7 Things that Go into a Winning Multi-Academy Trust Strategy

After our inaugural training webinar on ‘Selling to MATs’ yesterday, I’m back today with a quick-fire 7 tips for you to consider when developing a MAT strategy.

• 👉 If you didn’t make the webinar, I’ll be turning it into an on-demand training course. It should be live in November.

1. A Clear Roadmap for your MAT product. 

You can’t just tag a dashboard on and call it a Trust product. You need to understand the specific challenge the Trust is trying to solve, or a unique need that they have.

If the product doesn’t provide value to the people in the Trust using it, you’re not going to be interested.

Speak to Trust leaders and Central Teams to understand where there are opportunities for your product.

2. Value Driven Marketing

Trusts are a complete different segment, so you need to develop unique content, assets, and eventually events that will engage them with.

Host webinars, round-table, dinners, or even conferences. However, think about why they’re going to give you their time. They’re incredible busy.

❌ DO NOT cold email Trusts asking them to buy or book meetings before you’ve developed a relationship. This will burn your leads fast.

Say something important, interesting, or unique. Don’t be like every other EdTech.

3. Evolved Sales Processes

Trusts don’t buy in a neat linear process, often needing to defer back to school stakeholders or even asking to pilot with a small group of schools prior to making a decision.

Ensure you’re able to track that within your CRM system and account for the need to reach out and involve more stakeholders.

Procurement cycles are typically 12-24 months.

4. Differentiated Onboarding 

Trusts vary considerable. Some have their own internal technology teams. Larger Trusts even have project coordinators now. Yet other Trusts have neither, and may have team members seconded from a day-to-day school role.

To ensure you put yourself in the best light and cater to the unique needs of that Trust, develop differentiated or tiered onboarding options around ‘Do-It-With-You’ and ‘Do-It-For-You’ journeys.

I caution against ever running a DIY onboarding approach. Trust contracts can be extremely valuable so you want to ensure they onboard effectively in order to retain that contract for many years to come.

5. Support Options 

Support tickets and queries should be going through a central system, and you’ll want to run reports on tickets across the Trust. This will help you improve the outcomes from pilot projects the Trust may want to run prior to undertaking a full implementation.

Your support provision will need to evolve from an ‘all you need, any time you need us’ offer, to a tiered triage system because time-to-resolution will be a critical factor and you’ll need to set your team up to be able to quickly respond to and resolve school issues.

6. Product & User Feedback Systems.

With all this extra complexity, you’ll want to ensure you have good visibility on product metrics (usage) and sentiment scores (do users like it?).

This will enable you to understood how individual schools are getting on, how quickly implementations are going, and receive early warning signs things could go awry.

This will help you build a proactive support capability, enabling you to reach out early and resolve issues before they become major problems.

7. Experienced Team and People

To make all this possible, build out your key teams and look for people who know what they’re doing. If they’ve worked with Trusts previously, that’s a good start. People who can speak the same language as a Trust will turbo-charge your effort.

Trusts are complex, sprawling, political beasts, and what works for schools doesn’t naturally fit when talking with Trusts.

Look for commercial people with experience in training, support, project management and many other complimentary skills.

As always, thanks for reading and see you next time.

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Best, Jay