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Summer To-Dos to Increase Next School Year's Sales
School is wrapping up across the country, but for education companies, summer is no time to kick back and relax. With next year's sales revenue riding on the ability to prep during the summer, the first step to success is understanding the selling cycle.
As the sales cycle shows, being fully prepared at the start of the school year is critical, with a successful new customer implementation strategy operating alongside a strong leads acquisition program. The only way to get to those? Strategic and tactical planning during the summer. We encourage companies to convene a Sales Planning Retreat to focus exclusively on these plans. We often facilitate these retreats, asking the hard questions and focusing on seven key tasks:
- Assessment: Consider what worked and what didn't work in the previous sales year. What should you keep doing, start doing, or stop doing? What risks do you anticipate and how can they mitigated by fall?
- Sales Goals: Set your 2018-2019 school year goals for new business and renewals, which will allow you to build a sales and marketing strategic and tactical plan that can be broken down by month. By comparing that plan to the sales cycle, you can then set monthly and weekly lead acquisition targets. (For earlier stage companies, this may just be a guesstimate, but having a stake in the ground is an important start.)
- Lead Acquisition Plan: Think about what kinds of outreach you can utilize most effectively. These could include hosted workshops or webinars, lunch 'n' learns, trade shows, e-mail, social media advertising, print advertising, and school site visits.
- Current Customer Plan: This plan helps ensure your current customers have a successful back-to-school implementation and continue using your product so you can ensure renewals.
- Product Plan: Consider how the release of new products and features can be timed to enhance and support the selling process.
- Training Plan: Think through how you will ensure high quality, consistent training throughout the school year as new teachers cycle in.
- Communications Tool Review: Make sure your CRMs, web site, and communications tools are ready to achieve your established goals.
If you are interested in doing a Summer Sales Retreat with Arc, contact
rita@arccd.com for more information.
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What We're Up To
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Rita and Kevin at the Conrad 2018 Challenge Spirit of Innovation Summit, Kennedy Space Center. |
The Conrad 2018 Challenge Spirit of Innovation Summit brings high school students from around the globe to pitch their STEM product innovation ideas to the Kennedy Space Center. Rita and Kevin were honored to be judges.
Rita and Arc portfolio company Choosito were interviewed for DigiPub as part of the Harvard Digital Publishing Collaborative by Sue Brown of Macmillan. Check out the full interview here.
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Rita with an Australian EdTech delegation at the Selling into the U.S. Education Market workshop |
Government Relations Update
Open Textbooks in FY18 Budget
In the "first major investment by the federal government in open-source materials [that] could advance the movement," Congress committed $5 million in the fiscal 2018 budget to support the creation or expansion of open textbooks on college campuses. For more, see this
Washington Post piece
.
European Union Data Privacy
If you sell or plan to sell into the EU, make sure you understand the new privacy regulations under the
European Union General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR), designed to harmonize data privacy laws and expected to influence global standards. With stiff penalties for non-compliance, understanding the regulations and integrating them into marketing strategies is essential.
5 Things Educators Can Do to Make Ed Tech Research Work Better for Their Schools
In a
piece for The 74 Million
, Denis Newman and Hannah D'Apice of Empirical Education look at how education research (particularly that funded by federal dollars) can be made "more relevant to people working in school districts who are asking, 'Is this product likely to work in a school like mine?'"
Education is a regulated industry. If you are selling at the federal or state level, you need to intimately understand the dynamics at work to be effective. For more on how Arc can help you navigate government relations at every level, contact
rita@arccd.com
.
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Upcoming Events
June
- 6/22-25: SETDA Leadership Forum, Chicago (Kevin and Rita speaking)
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6/25-27: ISTE, Chicago (Kevin and Rita)
- 6/28-29: EdEnt Capstone Pitch Day, Penn GSE, Phila (Rita teaching)
August
- 8/6-7: 2018-19 EdEnt Capstone kick-off, Penn GSE, Phila (Rita)
- 8/27: Work trip to Greece (Rita)
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What Arc is Looking for Now
Arc is looking to work with a few select growing education technology companies in an advisory, board or coaching role. More than 80 percent of the companies that have worked with Arc received an external capital infusion or acquisition offers within a year. Arc will also consider a few investment opportunities. If you know of a company positioned for strategic growth, please let us know.
Finally, because education is a regulated industry, education companies need to incorporate a government relations plan in order to optimize revenue. Arc's strong government and grassroots relationships, education industry expertise and business acumen allow for successful advocacy at both the federal and state levels. Check out our Web site at
arccd.com or e-mail us at
info@arccd.com.
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