K-12 Marketing and Sales Blog

The Pre-Show Checklist: What Has to Be True Before You Approve a K-12 Conference Trip

A company shouldn’t approve a K-12 conference trip because the show is on the calendar and the budget has room. It should approve the trip because five specific things are already true before anyone books a flight. Skip that gate and the fifteen to twenty thousand dollars a small company spends on a national show…
Read more: The Pre-Show Checklist: What Has to Be True Before You Approve a K-12 Conference Trip

Why Marketing Leadership Alignment Is Usually an Illusion

A marketing leader and a CEO can leave the same strategy meeting both convinced they agree, and both be wrong. That’s not a communication failure. It’s a well-documented behavioral pattern, and it’s one of the quietest ways marketing leadership alignment breaks down inside education companies. Most people assume misalignment looks like conflict. Someone objects, someone…
Read more: Why Marketing Leadership Alignment Is Usually an Illusion
K-12 Sales Coaching: Build a System, Not a Habit

Most K-12 sales leaders believe they coach their reps. What they actually do is inspect their deals. The weekly 1:1, the Thursday pipeline review, the forecast call: these feel like coaching, but K-12 sales coaching that develops sellers is a different activity entirely from the meetings that fill a manager’s calendar. The gap between the…
Read more: K-12 Sales Coaching: Build a System, Not a Habit
The Five Stakeholders Every K-12 Deal Has to Win Over

A rep can have a warm, engaged champion inside a district and still lose the deal, because a champion is one seat at a K-12 buying committee that typically has five. Understanding who else is at that table, and what each of them actually needs to say yes, is the difference between a deal that…
Read more: The Five Stakeholders Every K-12 Deal Has to Win Over
What K-12 Demand Generation Actually Looks Like Before a Rep Ever Calls

Every K-12 company agrees that marketing should create demand before sales makes contact. Almost none of them can describe what that actually looks like week to week. K-12 demand generation gets treated as a strategy slide instead of a set of repeatable motions, which is exactly why the job keeps sliding onto a rep’s calendar…
Read more: What K-12 Demand Generation Actually Looks Like Before a Rep Ever Calls
Why Cold Prospecting Is a Marketing Job, Not a Sales Job, in K-12

Cold prospecting is not a sales activity. It’s a marketing activity that a lot of K-12 companies have quietly handed to the wrong person on the team, and it’s costing them the year. Here’s the pattern behind most failed K-12 sales prospecting: a founder-led education company with eight or ten people, one or two reps…
Read more: Why Cold Prospecting Is a Marketing Job, Not a Sales Job, in K-12
The K-12 ICP Problem: You Know Who to Target. You Don’t Know How They Buy.

Most ideal customer profile frameworks were built for B2B SaaS. Short sales cycles. Single decision-makers. K-12 companies imported those frameworks wholesale, and they’re misreading their own market as a result. A typical K-12 ICP describes a district. Enrollment size. Grades served. Funding type. Geography. Poverty index. It’s a firmographic portrait of the customer, and it’s…
Read more: The K-12 ICP Problem: You Know Who to Target. You Don’t Know How They Buy.

Explore the Guides: Start With the Challenge in Front of You

Explore our eight Guides. No forms. Pick the one that matches what is stuck.

How K-12 Districts Actually Buy: The calendar, the committee, and the politics behind every deal.
Why K-12 Marketing Stalls: Why good work gets no traction, and what to fix first.
K-12 Sales and Marketing Alignment: One definition of a ready lead. One shared scorecard.
What “Built for the K-12 Market” Means: Built for districts, not adapted to them.
What Is a Fractional CMO: Whether your education organization needs one.
K-12 Sales Coaching: Why inspecting deals is not coaching.
Account-Based Sales and Marketing for K-12: Work the account, not the contact list.
Earned Revenue for Education Nonprofits: Build revenue beyond grants.

Insights FromInside The K-12 Market

The Pre-Show Checklist: What Has to Be True Before You Approve a K-12 Conference Trip

Why Marketing Leadership Alignment Is Usually an Illusion

K-12 Sales Coaching: Build a System, Not a Habit

The Five Stakeholders Every K-12 Deal Has to Win Over

What K-12 Demand Generation Actually Looks Like Before a Rep Ever Calls

Why Cold Prospecting Is a Marketing Job, Not a Sales Job, in K-12

The K-12 ICP Problem: You Know Who to Target. You Don’t Know How They Buy.

Explore the Guides: Start With the Challenge in Front of You

Insights From
Inside The K-12 Market