Tonight, please check out this valuable insight from Kirby Salerno, who I wrote about a few weeks ago, and then connected with to record an episode of The EdTech Startup Show.

On the topic of mistakes he often sees in K12 sales, Kirby said:

I'm a big proponent of bottom-up sales in this industry, where you build a groundswell of starting with teachers and then working your way up to principals, and focusing on the school purchase. And that if you have the right price point, which is, something between 1 and 3 or $4,000, schools can make that purchase relatively easily with discretionary budget dollars. And so that can be a fast sales cycle of one to three months. Where the mistake that a lot of people make is that they try to go for the district sales because they're super enticing, right?

You have an opportunity to get 15 schools at once. It seems like that would be a good use of your time to try to get a 15 school sale instead of a one school sale. The reality is that 15 schools sale may take you 12 to 18 months. So it becomes a very high stakes game.

And, bridging the revenue, throughout the sales cycle can be incredibly difficult. So I think, the smart companies are those that have figured out how to sell at the school level and have really figured out how to leverage teachers as the entry point, for using the product and either a freemium or a trial model, and then activating those teachers as champions to the rest of the school and ultimately to the principal.

And so we talk a lot about a land and expand model in K-12 where let's say you have a year as a district with 20 schools. If you can land in one of those schools, you've got a much better shot of getting to the other 19 and the reason for that is that this is an industry that is very driven by referral sales. So the majority of decisions that are made in schools and in districts are based on information from a peer or a colleague, either within your district or another district like yours.

So again, some referral selling, land and expand, bottom up, these are models that I think are better than top down sales and shorten the sales cycle and create a more repeatable revenue model.

In this case, I was just there to ask the question, and Kirby's answer is certainly valuable enough without further commentary from me.

However, one. quick thing:

If you leave an honest review on iTunes for The EdTech Startup Show, and send me an email with a screenshot of the review after it goes live, then I will record a screencast review of one page on your website or one of your sales/marketing emails at no cost to you.

Thanks for reading,

Gerard Dawson

PS - Here's how you leave a review on the iTunes podcast app.