Sales + Commercials at Cadmus

Our Commercial Team members are our people on the ground, working with institutions worldwide and tackling problems related to scale. The relationships we have with our customers are core to our shared success, which is why our customer-centric approach to Sales and Customer Success is so important to us as a business.

Our approach to sales

We took a first-principles approach when building out our sales function — starting from the ground up to understand the problems we were solving and all the people involved. This meant thousands of hours researching our customers and stakeholders, designing impactful solutions, finding ways to engage purposefully, and constantly iterating based on our experience. While there’s still a way to go, we genuinely believe that the best way to connect with our customers is through a direct sales approach — it’s how we’ve been able to partner with a third of Australian universities so far.

Universities and education providers can be complex organisations, made up of multiple stakeholders, decision-makers, and strategic objectives. This means it’s vital that we spend time engaging and understanding the challenges of everyone involved. (Oh, if only organisations could agree to implement enterprise software after one meeting!) And once a customer agrees to use our software, we continue our engagement process, forming genuine partnerships and ensuring our customers achieve remarkable outcomes. 

A well-structured engagement should facilitate a seamless experience for customers, guiding them from a pilot, to growth, and finally to enterprise-wide usage.

Our Commercial Team goals

We truly believe that our solution can drive meaningful educational change and want as many teachers and students as possible to have access to the Cadmus platform. Our main goal is to expand our customer base; connecting with customers in innovative ways to achieve this.

As we grow, our challenge is then to maintain this at scale. While we have some ideas, we still have a long way to go. It’s an exciting challenge that will involve working closely with our Product and Marketing teams to build a product-led solution that can scalably support new customer adoption, onboarding, and growth — all with a highly personal touch. 

How we work together

Every quarter the Commercial Team comes together to agree on our biggest commercial problems. We sit down and work out the best way to solve these challenges, scope out projects, and put together cross-functional teams. We then carve out goals for each project (using our OKR system) and schedule our projects into sprints. Once the quarter is planned, we go for it. As a lean team, we’ve found this to be a great way to prioritise work, work collaboratively, and ensure we’re all doing the most impactful work.

Living by our values

Our company values reflect who we are as individuals and collectively as a team. Here are some of the ways our values come through in our day-to-day.

Show you care

Great sales and customer success people genuinely want to help. We show we care by listening to our customers, going the extra mile, and finding ways to positively impact everyone we interact with.

Be resilient

Having the strength to persevere when you face setbacks can be the difference between gaining or losing a potential customer. We believe in our solution and each other, and know that things will eventually line up.

Challenge assumptions

When we start a new project, we never know all the answers. But using first principles thinking to go through a good process has been the best way to move forward.

Some recent wins

• Breaking into the UK higher education market with a flagship Russell Group university

• Being selected for the Amazon Web Services partner program, which gives us access to global sales and marketing support 

• Growing our customer base by 200% this year 

The best bits

Universities love our solution (probably because we developed it in conjunction with the University of Melbourne), and we love being able to share it with them. When we talk to prospective customers, they typically get really excited about the potential it could have at their institution — even more so when we release a new feature that they’ve wanted. 

Similarly, it’s incredible to see growth at an institution over time — from acquiring a new customer, nurturing relationships, championing their success, to finally seeing the long term impacts on learning and student outcomes with our product. Take a look at our case studies to see what we mean.

If you're interested in joining our Commercial Team or learning more about other areas of the business, head to our Careers page for more information.