Growth manager

How to 5x our monthly demos and hit 300 new decision makers by December without relying on walk-ins, events you don't control, or chasing decision-makers who never pick up. About Ether Current Business Situation - B2B EdSaaS company offering a user-friendly admissions management CRM for schools, built to take an inquiry through to enrolment in the fastest, smoothest way without schools needing to hire or retrain tech-savvy staff. - Operates as a separate start-up entity, but sits inside the **Universal Education Group**, a Mumbai-based K-12 and higher education player with vertical integration across school verticals (books, uniforms, canteen, software). - **30-35 internal Universal schools** run the product as an internal service, plus **10 external paying schools** acquired in the last six months since go-live. - Pricing is **₹1.5L-₹2L per school per year**, deliberately set below market rate as a strategy to reach scale. Pricing flexibility is high, and for the first ~100 schools profitability on acquisition is not the priority. Sankar treats the product as a loss leader given strong LTV (₹12L-₹15L per admission relationship) and a very sticky, high-retention product. - Sales team is spread across Bangalore (2), Hyderabad (2, including the head of sales), Chennai (1 new), and Mumbai (1), with in-person demo capability in those cities. - Current acquisition mix: events, direct cold visits/walk-ins, CRM nurturing, Google Ads, some LinkedIn Sales Navigator, early SEO, and planned brand marketing. Many channels are recent and not yet proven. - **📈 Goals & Targets** **Acquire roughly 140 new schools from now until December, the majority being multi-campus chains rather than single schools.** - Scale total monthly demos from the current ~2 per day (around 14-15/month) to **~300 demos per month**, a 5x increase, since demos with the right person are the single biggest determinant of closing. - Shift the client mix so that **at least 60% are chains** (3-10 campuses), because one process replicated across campuses makes implementation easier and accelerates the school count. - Work the season deliberately: now through December is the live window, with larger schools and chains starting their admissions process around August-September and smaller schools around November-December. - **📊 Current Challenges** --- - **Inertia to change is the number one constraint.** Schools either already use a CRM or ERP module and don't want the disruption of switching, or they have no process and don't believe they need one because seats fill on legacy reasons (location, curriculum, price point). - **Trust as a new vendor.** Against an incumbent like Zoho, "how long have you been doing this?" is a losing battle on age alone. Trust only gets built through relationships, pilots/POCs, and direct decision-maker contact. - **Reaching the decision-maker is the real bottleneck, not the product.** Sankar was explicit: product is well received in demos, price is secondary, the limitation is convincing them to change and getting in front of the owner/trustee/chairman. Admissions heads act as gatekeepers and have no incentive to change (more work, no raise). The decision-maker always wants an edge, the gatekeeper just wants seats filled. - **Walk-ins don't reach decision-makers.** Roughly 50-60% of activity is walk-ins, where staff are closed off. The decision-maker rarely searches Google himself and often isn't even on email, so Google Ads reaches a searcher, not the buyer. - **💼 Ideal Customer Profile** --- - Private K-12 schools, preschools, and coaching/tuition centres (not yet universities/colleges, since required modules are still being built). - **New or competing schools** open to new relationships, OR schools that have never used such a product. - **Fees above ₹1L/year**, which correlates with curriculum: IB, IGCSE/Cambridge, and top-tier ICSE schools. CBSE is a large but different market that sells on academics and is a weaker fit. - Geographically anchored in cities with active sales presence: Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai. - Priority on chains and groups where the decision is made centrally at head office, even for franchise/licensed-name models (DPS, Birla Open Minds) where each owner still chooses their own software.