Simplilearn beefs up marketing team in push to sell to enterprises

Bengaluru: Education start-up Simplilearn Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which provides online certification and training courses for professionals, has hired a chief marketing officer based in the US as it seeks to tie up with large enterprises based there.

“We decided that for the kind of space that we are in, enterprises have huge budgets to train their employees. Two quarters back we decided to spend a lot of our energy on the US market, and build a strong brand, and that’s why we hired Mark Moran, who has two decades of experience as our CMO,” said Krishna Kumar, chief executive officer, Simplilearn.

Currently, Simplilearn’s offerings for individuals make up 80% of its revenue, with the rest coming from enterprises. To increase revenue from enterprises at least three-fold in the next two years, it has hired 25 people in the US for their enterprise sales, customer success and marketing divisions.

While individuals take one-time courses, enterprises engage with Simplilearn on a yearly-contract basis, making them far more lucrative.

Simplilearn is one of the largest certification-providing start-ups in India, employing 450 people and training 20,000 people every month on the back of $28 million it has raised from multiple funds.

The main drawbacks of selling to large enterprises are the effort and resources required to customise for each, as they would have different requirements.

To get around this, Simplilearn said that its core offerings for each course remain the same for all companies, but that it customises the case studies for each company to make it more relevant.

The firm has also been working on adding features that large enterprises need for its course-delivery system.

“We’ve been making a lot of changes in our product geared for enterprises. For example, reporting is a very big requirement for them. We have that.

Having labs for training is another, we have that too,” said Kumar.

Simplilearn has also changed its offerings so that they could be easily integrated with the already existing learning systems within enterprises.

Another concern for online education companies are the course completion rates—the number of people who sign up for courses vs those who actually complete them.