Sales Enablement to Support Long-Term Educational Value
Drive meaningful adoption of your solution through strategic marketing and sales enablement.
From personalized learning platforms to chatbot tutoring systems, generative AI (genAI) is being touted as the future of education. Regardless of what new technology comes along (and we’ve seen quite a few over the last three decades), all educators ever want are solutions that genuinely enhance teaching and learning and make their workload easier to manage so that they can spend more time helping students.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how shiny, new, or transformative the technology is. True instructional value is what sustains product engagement and builds trust with educators, not the allure of the latest tech trend. After the last five years of being inundated with edtech solutions, only strategic marketing and sales enablement that focuses on sustained instructional value and efficacy are what has the attention of decision-makers.
We help clients design and implement strategic marketing and sales enablement that accomplish this. We review the features and benefits of your solution and its alignment with the needs of educators. We often find that the messaging or talking points don’t quite align with the needs, constraints, or aspirations of education decision-makers or the end-users of solutions (educators, students, or both). We help clients reframe their value propositions and unique differentiators in a language that educators and school leaders understand and respond positively to.
Once we've completed this foundational work, we determine which materials will best support your sales team. For most, we develop a series of short, 3-5 minute online training courses accompanied by a 1-2 page summary of key talking points. These resources are designed to quickly upskill teams, helping them speak the language of educators and address their challenges. For products that offer comprehensive curriculum or instructional support, we create more in-depth training materials to support the sales team, who may not have a background in education theory or practice. These may include comprehensive insights into relevant education concepts, acronyms, workflows, best practice white papers, and detailed pitch decks or vision presentations.
Our nearly thirty years of experience providing tailored resources that align with the needs of education has resulted in clients growing their sales and improving the messaging (and functionality) of their solutions to resonate with educators.
Where Does GenAI Fit in Sales Enablement?
The most important role is to enhance your messaging by tailoring it to align with the priorities of your customers. Before GenAI, this was a laborious process of research, analysis, and editing. That has all changed with GenAI.
Instead of reading a 70-page comprehensive school improvement plan for each prospective customer, one can have GenAI summarize the main strategic priorities. Instead of manually creating a pitch deck that touts the benefits of your solution that you reuse with every customer, have GenAI take your talking points and generate a version customized to a specific prospective customer’s priorities.
Every day, our team discovers new ways to use GenAI to either rapidly automate or customize nearly every piece of sales and marketing collateral. Of course, there are limits, significant environmental costs, and risks with every emerging technology, but the rate of iterative improvements being made daily is pointing to a future where these are resolved.
How to Talk about AI in your Education Sales and Marketing
As has always been the case, it’s not about the technology–it’s about teaching and learning. If your product is incorporating AI functionality, make sure you focus on how it helps in areas such as classroom management, instructional strategies, and student engagement. Think about what ways AI facilitates teaching and learning that weren’t possible before. There are many factors to consider and attitudes about AI are shifting constantly. The point is, no matter what technology comes along, if it can’t be described in terms of improving the process and practice of education, it will struggle to see long-term relevance. Just ask the clicker.
Contact us to learn more about how we can boost the successful adoption of your solution with targeted marketing strategies and effective sales enablement.