There is a specific moment when a senior leader realizes their picture of the market is wrong. Usually, it comes from a conversation they weren’t supposed to be in. A founder joins a sales call as a listener and hears an objection nobody mentioned in the pipeline…
Here’s a conversation that happens in education companies and nonprofits every quarter. The VP of Marketing walks into the pipeline review with a number: “We generated 340 MQLs last quarter.” The VP of Sales nods. Later, in private, the sales leader says: “We looked at those leads. They’re not…
The political environment in K-12 education has changed enough in the last three years that vendors still running 2021 playbooks are getting surprised by conversations their products used to sail through. The changes aren’t subtle. Federal funding that districts built programs around is in question. DEI-related programs that…
Every education company says they understand K-12. Most of them mean they’ve worked with K-12 clients before. That’s not the same thing. Understanding the K-12 market in a way that actually changes how you sell means knowing the things that don’t show up in an industry overview.
Hiring a senior marketing leader feels like the right move when marketing isn’t working. It looks decisive. It signals investment. It gives leadership someone to hold accountable. It’s also one of the more reliable ways to make a struggling marketing function worse before it gets better. Here’s…
District leaders have been pitched at for a long time. They’ve sat through enough demos, read enough one-pagers, and fielded enough cold emails that they’ve developed a reliable early filter: if the first thing you tell them is what your product does, they stop listening. Not consciously. They’ll…
Most companies selling to K-12 districts treat September like a starting gun. School is back. Leaders are at their desks. Time to launch the campaign. It’s the wrong read of the market. By September, the decisions that determine most of a district’s discretionary spending are already made.
When K-12 marketing isn’t landing, the first thing most teams try to fix is the message. Rewrite the copy. Refresh the deck. Rework the email subject lines. Bring in someone to sharpen the positioning. Sometimes that’s the right move. More often, it isn’t. The harder diagnosis —…
Most K-12 education organizations don’t have a marketing problem. They have a coordination problem that marketing is taking the blame for. The distinction matters because the two problems have completely different solutions. A marketing problem gets fixed by improving the marketing. A coordination problem gets fixed by…
When a K-12 marketing team is underwater, the diagnosis is almost always the same: not enough people. I’ve seen this in education organizations at every size. The team is behind, sales is frustrated, and leadership is asking why marketing can’t keep up. Someone proposes a hire. Another content…