In the shoes of a CMO

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Laura Vol, Les Sherpas: “Today, it is essential for us to appear in LLM answers”

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CMO of Les Sherpas since late September 2025, Laura Vol joined the private tutoring platform as part of a newly created role. She now leads a team of around twenty people within a company of 70 employees, supporting more than 40,000 families and growing its annual revenue threefold.

Before joining Les Sherpas, she notably built and managed the marketing team at Captain Contrat. In this interview, she discusses the challenges of stepping into a fast-scaling organization, how she uses AI in her day-to-day work, and the GEO strategy she has implemented.

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You joined an organization that did not have a centralized marketing leadership. What was your starting point?

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Laura Vol: The challenge was actually quite operational. When I arrived, there were five different marketing teams — paid, SEO, content, brand, and creative — with very uneven sizes, no coordination, and no shared responsibility. Everyone was working in silos, information was not flowing, and duplicate work was piling up. Before defining a strategy, the first priority was to rebuild a truly collaborative organization.

What makes this kind of exercise difficult is that it is hard to document. On technical topics, you can find a lot of resources. But on human topics, you mostly learn by speaking with peers. I had already learned a few hard lessons at Captain Contrat when my team grew quickly from two to eight people. This time, I took the time to observe, interview everyone, and cross-reference individual aspirations with the company’s real needs before making any changes.

I also used Gemini as a thinking tool during this phase, feeding it my interview notes and strategic intentions so it could challenge me factually, without emotion or internal politics. This type of tool does not replace judgment, but it helps test options and build solid arguments.

In the end, I reorganized the five teams into two structures: a growth team bringing together paid, SEO, and creative, and a brand and content team. A third CRM team is currently being built.

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What are the main strategic challenges for Les Sherpas?

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L.V.: Acquisition comes first, because we need to continue tripling revenue while reducing CAC. We have to sustain growth while moving toward profitability.

Then comes retention. Once you have a sizeable customer base, it is always cheaper to get existing customers to sign again than to acquire new ones.

Finally, market education remains a structuring challenge, both around private tutoring in general and around our unique positioning. Our main competitors, Acadomia and Complétude, offer packaged solutions. We offer a tailored approach with long-term support. The market has not yet fully understood this difference, and that is where a significant part of our brand work comes into play.

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How do you manage the increase in marketing budget?

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L.V.: The hardest part is not increasing a budget, but managing that increase intelligently. It is not about simply spending more; it is about continuing to spend better.

When I arrived, I directly took over the management of the two agencies handling Google Ads and Meta Ads, in order to reset the relationships and establish a new level of expectations.

On Meta in particular, we completely reworked the creative naming structure: which pain point, which angle, which format, which persona, and which stage of the funnel. We had a lot of content running without any real learning logic.

Thanks to this work, since September, we have cut customer acquisition cost in half.

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How do you decide between in-house and external resources?

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L.V.: The equation is constantly recalculated, depending on how internal teams upskill and how budgets evolve.

What I expect from an external partner is an informed perspective and a critical eye. An external partner manages several accounts at the same time, sees cross-sector signals, and has early access to platform changes. Our agency, for example, is a beta tester for Google.

Some highly technical and occasional topics, such as tracking, can also be handled more efficiently externally, even in an organization that has internalized most of its marketing operations.

But this value has a hidden cost. Managing an agency requires internal time, can create extra interfaces, and can dilute responsibility. If managing an agency takes too much time, internalization has to be considered.

The real question is not whether something should be internal or external, but rather: where is the value truly created, and who is best positioned to create it?

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How do you use AI in your day-to-day work?

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L.V.: For creative performance analysis, we fed Claude with all the content from the past six months to identify what works, what is losing momentum, and most importantly, why. We cross-referenced this with brand objectives and positioning. This allowed us to stop certain pieces of content.

What changes with this approach is the way teams receive decisions. When you stop a concept someone has been working on for six months, the fact that the decision is documented and rational, rather than based on leadership intuition, really changes how it is received.

It is as much a management tool as it is an analysis tool.

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How do you work on customer understanding?

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L.V.: Our targets are both the parents of students, the students themselves, and the teachers. We rely on several layers to understand them: regular surveys among our customer base, systematic analysis of reviews, and listening to customer calls with the sales teams.

We also conduct targeted thematic studies. For example, we recently ran a survey among more than 1,000 young people about their revision habits. What came out is that they revise at the last minute, without a method, and with a lot of stress. This was one of the insights that accelerated the development of a revision app that we will launch soon.

When it comes to teachers, we are actively working on their own experience, with lesson preparation tools, session recordings, post-lesson quizzes, and more, in order to create a real attachment to the brand.

Their role is key in student and parent satisfaction, so we need to give them the best possible conditions.

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How do you approach GEO?

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L.V.: Our SEO manager also manages GEO. Today, they are actually more strongly measured on GEO results than on SEO results.

We track our performance through Qwery, based on 200 prompts that correspond to the questions parents ask themselves. Our strategy is built around content organized by theme, serious work on FAQs, a natural presence on Reddit, and a PR layer to strengthen mentions.

LLMs play a real support role for parents facing their children’s academic difficulties. These are emotionally charged questions, and people ask them to ChatGPT or Perplexity as they would ask a trusted advisor.

That is why it is essential for us to be present in these answers.

Today, we alternate between the second and third most cited tutoring brand across our prompt base, and we already have directly traceable lead acquisition from these platforms.

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What do you look for when recruiting?

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L.V.: I look for people who want to learn quickly, who look ahead, and who are results-oriented. In a scale-up, scopes move quickly, so adaptability is not just one quality among others. It is a basic requirement.

I am also uncompromising on rigor, whether it concerns spelling, communication, or reporting. Once someone is responsible for their scope, I need to be able to trust them without checking everything behind them.

Then it is my responsibility to create the conditions for them to learn where they are less experienced.

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