Giving Compass' Take:

• Reshan Richards, writing at EdSurge, discusses the "Dos and Don'ts" of companies navigating how to sell education technology products and software to schools. 

• Are there partnership opportunities for companies and donors to help schools with edtech needs?

• Read about how to make edtech more effective. 


Combined, we have worked in schools for nearly 40 years. In that time, we have been on the receiving end of the sales process for many products and services. We have heard pitches that we expected, and have also suffered through pitches that somehow snuck past our filters. Software, guest speakers, singing groups, hardware, professional development programs, online courses, observation tools, data solutions—we’ve received pitches aimed at solving almost every educational problem, real or perceived.

If you care about helping schools and forming deep, lasting relationships with the clients you serve, then we hope the following guardrails will be useful for your work.

  1.  Getting Attention: Email Outreach: DO use email as a non-intrusive method of reaching out to school officials. Phone calls (and walk-in appearances) interrupt busy days.  DON’T overly automate your email processes. Overly automated emails send a clear, negative message to each recipient.
  2. First Contact: Scheduled phone call: DO spend more time listening than talking. Demonstrate that you are listening by continually confirming your understanding of the school’s interests and needs. DON’T talk over or through your participants. If they could have simply listened to an audio recording or watched a webinar to gain the information you are sharing, why bother setting up a call?
  3. Momentum: Face-to-Face Presentation (in-person or video call): DO sell by teaching. Successful teachers start by understanding what their students know about a subject.  DON’T make everyone carve out time from their days and coordinate their schedules to be at a specific time and place, only to have them believe what was experienced could have been handled via a phone call, or worse, an email.
  4.  Sale Closed: Onboarding: DO understand the way that work happens in school.  DON’T assume that all schools are the same.

Read the full article about companies selling to schools by Reshan Richards at EdSurge.