Alps - Anonymous employee Alps Education Employee Review

The team are a decent set of people and easy to get along with, and the product itself is quite good.

Working in sales at Alps is really difficult because it's a really difficult product to sell effectively for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's wildly expensive for what it is, and despite what it costs it's doesn't really offer much more value than it's competitor products that cost in most cases about half. The product serves both KS4 and 5, and at KS4 the value proposition is almost null, and winning new business against the likes of Sisra/4Matrix is impossible. Because of the above, namely price and value, churn is really high among clients, meaning that growth is stagnant and appears to have been for quite some time - the company has been around 23 years or so and serves about 1100 schools in total - compare that to their competitors and, well.. The way that the sales side of things operates is uncoordinated and hectic. There appears to be no real plan in place and a disproportionate amount of time is spent cold calling schools - this is the complete wrong approach to this type of market, but raising this and suggesting alternatives leads to nothing really, the daily call metrics seem to be all anyone cares about and it's massively frustrating having your entire 'output' measured by how many calls you've made, irrespective of whether you actually spoke to anyone or not - because trying to call busy school leaders and expecting to get through isn't the right way, obviously. Allowing a pointless and arbitrary 'performance metric' to dictate everything is flawed - I think many people know this, but there's an unwillingness from the powers that be to consider anything else. Sales is also made difficult by the lack of actual leads - there's 3 people working in marketing and the sum total of that is a handful of emails that go out a few times a month, it's madness. Even then, the approach and messaging on them is largely the same, there's never anything new, and to make it worse every time an email is sent, it's going largely completely cold and usually to the wrong person - despite this, it's then added to the CRM as a new 'lead'. These aren't even close to leads, you're then calling people who don't know who you are, don't need what you're offering and even if do get a nibble, they retreat when you tell them what it costs. Low sales also isn't helped by the lack of attended events - they don't go to BETT or SaaS etc, instead senior management fly off to the UAE, Dubai, and other far flung ridiculous places to attend events that don't really seem to yield enough to justify the cost of them, but they get a free holiday and get to tell people they're attending a conference abroad which massages their egos a bit so all good I guess. And one of the most draining things is attending a stand up every morning that serves no observable purpose. Everyone joins at 8.50 on the dot, tells the rest of the company what they plan to do with their day, which is nearly always the same as the previous day, week, month, year. Then, last thing in the afternoon we all do the same thing again and regurgitate what we said that morning, all the while you can just see that everyone probably agrees it's pointless and offers nothing other than to waste a bit of people's time. I assume it's some lacklustre attempt at team building in what is a heavily remote company, but it's pointless and reeks of micromanagment, a bit like the narrow minded tracking of daily phone calls.

A supporting and hard working environment, led by a brilliant CEO. The care for the product is evident in all corners of the business. This makes for a very customer focused, switched on environment.

Hard to think of any! Thoroughly enjoyed my time here.