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Insights From
Inside The K-12 Market
Practical ideas, proven strategies, and real-world lessons for education organizations looking to improve marketing performance, strengthen revenue growth, and better understand how schools and districts make purchasing decisions. Explore articles covering K-12 marketing, sales strategy, leadership, revenue growth, demand generation, and market trends.
Strategic Plan vs. Operating Plan vs. GTM Plan: What Education Companies Keep Confusing
Read more: Strategic Plan vs. Operating Plan vs. GTM Plan: What Education Companies Keep ConfusingMost education companies have a plan. What they do not have is three plans, and that is the actual problem. Every fall, a leadership team sits down, builds one document, calls it the plan, and then spends the next year confused about why the document does not answer the questions they keep asking it. The…
The Seniority Trap: Why Senior Leaders Are Always Last to Know What’s Happening in the Market
Read more: The Seniority Trap: Why Senior Leaders Are Always Last to Know What’s Happening in the MarketThere 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 review. A VP attends a discovery call and…
Why K-12 Sales Teams Ignore Marketing Leads — And What to Do About It
Read more: Why K-12 Sales Teams Ignore Marketing Leads — And What to Do About ItHere’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 real.” Both are telling the truth.…
Why the Current Political Environment in K-12 Has Changed Who Makes Decisions, and How
Read more: Why the Current Political Environment in K-12 Has Changed Who Makes Decisions, and HowThe 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. Programs that were funding priorities two years ago are now…
What “Built for the K-12 Market” Actually Means in Practice
Read more: What “Built for the K-12 Market” Actually Means in PracticeEvery 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. The claim is so common it has stopped meaning anything to the people it’s aimed at. District leaders hear “built for K-12” from nearly every vendor who walks in, which is exactly why…
The Case Against Hiring a Full-Time CMO Before You Have a Strategy
Read more: The Case Against Hiring a Full-Time CMO Before You Have a StrategyHiring 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. Not because the hire is unqualified, and not because…
Why District Buyers Distrust Vendors Who Lead With Product
Read more: Why District Buyers Distrust Vendors Who Lead With ProductDistrict 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 stay in the meeting. They’ll nod in…
