers: Hey, Jeremy. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy Balius: Really great to connect. I’m really excited about today and what we’re talking about but Before we get into all things value proposition, I really want to go back to the origin story and find out about how you got your start.

How did you evolve and how did you get to where you are today?

Gil Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. And again, I appreciate the time. And I always love telling my superhero origin story. It’s not nearly as interesting as the Avengers, but my I started my whole career in ed tech. Years ago now, at this point as an admissions counselor at the college that I went to in Connecticut, because I didn’t want to get a real job when I graduated.

I wanted to work at a camp in Minnesota during the summer. And in order to do that, I needed a job that started in the fall night, not in the spring, right? When I graduated. And so admissions counselor was a great gig because I could just. Travel around and go recruiting and visit high schools all fall and spring and then go play in the woods all summer.

And for a couple of years that worked out well, and when my contract for that position ended, still didn’t want to get a real job. And so I got a job as an admissions counselor at a different school, just with a different title, better promotion, that sort of stuff. And so I’ve worked in higher ed.

Essentially, since I graduated from college in various roles in enrollment, management, marketing, recruitment, admissions, international engagement, all that sort of stuff. But probably about 15 years ago or so, I took the leap to the ed tech and consulting side of the desk, still working in higher ed, but helping, more than one college, helping hundreds and thousands of colleges with recruitment and marketing initiatives.

Whether it’s, lead generation for recruitment campaigns or marketing, digital marketing. I was at a virtual events and video content platform company before COVID. I was an AI chat bot company before chat GPT became all the rage. And so then about a year and a half, almost two years ago now, at this point I started my fractional CMO business where I support ed tech companies with crafting their message and telling their stories most effectively.

To introduce themselves to the industry, right? And so still helping students and schools connect or supporting students success, just with a different lens, by helping new and innovative companies with reaching the institutions that, that they’re trying to support.

Jeremy Balius: That’s fascinating. The. Breadth of experience across disciplines must serve you so well, speaking as a fractional CMO and talking to school leaders or college leaders about the different impacts across what the decisions they’re making.

Is that fair to say?

Gil Rogers: Yeah, it’s interesting because, one of my one of my litmus tests for if I’m going to work with a company is are they building something that is really student first student focused and student success oriented. And my 1st, the 1st company I worked with.

In my business is a company by the name of science interactive. And what they do is they develop online curriculum for science courses, right? Online education is nothing new clearly, it’s taking an online business course or a history course is a lot different than a biology course where you have to do dissections and you have to do experiments and you have to have these hands on elements that you can’t necessarily replicate with a virtual environment.

And so they have this kind of mixed use type of a scenario where they. Have the online components, but then it’s actually ship physical lab kits to the home or to the dorm room of the student who’s participating in the course. So it’s a really great way to support student persistence, because now that those credits are transferable, they’re at a community college and transferring to a 4 year school, it’s it makes it so the content is accessible.

So that really checks that those boxes as far as student focused in students 1st, right? And so now fast forward to 2 years later. I’ve worked at learning design companies, helping with online curriculum development. I’ve worked at virtual content providers doing lead generation and college matching type services.

And now I’m helping in online dental programs with with implementing their apps at the colleges that they’re working with in dental school. So there’s a lot. I I used to just recruit for a college and talk about how great the English program was. Now I’m helping, Institutions build content for their English programs, right?

It’s definitely, like you said, depth and breadth moved beyond just the enrollment marketing, but really the entire student life cycle and the higher ed ecosystem.

Jeremy Balius: That’s amazing. Tell me about who you’re working with on the other side. Is it a mix of roles and disciplines, or do you tend to have a core focus of roles that you’re working with?

What is, yeah, I support.

Gil Rogers: Typically, I’m working with small and medium size ed tech companies that are, or startups within established ed tech companies which effectively operate as small ed tech companies, or at least they should be. And so I am typically sitting with the CEO on a strategic basis, helping with guiding, marketing, planning, positioning strategy for the company.

And then depending on the size of the company I’m working with, I, I’ve either, I’ve done a number of different. Methods, but the two main ones are, I serve as the fractional CMO reporting to the CEO on all marketing activities. I can hire people, I can fire people, I can set up the campaign and it’s campaigns and work with internal resources.

And then there are other places that I’ve worked with that I’m in that role, but they don’t have internal resources. They don’t have a marketing manager or a web developer or a graphic designer or those sorts of things dedicate or, SEO and SEM team, all those sorts of resources. Resources that a established company might.

And so then I work with my bank of freelancers that I’ve met and coordinated with and worked with at various places over the years to effectively be the fully outsourced B2B marketing team for the company. Both ways work. It all just depends on how the company is established and operating with the end goal of eventually me not needing to be there anymore, right?

If we’re doing this right, and the company’s growing at A rapid enough pace, eventually I’m able to step back and they can, they’ll, they would hire a full time CMO and work with either again, the resources I’ve implemented or ideally promote from within their existing team.

Jeremy Balius: Got it. So just so that I understand the context, the ed tech startups or startups within established or standalone are selling into higher ed. So their target customer would be leadership teams or I. T. teams or whomever inside universities, colleges.

Gil Rogers: Correct. Correct. Yeah. So depending on the company that I’ve worked with, some of them are focusing on enrollment and marketing.

Some are focusing on the chief academic officers. With online curriculum development some, it’s the dean of the dental school or the dean of the nursing program. It really just depends or the head of it, of what doesn’t work with some CRM companies here and there, right? So they all have different folks within the higher ed ecosystem that they’re trying to work with.

And my job is to help them with effectively telling their story to that. audience so that they become the trusted partner that provides the service that they provide.

Jeremy Balius: I want to circle back on this in a moment because I think that ideal client profile, buying committee, whom are we speaking to is going to be important in this conversation later. So I’m going to Park that for a moment, but I love how you’ve just brought up the storytelling component. And, we’re here talking about value propositions and I’d love to get your view as you are stepping into an organization to support them.

What is the most common view, would you say, across the board in the way that EdTech companies and SaaS companies are thinking about value proposition? What is the most common state that you are entering?

Gil Rogers: I think that a lot of companies, for better or for worse, they are focused on What they do and not why they do it when they are talking to the, to their customers and with good reason, right?

I think a lot of the companies that I’m working with, they have a new product, a new approach, they’re solving a problem or they’re solving a future problem. Cause they’re that forward thinking and visionary that they’re saying, Hey, we really we see this becoming an issue and we’re being proactive.

And so the, but the pitfall is that you A lot of times, and because the, the CEO is focused on so many things. They’re gravitating towards the what, right? The widget, the tool, the feature. This is what it does. And this is, and that’s why it’s important.

But the reality is that’s not why it’s important. That’s, that is the feature and function that it does the why. Is what is the problem is that we’re trying to solve for right and helping the people helping the potential customer to understand and make them believe what you believe, right?

Which is this is going to be a problem down the road or this is a current problem or that, is it a. Recruitment issue. Is it a conversion issue? Is it a retention issue? Is it a persistence issue? These are the types of things that need to be more effectively told. I was working at a company and like I mentioned earlier, I was at a chatbot company before AI was all the rage, right?

So very forward thinking on the cutting edge. They were doing things that no one else was doing and they were looking at it from the lens of. How do we help identify students who are at risk of dropping out earlier than a faculty member who is flagging them in the student success system as, oh, this person hasn’t shown up for six weeks.

So now I’m going to say, hey, they’re a flight risk. That’s probably four weeks too late at that point. And The, but the reality was they were positioning themselves as a chat bot company or text chat bot via text message. That’s feature focused, right? And everybody gets, it gets lost in the noise of all the chat bots and all the text messaging flat platforms in the world.

And so what we effectively leave. Did there, as we said, you’re, we’re not a chat bot company. We are a student insights and a student success company, right? And a chat bot is the method in which we gather our data and insights and intelligence to better inform your team. And so we stopped talking about the features of the chat bot, where then we start getting into conversations about what questions it’s asking and how it’s answering them and all that you get, you go down all those rabbit holes of features versus alignment on.

We all agree that we can do better about supporting student success. We all agree that there is a college completion issue in the United States. We all believe and agree that we need to do better with making sure students graduate with the credential that they came here to do. Now let’s talk about how we can better accomplish that.

That’s a much different conversation than, hey, we’ve got a chatbot that text messages students every couple of weeks to check in on them and see if they’re struggling with food insecurity, right? There’s a, there’s just a different level of conversation and a different level of outcome. So I think to answer your question about the kind of the storytelling element, it’s really about and it can take a little bit of time and it ca takes a couple of different swings, right?

You, I you, you’re not gonna hit a home run every single at bat. You’ve gotta experiment and test what the feedback is gonna be from the market. But once you’ve got gotten that, now you’re in the, now you’re in the business of category creation and you’re in the business of really defining and putting your stake in the ground as we are the company that solves this big problem and nobody else can do it.

’cause we’re the ones that defined it.

Jeremy Balius: Isn’t it so interesting that tech leaders are features led and compete on the features when a value proposition tackles the why and is ultimately the real reason for the purchase, right?

Gil Rogers: I think that’s one of the, it, again, it goes back to the pitfall of a lot of founders are product people, not marketing people.

And that’s a great thing, right? Because they are the ones who are coming up with the idea that’s going to solve the problems, but by nature, they’re not, unless they are a product marketing person, their nature by their nature is not to. Necessarily come up with the big story, right? The sales story that it what’s tricky is there’s that weird push, pull and push between that though, because a lot of times the CEOs at the, at these companies are also the best ones at telling the story, right?

And so once they have that message, then they can evangelize and they’re the ones posting the thought leadership content on LinkedIn, and they’re the ones speaking at keynotes and they’re the ones who are the face of the brand, but that’s also why you get so many founder, co founder. Type situations where you have an operational person who their job is, the, is the management of the product and the, and driving those pieces forward.

And then you have the outward facing evangelist that, that is, has, is really on message and has the inspirational voice and is able to get that message out there. And again, I think a lot of that comes with growth and time and refining of that message by. Having conversations in the market.

And they get a lot of help too, right? Investor types who have been, who’ve been through this process a thousand times can help them with that sort of a process you get a good marketing leader that can can help you with refining those messages. That those are all tactical ways to get back to that, get, getting back to the why and the messaging around the why your company exists.

Your company doesn’t exist to be a app here. Your company exists to help students. Succeed. And now it’s how they go about doing that and what the product is

Jeremy Balius: As you are stepping into a business and are having this discussion with the CEO. About this very thing. How accepting are they of this?

Or does it require guidance to show them how valuable the value proposition?

Gil Rogers: I’ve had more success getting buy in from CEOs. Over the past two years as a fractional CMO coming in as a consultant, external voice, whatever you want to call it, then I ever did as the VP of marketing or head of marketing or whatever internal title you want to call it at companies that I’ve worked for.

I actually, I had one company that I worked for the COO straight up told me that they don’t believe they’ll ever see eye to eye on how to market. The company, which is why we parted ways. And that was a full time role. And a lot of that has to do with they, you hire someone and you want them to be a doer and to execute your vision of what you think marketing should be, especially at that small and medium sized company.

Profile where the founder and CEO is to have all the answers and they still know everything that about every client. And they still know everything about everything that’s going on. Cause the company is so small and they’re plugged into everything. And so they don’t need they either don’t need a head of marketing.

Who’s going to come in with big ideas to, Create a plan and a strategy, or they don’t want to listen to that person, or they can’t afford that person, right? The, one of the main reasons why my company exists is because the companies that I worked at prior to starting it, the biggest challenge we had was resourcing for marketing, because when you hire a full time marketer, You’ve got to hire them.

You’ve got to pay their salary and their benefits and their equity and whatever else it is that you’re going to use to attract great talent to your organization. And by the time that’s all done, now you don’t have resources to do the advertising campaign that marketing person wants to do, or effectively do the conferences and the swag and the, and all of the stuff that the marketing person wants to spend resources on or I should say invest resources on.

And that’s the big distinction is that everything turns into spending money, not investing money. And then you start to go into a spiral with your marketing organization. And so now that I’m an external party coming in and I’m the consultant that’s helping to develop the strategy and the plan, it’s a, it’s an interesting hybrid kind of an approach where.

Now I’m com. Now I’m the CMO in org chart purposes, but I’m not a full-time employee. I’m still seen and supporting as that, as this the expert, external expert that’s coming in to, to help define and solve the problems. And so I’m not being brought in to be the doer. That the CEO or COO or whoever just wants to execute on their vision of what marketing should be.

I’m there because they don’t have a vision for what marketing should be, and they need help. And I think that’s a different, just a much different approach, particularly in those smaller and medium sized ed tech companies where that’s the difference and that’s the need.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, fascinating. I wonder if being an external party also keeps you out of the informal social politics and gives you the ability to be an external advisor who just wants what’s best for you.

You don’t need to play the yes, man.

Gil Rogers: Oh, certainly. And I think that’s one of those things that’s been the case with consultants quote unquote for forever, right? Is there are people who will joke internally and they’ll say, I, I’ve said this a thousand times, but then the consultant comes in and says the same exact thing and now they finally listen, right?

And so there is some credence to that, right? Where that the consultant is going to come in and reinforce, What’s best for the organization without the interpersonal feelings and politics and everything else. I’m a, I will say I’m a huge relationships guy. I really value people.

And that to me is one of the most important things is listening to and hearing the people internally at the company, because that’s where you’re going to get. Most of the best ideas, the challenge that these organizations have is filtering and synthesizing the best ones and you can come in and build those relationships, but then filter and synthesize the best ones for internal and external consumption.

And that includes helping leadership with best, best defining their value prop for the market. And once they get, if they can’t get that they’re not going to go very far. And that’s. Why it’s so important to make those types of investments this early.

Jeremy Balius: Agreed. Agreed. How do you start that?

Where do you even begin?

Gil Rogers: So I would say that my step one with the majority of the clients that I work with now is because when I first started, it was a lot of project work and quick step in and just make decisions type things. And I’ve got the opportunity now to be a little bit more selective with my work, but also More thoughtful with my approach, right?

And so I think that the first thing that I’m doing in that first 30 days is a lot of listening and a lot of a lot of understanding. Okay. What are the get? I’m going to hear a lot of the what? To start, but help to figure out, okay, what is that? What is that next level? What is that challenge?

And I’ll give you the great example that one of the companies that I’m working with, I just started with about three weeks ago. And so we’re in the midst of that process now it became abundantly clear. And this is going to be different for each company, but it’ll surface eventually.

What is, where’s the gap, right? And and one of the things I noticed is that, sales was doing a lot of their own kind of development of like microsite things and proactive outreach type work and that sort of thing. And I said to the head of sales, every organization I’ve been in, when sales people start doing that stuff, it means that marketing isn’t working for them correctly.

And her response was, yep, that’s exactly it, right? When sales is making their own marketing stuff. And when you have a marketing department, that means your marketing department Better listen to sales. And so for me, it’s about it, like being a doctor and prescribing the problem, and identifying it for you, you see the symptoms and you get to, and you could be right that prescription and you say, we need to do this. So it’s not a one size fits all with everybody of what the first step is going to be aside from. Listening and being and asking lots of questions, right? I think that’s the being curious, right?

To borrow from Ted lasso, right? Is it be curious and then just ask a lot of questions and that’ll help us to identify what the biggest problem and challenge to overcome is. And a lot of times it’s going to boil down to working on identifying what are our ideal customer profile, what’s our ideal customer profile, and what are the big, what’s the biggest challenge that they are trying to solve for?

That’s what our value prop needs to speak to. It doesn’t need to speak to internal constituents. It needs to speak to, which I mean, it will, but by default it will, because it’ll, it’s going to resonate to with your audience. And that means that your team is going to be fighting whatever that is.

Problem and challenge is on behalf of the clients. And it’s the it’s the, it’s honestly, it’s the same challenge of when I worked at colleges, is in colleges and for profit entities are very similar. When you really think about it, colleges don’t like to call press prospective students leads, but that’s what they are.

They don’t want to call admissions counselors, salespeople, but that’s what they are. And and They also need to understand that who their target customer is and what message needs to apply to them, even though there’s competing priorities and competing audiences at the college side.

It’s they’ve got alumni. They’ve got prospective students. They’ve got parents. I’ve got the local community. They’ve got faculty. They’ve got fans of their sports teams. They’ve got the so they but yeah. What’s the audience driving the most revenue for most colleges? It’s tuition from undergraduate students.

So their audience for their homepage of their website should be prospective students and their families, right? Period full stop. That’s gotta be it. Same thing with a college, my, or with, sorry, same thing with a ed tech company, we’ve got investors, we’ve got end users, we’ve got decision makers. We’ve got our internal sales team.

Who are the ones who are the ones signing the checks decision makers at the companies or at the colleges, we’ve got to create content that resonates for them. The wrinkle in this space in ed tech is you need a very solid top down and bottom up approach when it comes to your content plan because looking at academic content specifically.

You can market to the dean of the engineering school all you want, but if the faculty of the engineering department don’t want to use the modules or the program that you’re trying, that you’ve developed, it’ll get tanked in committee. And so you need to be likable. You need to be respected. You need to be trusted.

And that’s why content is king, particularly in ed tech marketing.

Jeremy Balius: First question is, can you give me an idea of how long that sales cycle is?

Gil Rogers: For a, for an ed tech company selling into higher ed?

Jeremy Balius: Yes.

Gil Rogers: I would say that on the short end, a sales cycle is 90 days on the, on, from an ed tech company selling into higher ed for some, depending on the deal size, depending on the product and what you’re solving for, who you’re selling to, how, if it’s, institutional wide versus department specific, it could be a two year process.

Because a lot of it could depend on what their current vendor is for whatever product you’re trying to sell. If you’re a CRM provider, chances are the school you’re talking to is already in a contract with another company that isn’t going to expire for at least a year and a half, but they’re starting to search because they’re not happy with features, functionality.

Service, whatever it is from their current provider, right? And so now it’s, and I’m doing some research right now for a CRM provider to better understand what are the wants, needs and desires of specific segments of institutions. They’re doing that research now, knowing that it’s going to be a year and a half, two year sales cycle to get.

Institutions to make that change and make that decision. And that is the, that’s the hardest thing for ed tech CEOs that don’t have a ton of higher ed experience is understanding that lengthy sales cycle. And then you’ve got to deal with the patients of your board and your investors and look at the runway of your, with your rev, with your current revenue and what your future revenue plans are.

It’s a very, and that’s why. Such challenging environment, right? Is making, is navigating that process, which again is why you can’t over invest in marketing upfront, right? And so when you’re working in this, in the, in a smaller and a medium sized ed tech company, hiring a full time VP of marketing or head of marketing or whatever it is probably not the right move.

And I’m saying this as a past head of marketing at a company that’s exactly what happened, right? Is that they the company I was working at brought me on to lead, The development of the marketing plan, but nine months, 10 months in, it became abundantly clear that they needed to actually invest in engineering and customer success because what they wanted to do is focus on current customer growth, not new logos.

And that’s a different strategic priority than bringing on someone who’s really good at pre funnel and top of funnel type work.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, that’s so interesting. The reason why I asked that first is I would imagine that as you are galvanizing the team on a core, why this is how we are presenting ourselves to market, and this is how we are going to articulate it addressing pain points of not just the specific buyer.

But also a whole range of other people who are either going to support this process by way of a committee or or they are going to be internal ambassadors to, to help get us advanced within that sales cycle for a cycle that long, that is a ton of content. It is. And I would imagine that for those without the background in the space would be thinking value prop done.

Email campaign launch, where are my leads immediately when it sounds like there is so much more brand work that’s going into this work in terms of awareness, in terms of reach, in terms of remembrance to get anywhere as you’re selling into higher ed.

Gil Rogers: I would say that you hit the, you’ve hit the nail on the head and that’s the hardest thing for a lot, there’s be the two hardest things are being curious.

And being patient, right? And, when you’ve got that message down and it’s starting to resonate. The propensity is that the minute you start to see a little momentum is when patients has run out on outcomes and then start pulling the plugs on plug on things when what you really need to be doing is doubling down on the channels that work.

And that’s where analytics come in. But it’s also where just a lot of experience comes in and go and listening to the people listening to your customers. Defining your buyer persona and really doubling down on that. And I think that people, they rush to, and this goes back to the very beginning of the conversation.

This goes back to the, if you’re focused on your features and your, and the widget, then you are not going to have the patience for the brand work that needs to happen, the SEO work that needs to happen, the content work that needs to happen, building a likable, trusted brand.

Is more important than your product being perfect. And that’s the reality in education, right? People will deal with warts of your product. If you’ve done all the work to invest in. Building a relationship, building a quality experience, having good customer support. And that’s the tricky part is that’s then that’s not sass quote unquote, right?

That’s not the, that’s not true sass because true sass wouldn’t need a customer support team helping a client get going. But there, but in the early stages of an ed tech company, you’ve really gotta be a managed services company that. Has your own software because otherwise your end user is too busy to learn anything new.

They’re going to go with some free off the shelf thing. That doesn’t do nearly as much as what yours does, but it’s free and off the shelf or just good enough. And I’ll give you a great example there. Most CRM platforms have. Text message functionality built into them right out of the box. There’s text message functionality.

Most CRM platforms, the out of the box text message functionality sucks, but it’s built in and it’s there right now. There are also a dime a dozen. Platforms and providers in the space that are CRM agnostic that develop text messaging solutions that use AI and have a combination of human and AI and have met different ways to branch and message and whatever, right?

But if push comes to shove, an institution will go with 70 percent of you. And built in versus you because you cost more on top of what they already have. So you need to create that case and have that positive relationship and demonstrate that those outcomes to make that investment worth it for them, otherwise they’re going to go with the cheap off the shelf stuff that isn’t good enough, isn’t as good as what you’re doing, but it checks the box.

It says that they’re doing it so they can say to their boss. Oh yeah we’re doing texting. It sucks. Doesn’t work half the time, but you know what? It doesn’t. So you can make up for your tool. Not be with all that said your tool can’t be terrible and not work at all, right? You need to have, it needs to work, but you can make up for missing features here and there with quality user experience.

Quality relationship and quality support. And then that gets you that time and runway to be able to build the true self service hands off true SAS type of a solution.

Jeremy Balius: My wheels are turning. This is so fascinating. So it almost sounds like the true SAS as an ambition is. A decade away.

It, it sounds like there is so much runway required to achieve that, that possibly the liquidity event happens even before you reach that point.

You’re still running the customer success integration, system integrator type service as part of your functionality or, yeah, I’ve been at, I’ve been at many places that say that they’re a SAS company, but then when you do the customer service. emails and you do the, net promoter score surveys and you do the post ticket surveys and you ask people about what they like best about XYZ company.

Gil Rogers: It’s always my account manager. It’s always the customer support that we got when whatever happened. And so it’s almost Your feature, something breaking in your platform is what demonstrates the true value of your company, which are the people, right? And that’s hard for someone who wants to just build a true SAS solution to, to really wrap their head around and say, Oh yeah, we’re still got to invest in client support and client success, account management, those sorts of things.

Because. It’s not a, it’s not an overnight thing, especially in education, right? Education works glacially slow. And so that you still need that hands on element, but that doesn’t mean that the impact of your company, the valuation of your company, the, the liquidity event. Date shouldn’t have value and weight.

It’s just truly understanding and managing what your expectations are with all of the other numbers that are impacted by having people versus being true software, right? And Clearly your EBITDA margins are going to be different when you have people in client success roles and not having people in client success roles.

These are all things that are, that change. And we can do hundreds of podcasts on all that sort of stuff. I know enough to be dangerous about finance. I work in marketing, right? My, my marketing one 10 professor in college used to always say that everything is marketing and marketing is everything except accounting.

But I know enough about accounting and those numbers to be dangerous. But it’s, I think that those are. Realities of ed tech is that you’re never going to get pet. Oh, you’re never going to cross that chasm to true SAS without a bridge built with human hands. And I think that’s an element that so many people try to skip. And there’s a very rare instances where you’re able to just go straight to software that colleges use.

Jeremy Balius: So if I’m the CEO. of an ed tech company and I’m thinking about value proposition and I go hard on what sets us apart from the free versions is our people.

Gil Rogers: Depending on the company, I think there’s probably one or two other pieces to that story to make it compelling, but people are going to be a part of it, right? It’s going to be the service support. And the care, right? And, there are cliches that a lot of companies will put in there in their branding.

So we got to figure out a better way to say it. But built by higher ed for higher ed, right? We recruited a bunch of people who’ve worked in the space forever to come here and do these things. That can be part of your story, right? But the it’s got to be even a level above that. That’s more of the how part of it, right?

It’s got to be a level above. That is why we exist and we exist. To support better student outcomes to solve a big problem to solve your big problem, right? And and if you’re marketing to higher education, it’s gotta be an understanding of students and student outcomes. If that’s your, if that’s your area, right?

Obviously, if you’re working in alumni and development and in those spaces, you’re going to be speaking in even different language. But for if I’m talking to marketing enrollment, academic affairs, instructional technology, instructional design. It’s got to be about how we’re redefining learning or how we are redefining student engagement or how these are all cliches that we still got to build on, which is why people like me have jobs, right?

Because we have to help to reiterate and refresh that story. The hardest thing about marketing, like you said, with a long sales cycle, especially Hardest thing about marketing is being able to tell the same story 365 times because you have to tell that story every single day of the year. And I think there’s always opportunities to, to reinforce and refresh that, that message in that story while also remaining consistent to your why this is

Jeremy Balius: all fantastic.

I’ve I’ve picked up so much. In this conversation, I’m going to need to reflect on really appreciate all this. What’s the best way for people to get in touch?

Gil Rogers: Yeah, I would say LinkedIn is a great place. I love LinkedIn. I’m on there pretty regularly. I’ve been doing a lot more lurking on LinkedIn than I have been posting recently, which is actually quite refreshing to not have that, the pressures of the vanity metrics of the reach of my posts.

But just find me on Gil Rogers on LinkedIn or gr7marketing. com. Is my website. You can reach out to me through there as well.

Jeremy Balius: Awesome. Thanks so much.

Gil Rogers: Jeremy. Thank you. I appreciate it. And we’ll talk soon.

Jeremy Balius: Thanks.

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