BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Five Tips To Increase Your EdTech Sales

Following

Selling is hard. And it’s especially hard when it’s to schools and districts. There are elongated sales cycles, bureaucratic hoops to jump through, and often, the need to get multiple stakeholders, like teachers, administrators, school board members, parents and students, to see the value of a product being considered. Despite this rough sales terrain, success can be carved out. Use the strategies detailed below to do so.

1. Listen More Than You Talk

You’re excited about your product. You land a call with the purchaser of a large district and want to tell them all about how great your offering is. “It has this! It can do that! It solves this!” Resist the urge. Instead, get the potential purchaser talking. Ask probing questions about their work, schools, students, teachers, and most importantly, the problem that you can potentially help to solve. Sales 101 teaches that people like to talk about themselves, and they tend to like people who give them the time to do so, while listening intently; you want a buyer to like you and to want to do business with you. But this strategy isn’t about listening to manipulate someone into liking you, it’s about listening to really understand the person’s problems and to get clear on how (or whether) you can help.

If you’re inclined to be a chatterbox, it may be worth investing in a conference line, like Dialpad Meetings, that offers post-call data on how much time each party spent talking. If you find that you’re speaking more than 50% of the time, work on it, and continue to monitor your ability to listen.

2. Align Perfectly To Buyers’ Needs

Schools and districts are complicated. They must vet and acquire technology and curricula for diverse grades, subjects, and populations. Make educator-buyers’ lives easier by introducing a product that is customized to the tools, systems, goals, and curricula that they already have in place. Take the time to dive deeply into their resources and alter your product to be not just a good complement, but the perfect fit.

This strategy is time consuming on the front end, but worthwhile for sizable sales opportunities, who will appreciate feeling like you don’t want to sell to just anyone, you want to partner with them.

3. Make The ROI Clear

In a sales conversation, it’s clear what the sales person gets out of the arrangement; a deal, users, money. But what will the buyer get? Hopefully, they get a solution to a problem; you make a pain point disappear. Many district administrators, however, will need more than just an “I’m a solution to your problem,” pitch. They also want and need to know what you’re saving them—in dollars. And while it may not always be obvious how your program converts to financial gain for districts, it’s a worthwhile exercise to figure it out. If you’re app replaces hours of office workers’ time, multiply the number of hours by the workers’ hourly rates, and there are the savings. If you have a curricular product, and it provides a meaningful reading intervention that keeps kids from needing to be pulled out by a literacy specialist or attend summer school, calculate those savings. To a large degree, districts are run like businesses. Keep this in mind when selling to them.

4. Back Up Your Promises

As the saying goes, data is king. This rings especially true in education sales. Administrators may love your product, but if you can’t show proof of its efficacy, they may be hesitant to implement it. They may want to take a chance on something that they’re excited about but worry that if it doesn’t deliver, and there’s no precedent that it will, their reputation—and maybe even jobs—will be at risk.

So does this mean that you need an efficacy study? Kind of. The more official your data is—bow to the randomized, controlled trial—the better. This doesn’t mean that those who can’t afford proper efficacy studies from companies like Empirical Education should give up, though. Those without official studies should compile their own data and seek out districts known to be early adopters. Members of the League of Innovative Schools are a great place to start.

5. Evangelize Administrators

Many edtech products’ end users are teachers and/or students. If such a product is good, it’s relatively easy to get teachers who are willing to sing its praises and promote it to colleagues. But when looking to sell edtech, teachers usually aren’t the buyers, so their promotion can only get a company’s sales aspirations so far. While it is crucial to have the buy-in of teachers, to close deals, it will often be just as crucial to have district and school administrators on your side, willing to vouch for you to their peers. An administrator considering your tech may want a reference or to read a case study, and they’ll care most about what their counterparts, other administrators, have to say. So make sure to invest time in cultivating those relationships and designing a product and customer experience that an administrator wants to rave about. It will strengthen their loyalty and chance of renewing, and position you for success in districts beyond their schools.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website