The Education Business Blog

Do you need to pick a target market when entering the education market? One of the true signs of a rookie is a business plan built on selling to all schools. Just because all schools should be using your widget doesn't mean they are ready to buy it.

Picking a target market is a discipline many people try to avoid - they don't like getting boxed in. Others don't understand just how big the education market is or think all schools are the same. If you are in love with your product you may resist the idea that some schools don't want it or don't need it.

Today we tackle issue #2 in our series on selling and marketing to educators. As a consultant in the education market I work with a wide range of businesses. This series covers the common execution errors I see with new executives and companies when they enter the market.

Part 1 is here.


Part 2. "Education" is not a target market - it's an industry.

Education is a vast enterprise. In almost every community the school system is one of the top 3 employers. Thats right - every community. In the US education is second only to defense in total spending.

A target market is a niche, an industry segment that is particularly friendly to your story and solution.

Picking a niche to target (which I've written about here and here) is not complicated. Schools vary widely in their infrastructure, politics, test scores, pedagogical preferences, and budgets. Your goal should be finding enough low hanging fruit to keep you busy as you build your business without overwhelming your capacity.

If you are selling education technology - find the schools that already have the infrastructure to run your product. Otherwise you have to first sell them a bunch of someone else's stuff.

If you have a hot new reading product find the schools with the lowest reading scores - they are motivated to look for something new.

If you are capital constrained limit yourself geographically to keep your costs down. Build out from there.

If you focus on a particular pedagogical philosophy the presence of similar or related products should be a green light.

You also want to make sure you go where the money is.

In many cases you will pick from all of these. Lets say you have a new reading intervention for middle schools. To keep your average sale high you might want to target large middle schools with bad test scores and funding to address it. If you are in Newark you may want to focus first on your home state to keep costs down.

How do you find the data to help you focus?

I use a tool called MarketView from MDR which makes it easy to ask questions like "how many middle schools in New Jersey are missing AYP and have more than 500 students?" The answer is 107. This is a critical number for business planning (market size, share projections, revenue projections, sale force capacity, etc.). I could also easily create a mailing list and a call list for a Rep from the results of this search.

Scholastic's QED division also has resources and services to help you answer these kinds of questions.

State DOE websites are a great source of data. For example California has lists that allow you to drill in deeply on test scores by school, district, or county.

These quantitative qualifiers are a starting point - you then start calling on these schools and asking the questions you can't get answered from a database (e.g. what pedagogical approaches do they favor?, is this issue a priority for them this year?, do they have complimentary products etc.). By narrowing the list and then qualifying further you spend the most precious asset wisely - your time.

You can do a lot of this yourself if you choose to - but in many cases a seasoned hand can shorten the distance between your product and the right customers. But please - no matter how you approach this question pick a market to focus on.

A side note - unless your product is specifically designed for private schools or the home school market don't prioritize them initially. They are relatively small and highly fragmented markets. Public schools are 90% of the opportunity. This isn't an editorial on the merits of either market - just a dollars and cents suggestion to maximize your investments of money and time.

School Sales & Marketing Series

Part 1. Obey the calendar. Schools buy on a regular schedule, design your business around it.

Part 2. "Education" is not a target market - it's an industry. No matter how great your product you need to pick a target market to focus on.

Part 3. This is a zero sum game. In order for you to win someone else has to lose.

Part 4. Teachers don't have the time to take the rough edges off your product. Teachers make or break a product.

Part 5. It's all about learning - mostly. You need to know the politics of selling to schools.

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Posted In: Data Driven Selling , K12 Publishing , Marketing Management

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Marketing and selling in the era of infinite input feels like howling into a gale. The average urban dweller is subject to 4,000 ads a day, 1 every 14 seconds. The only sane defense is to tune it all out, to turn it into wallpaper for your world.

Earlier in this series on Information Overload we looked at our broken paradigms of information management, a new personal productivity paradigm, and 10 ways to build instructional products for today's learners. Today we look at what this means for those of us in the persuasive professions. The suggestions here are not just for education publishers - they are what I consider best practices for all marketers.

The fundamental problem is that the signal to noise ratio has gotten completely out of whack. I have an email account that I've been using for several years. Spammers have gotten their grubby little mitts on it and I now get over 3,000 spam emails a week at this address. I have great filtering - less than 100 make through so that isn't the problem. The issue is that I no longer bother looking for false positives - I just delete it all and hope/pray that if it is important the person will find another way to reach me.

So what is a legitimate marketeer to do? Here are some suggestions for how to rethink your marketing and sales mix so that you can stop shouting and start conversing with your customers. Fundamentally it is about what I call Socratic Marketing.

I'm assuming you have read at least the first installment in the series, what is below will make more sense if you have.

Marketing & Sales Concepts For The Conversation Economy

1 - Be remarkable - You should have a winning promise and make sure that everyone in your company understands their role in making it real. Do something worthy of sharing with other people and customers will find you. Seth Godin writes consistently and persuasively on this topic. This is the bedrock of the new approach.

2 - Stop shouting. You can't have a conversation when you are screaming. Beyond the obvious (opt-in lists) you need to look at every communication and ask whether it is relevant, important, and actionable for the target audience. Make sure you hit all three. With the time you save from implementing the ideas in Part 2 listen more. With social media, blogs, and wikis It is so much easier to do today that you have no excuse.

3- Respect people's time. Less is more. Here is a great example.

4 - Be there when the customer is ready. Post information on your web site that maps to different stages of the sales cycle. Initially have general comparison charts that help prospects form a mental map of the market. As they get closer to buying have the detailed specs on hand. After they have purchased send at least one message with tips on how to get the most out of the product.

5 - Relax Grasshopper - This new information economy is not kind to control freaks. The goal is to help your passionate users find ways of communicating with their peers - what they have to say is going carry a lot more water than anything you say. That said, if you open up communications with customers you lose control of some of the content and some bad stuff is going to crop up. This is really an opportunity to engage in conversation. Would you rather they complained behind your back where you can't respond? In the end the benefits of openness far outweigh the negatives.

6 - Make it personal - In a sea of corporate dreck people respond to the genuine and personal. Boeing's Chief Marketing Officer has a blog, Randy's Journal. This forces a more honest interchange - he is speaking from his own perspective. It allows him to talk about issues that he has expertise on (e.g. the fabled 7 extra inches of cabin width on the Airbus translates into a pencil width for each seat). People expect you to have a perspective but they also respect the expertise you bring to their information gathering.

7 - Stir up some channel conflict. In an era when all the rules are changing and no one knows for sure what is going to work you had better get comfortable with channel conflict - you have to try a lot of new things to find what breaks through. Put a few products in on-line teacher communities like We Are Teachers [client], allow customers to build custom bundles on your website, or publish something just for the on-line world.

8 - Don't hide information with the hope that you are going to "force" the start of a sales conversation. You will just frustrate customers who are used to instantly finding what they need. In fact - go the opposite direction and constantly fine tune your site to increase your pageviews and make sure that the navigation is as intuitive as possible for the largest number of users. Don't manage your website as a job protection scheme for your sales reps - you don't do them any favors by pissing prospects off early in the process. If it is a complicated sale the customer will want to talk to a Rep.

9 - Worry more about communicating with your customers than about your competitors. Don't kid yourselves that the competition won't get access to information if you hide it - after all you get your hands on all the competitor's info - don't you? In a world where information flows so easily it will find its way out whether you want it to or not. The only person you will really inconvenience is a prospect.

10 - Its the Web Baby - Optimize. Take a hard look at your web site and the various search strategies customers use to find you. Are you at the top of the search results every time? Do your writers know how to load up searchable text in your titles, tags, and the first paragraph on each page? Is your copy tight, punchy, and hyperlinked where needed? When a customer gets to a product page is there more there than a part number and a price? Measure your results on everything and move resources towards what is most effective, even if it seems counterintuitive.

We hope these ideas help you get started on the road to building a robust conversation with your customers. To find the budget I suggest you downgrade trade shows and invest the savings in on-line presence. Most organizations continue to invest far too much in trade shows out of inertia. Think of the new stuff as building a 24/7/365 trade show booth if that makes you feel better.

If you have tried some of these ideas or have additional tips to pass along comment away!

Information Overload Series

Part 1 - It’s all in your head - really
Part 2 - A cure for “a poverty of attention”
Part 3 - 10 Ways to Build Instructional Products For 21st Century Skills
Part 4 - 10 Ideas to For Marketing & Selling In An Age of Infinite Input
Summary - Closing Thoughts and Resources

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Posted In: Data Driven Selling , K12 Publishing , Marketing Management , Sales Management

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E-Mail Marketing to Educators: What`s Working was put on Heller QED on October 12th. I had the honor of speaking about eMail marketing in a web 2.0 world.

My core message was that eMail 2.0 is activity driven, not demographics driven.

A person does something, and the company responds in a personal, authentic, and timely manner with a communication. It has the same give and take as a conversation. The focus is engaging people early in the decision making cycle with useful information, not at the end with a last ditch special offer.

As a follow up to the call I've assembed the following list of resources for attendees. I've also included my presentation for those who were unable to make the call.

Presentation

My presentation (PDF) Download file from today with speaker's notes included.

Articles

A couple of really good articles that lay out the case for the conversation economy.

The Conversation Economy - Business Week

Internet Marketing Mind Map - very cool

Books

These are all books that will build background knowledge and understanding of the larger trends that are at work today in the marketplace.

Wikinomics

The Long Tail

The Wisdom of Crowds

Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing The Way Businesses Talk With Customers

Small is the New Big

Business Blogs

All of these blogs touch regularly on issues related to marketing in a web 2.0 world.

Logic + Emotion

Seth Godin

The Long Tail

Bokardo Social Web Design

Copyblogger

Marketing and Strategy Innovation Blog

Influential Marketing Blog

Education Business Blog

Educator Blogs

These blogs won't teach you about email or marketing - but they will show you the kinds of conversations educators are having in general. These are some of the best but there are thousands out there to sample from.

eLearnspace

Weblogg-Ed

Not So Distant Future

Classroom 2.0

Metrics Tools

These are all tools that will help you measure traffic and activity on web sites. Some are free, some are not.

Quantcast

Comscore

Hitwise

Compete.com

Google Analytics

Service Providers and Autoresponders

These are companies and products that can help you set up your response trees, manage the process, and track performance metrics.

Skylist

Intellicontact

Aweber

Send Studio

Eloqua

You can also build a lot of this directly into your website if you choose to.

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Picking a target market is one of the most fundamental decisions a sales and marketing team makes. Your target market determines what products you build, where you promote them, and how you talk about them. Socratic Marketing in the budding conversation economy demands a rigorous approach to this question as part of your Big M Marketing approach..

Picking a good target market is a balancing act. The smaller your market the higher your odds of success in targeting specific needs. However, that has to be weighed against the financial objectives of the business. You can’t get so small that you define yourself out of a job! Think of this as two forces that are inversely proportionate. Your goal is to find the right balance point.

So why do so many companies get this wrong? They define markets based on granfalloons, a concept coined by Kurt Vonnegut which means "a proud and meaningless association of human beings." For example, have you seen segmentation schemes based on geography, district size, or % of free and reduced lunch students? If you are engaging in data driven selling and/or socratic marketing these are good starting points, but they are not the most powerful way to define a market.

A far more effective approach is to define your market based on how customers think about their problems. After all, in a conversation economy their problems are the topic you will discuss with them. “Fine,” you say, “but I can’t look inside their head to see how they think, I can’t measure that to determine if the market is big enough.” Fair enough, but if they really believe something their actions will speak louder than words. You can observe where they spend money and time to tease out what their priorities are.

On a sail there are dozens of tiny strings, tell-tales, woven into the fabric that show how the wind is moving across the face of the sail. This allows the sailors to trim the sail for optimum performance. As a metaphor this works perfectly for the concept we are after here. We can’t see how our customers think, but we can observe decisions they have already made to get a sense of it.

For example, at Chancery when we released Open District in the mid 90s we decided that only large districts would be open to purchasing the product so we didn’t even bother setting up pricing for districts with fewer than 10,000 students. Almost immediately however our Sales team was telling us that smaller customers were interested. When we dug a little deeper we found that it was far more important how customers saw the role of data in decision making than how big they were. The tell-tale we used to determine this was whether or not they had hired a Database Administrator (DBA) to manage their IT systems. This allowed us to be far more precise about our targeting while expanding our footprint at the same time.

On the curriculum side you might have products that appeal to constructivists or to advocates of guided reading. For the former you might look to see if they are using any products from members of the Constructivist Consortium. For the latter it might be relevant if they have maintained a librarian on staff or if they have a bookroom. Your products might require a fair amount of teacher training - look to see how they are allocating their budgets in this area. If you are selling technology you might key in on whether or not they have installed electronic whiteboards.

The goal is to find a handful of tell-tales that marketing and sales can use to focus their efforts. Marketing can use it for list selection (only give us Districts with a DBA) and Sales can use it to qualify prospects (check - they have whiteboards).

In the end the way you define your target market should be unique to your business but it should go much deeper than superficial indicators. Your goal is find a group of customers who are thinking about their challenges in ways that make them particularly open to the solution that you are offering.

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It is easy for a sales force to fall into a comfort zone. Data-driven decision making techniques can help insure that Reps are reaching beyond their current contacts.

In many companies there is a great deal of data about the market. The challenge is to drive this into your field organization so that the Reps and their Managers are probing for untapped market potential on a regular basis.

There are some simple and quick ways to start using data in selling to schools and school districts. This post outlines some ideas for how to encourage your sales force to adopt a more data driven approach.

More below the fold…

Continue reading "Data Driven Selling in K12 – Quick Start Guide" »

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