Karen Sanders Email & Phone Number

Smarthinking

Responsible for setting education-related quality, strategy, and policies for all STEM, Business Studies, and Nursing 24/7 online tutoring. Handle all recruitment, training, staffing, operations, and administration as well as program development. Facilitate new relationships, programs, and initiatives intended to drive new business with numerous prospective clients, including both internal and external stakeholders. Collaborate with vendors, clients, and internal staff to enhance education quality in product development and delivery.Accomplishments• Oversee a team of 250 tutors to meet all service levels, including student satisfaction levels exceeding 95% with overall business delivering 1M sessions per year• Manage 5-7 vendor relationships to ensure accurate staffing, pedagogy, and overall client satisfaction • Collaborate with Sales teams to drive revenue by serving as a subject-matter expert for sales opportunities and RFPs• Implement program support for new subject offerings (Security and Networking) and Pearson initiatives (Pearson+)

Leveraged my experience in the education space to provide sales, marketing, and operational expertise to clients. Managed all aspects of the business including business development, project planning, execution, and billing.Projects included:• Establishment of a marketing and implementation strategy for a statewide education data product deployment including pricing strategies• Implementation of a statewide educator survey and packaging of results to drive product development and marketing strategy recommendations• Expansion of a marketing and social media strategy for a professional development company, including content generation as a ghostwriter

Provided strategic direction and execution of projects on market analysis, go-to-market planning and relationship management.Select Projects:• Delivered research-driven recommendations for targeting segments of the K-12 market for both new entrants in the ed-tech market and established companies looking for new verticals.• Produced tiered strategies for online community development opportunities to strengthen educator engagement and increase customer success.• Conducted numerous ideation sessions with prospects, former and current education clients on operations infrastructure including strategy, implementation, partner/customer success, and post-sales support.

Bethesda, Md

Responsible for defining and implementing the strategy and direction of customer operations, including customer satisfaction, engagement onboarding, technical support, escalation management and training.

Strategic and operational direction of post-sales support for Discovery Education digital streaming media products.

Directed a team providing first line customer support for eBusiness issues. • Contributed to the overall eBusiness strategy through liaisons with Marketing, Sales and Business Development to both improve growth and shift a portion of the existing $2B company revenue to eBusiness channels.• Led a daily operations meeting with IT, consultants, business analysts and representative application managers to efficiently prioritize and resolve customer issues.• Nurtured and maintained relationships with business stakeholders, outside consultants and vendors domestically and internationally to improve internal business process. • Developed, implemented and maintained global business processes in support of a new e-commerce infrastructure and user interface. • Managed administration of the Right Now Technologies software within the Global Web Support team and participated in a core internal team responsible for maintenance and business strategy.

Directed a team providing technical support, contract management and training for proprietary genomic information software.• Retained over $40 million dollars in revenue by working with Management, Marketing, Finance, Legal, Sales and global business partners to implement a new business model. • Redefined legal and marketing collateral, web site offerings, documentation and training in support of new business model. • Provided customer input throughout the software lifecycle with IT, Sales, Product, Informatics, Research and Development and global business partners to drive product enhancements.• Recovered over $100K of subscription fees due to billing discrepancies by managing outstanding customers' legal and financial obligations. • Prepared customer and internal communications and managed interactions with developers and project teams internationally at the conclusion of product offering.

Provided first line technical support and training for proprietary genomic information software. • Contributed to requirements gathering, testing, documentation preparation and marketing collateral review for product releases. • Conducted customer on-site training and via WebEx. • Participated in sales events at customer sites to promote use of the products.

B.S., Biology

M.S., Genetics