Interview of the Week...

Welcome Natasha! Please share a quick summary of your background:

Natasha is an edtech leader with a deep passion for delivering transformative marketing strategies to support the growth of edtech companies. She currently serves as a venture partner and marketing advisor at Emerge Education, a global edtech venture capital firm dedicated to fuelling the next generation of education innovation. Prior to joining Emerge, Natasha drove growth through marketing at Coursera as the EMEA Region Chief Marketing Officer. Among her responsibilities were developing marketing strategies to help students identify new learning and career paths.  Natasha began her edtech career at Blackboard, where she ran global marketing across all products and geographies. During her time at Blackboard, she led the launch of several products across the regions.

Describe your previous role at Coursera. What were your primary goals?

My previous role at Coursera was EMEA Chief Marketing Officer where I was responsible for leading a team to drive growth through marketing across the company’s 3 business lines: Enterprise, Degrees and Consumer. For the Consumer business, I was tasked with driving revenue by attracting new paying learners to the platform. For Degrees, I was responsible for delivering new enrolled students to degrees in the EMEA region. And for Enterprise, delivering highly qualified leads that would hopefully convert into sales opportunities.

What single GTM channel was most effective in acquiring high-quality, paying subscribers? Why?

It differs by business line. For the enterprise business, as an example, the most effective marketing channel was our own hosted events whether virtual or in-person, because you’re not competing for airtime with other providers, you can curate your content and message to the audience, and you can create a level of intimacy that is relevant and targeted.

Which metrics did you see working well? Why?

For B2B, the marketing metrics that work well are the conversion of leads across the funnel. This is a good indicator if your marketing initiatives are landing well. Of course, it’s important to ensure you have close alignment with your SDR and sales teams on the purpose of the initiative, the target audience, and messaging, etc. Once that is squared away, then you should see leads that are of higher quality, and hopefully those leads convert through the funnel at a high rate.

 But the highest order metric is twofold: marketing contribution to pipeline, and LTV:CAC. This helps you assess the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

Which metric(s) did not live up to your expectations? Why? What could have been done differently?

The volume of leads does not live up to my expectation, nor does the reverse waterfall to calculate how many leads you need. Although it’s important as a guide, it can give a distorted picture, that’s why conversion is a better metric.

Please share an example of a sales-marketing campaign that was particularly successful.

At Blackboard, we coordinated the global launch of a new accessibility-friendly product called Ally. 

We worked alongside the GTM and Product teams on a systemised approach to reduce friction in the sales process.

We followed a multi-channel approach (social, PR, sales kits for the Sales team) and ensured there were clear CTAs for efficient lead capture. We launched during World Accessibility Day and promoted the brand across all geographies, starting from APAC and ending in the US, to underscore our status as a global company. 

This helped create a “halo effect” for Sales and there was continued interest in Ally for a long time thereafter.

The curated content library market for businesses (B2B) is very competitive. What do you think Coursera has done successfully to differentiate in this segment?

We followed a more personalised approach to content to help our corporate customers be more resilient and achieve their specific L&D goals.

Content was mapped against specific roles and were aligned with targeted skills. On top of our high grade content library, we also provided a more tailored content curation service for some companies. Moreover, the content was diversified, across general business skills, technical areas and data.

Edtech is becoming increasingly crowded in quite a few segments. What can a scaleup today really do to cut through the noise?

I’d say the most important thing is to build a customer / user community so that you can use them as testimony to the value your product delivers. It’s age-old wisdom but still rings true, buyers will listen to recommendations from their peers and trusted sources when creating a short list of options.   

Related to this is to have clear pillars for what your brand stands for and then be consistent across all the touchpoints you have with your target audience. Are your brand values apparent? And is the brand experience and persona apparent in your website, your LinkedIn profile, your sales and customer success teams, and even internally?

The third is a relentless focus on the customer experience, which is related to the first point I made. They will become your most vocal advocates if they feel a connection to your product and service.  

What advice would you give edtech scale-ups today to ensure they truly become scalable and profitable?

It may seem vague, but as you scale, you should continue to capture feedback on your product market fit. This is because you’ll secure new customer types, expand to new geographies, and potentially add new products to the portfolio. So, you want to continually assess your PMF and update it with new insights as you go along. This should serve as an ongoing guide for your GTM strategy.

Choose 1 keyword that shapes a high-performing GTM culture in an edtech organization. Why?

Focus. It’s tempting as you scale, and especially in a competitive market to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. But without focus, you can run even the best performing teams towards burnout. If a GTM sets out a well-formed strategy at the start of the year, the core areas of focus will (or should) be apparent to the organisation. And everyone will (or should) understand their role in the strategy. While it’s okay to be agile and there should be room for pivots along the path, the strategy is the vision on the horizon – it’s clarity of destination for the year, 3 years, etc. This inherently gives focus, and I believe that shapes a high-performing GTM culture in any organisation, edtech or beyond.

That's all for now folks!

Like this newsletter? Please click “Subscribe” above to receive future editions from the world of Edtech. Comment below to let us know what you think. Please contact Tiago Mateus to also ask for a specific write-up / analysis in a GTM area that concerns you.

Tiago Mateus has 20+ years experience in SaaS, EdTech and Learning from start-ups, scale ups and enterprise. He was CEO, CRO x2, BD leader in a $100M international unit and managed over 100 people collectively across all functions. He has worked across all edtech verticals, across 50+ countries and speaks 5 languages.