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From Product Pitch to Strategic Value: How to Win MAT Engagement
From Product Pitch to Strategic Value: How Suppliers Win MAT Engagement
There have been some great responses to last week's call for feedback on selling to schools / MATs. If you haven't responded, do take 5 minutes and share your experiences anonymously. The more data we get, the more accurate the findings. I'll write these up and share them at the end of the month. A recurring theme that has come up is around how it’s getting much harder to cut through the noise / gain attention so I want to dig into this and share my insights on this. As the sector has become more competitive, schools have more choice that ever. When I cofounded EdTech Impact in 2020, we mapped the entire UK EdTech sector and identified just over 600 UK based companies selling into schools. Today, based on Beauhurst's data, there are 1,100. That's almost twice as many UK based companies, and that's before you factor in the increase in US and Australian companies selling into the UK.
As well as building my own EdTech companies, I really love working with impactful products and ambitious founders, and over the past 8 years I've worked with dozens of companies to improve their revenue growth and bottom lines. Cutting through the noise comes down to three foundational aspects: vision, mission, and demonstrated impact.
Vision: Start With Why You Exist
If your message begins with product features, you’ve already lost.
Schools and MATs are not shopping for software or services in the way someone buys a new phone. They're trying to solve complex, high-stakes problems: raising educational outcomes, dealing with SEND complexities, grappling with admin and paperwork, staff workload, budget pressure, inspection readiness, recruitment challenges.
Your vision is what signals that you understand theirworld. I've underlined this because many companies have a very rudimentary understanding of how a school works. And even less understanding of how MATs operate.
Oftentimes the vision is too generic and high level. You see this a lot in educational tools where taglines like the following are common:
The most powerful revision tool
Improve GCSE maths outcomes
Get children reading for pleasure
If you're the only product in town, then you can get away with this but you're not. A quick Google search for GCSE Maths revision tools and I've got 2 pages of results that read almost identically. I can't tell the difference between any of them.
A compelling vision connects your product to something bigger than functionality. Define the existing problem and highlight how you do things differently.
This can make people nervous that you're going to turn potential customers away.
Remember that this year, you're not trying to win 100% of the market - you don't need to resonate with 26,000 schools. A couple of hundred new sales is a great result for most companies. You're seeking out people like you who want to do things differently.
When that vision is clear and compelling, your product becomes the vehicle, not the story.
Your Mission Shows How You Deliver It
If the vision is the destination, the mission is the path.
Your mission explains how you are going to make that vision real. This is where suppliers often need to be more concrete.
Having an onboarding one pager which highlights the steps on the journey ahead is really valuable here. You're taking them to a destination (the desired outcome) so giving them a map only instills confidence and de-risks the project. De-risking! This is fast becoming a key focus point for me. Trusts are really slowing procurement down and new projects. At my own company, I'm currently in conversation with a large Trust who said "All things going well, we hope to start in Easter 2027." This was the 2nd call I'd had with them after exchanging dozens of emails. I find this incredibly frustrating too!
Waiting for approval from the MAT
However, you may not be in conversation directly with the MAT, and you may not get that information upfront.
Therefore 'arming' your school contacts with onboarding collateral that they can share with the Trust to get approval is a really smart move to make. You demonstrate how easy it is to get started, how structured your process is, and how achievable the outcomes are.
Demonstrate Impact, Don’t Just Claim It
Many suppliers talk about impact, but very few demonstrate it clearly.
Trust leaders want to know:
What actually changed in the schools using your product?
What risk was removed?
What time was saved?
What problem disappeared?
Impact could look like:
reducing audit preparation from days to minutes
cutting manual admin tasks across multiple schools
enabling Trust-wide visibility of a key data
giving central teams confidence that standards are consistent
The more specific and measurable the impact, the more credible your message becomes.
BONUS: The Strategic Value Question
Perhaps the most important shift suppliers need to make is understanding that selling into a MAT is not the same as selling to a single school.
A Trust is thinking strategically across multiple schools, multiple risks, and multiple priorities.
When a supplier approaches a MAT, the question leaders are really asking is:
What does this do for the Trust as a whole?
This is the strategic value question.
Just because your product works well in a single school doesn’t mean it automatically becomes interesting at Trust level. This is perhaps the most common trap I see suppliers fall into because they underestimate the internal political battles at play. Let's say you're selling into a 15 school Trust, and you have a fantastic maths product that is proven to raise outcomes. It's already well adopted in 3 schools, so it's a no-brainer to you that they roll it out across the other 12. The problem is, there are 2-3 competing products in use in those other schools. Those schools love their suppliers just as much as your schools love you, and one thing we all know in education is there's a strong preference for inertia - if it ain't broke, why fix it?
To engage a MAT, your offer needs to address at least one of these strategic challenges:
Consistency across schools
Visibility for central teams
Reducing risk across the Trust
Scaling processes without increasing workload
Improving visibility, governance and accountability
If your message is still framed around “helping individual schools”, you’re missing the Trust-level conversation.
The Immediate Problem Test
There is also a much simpler filter MAT leaders apply:
Does this solve a problem I have right now?
Even the best product won’t gain traction if it doesn’t connect to an immediate pressure point.
Suppliers who succeed in the MAT market usually do one thing very well: they position their solution directly against an urgent operational problem.
They don’t start with the technology.
They start with the tension the Trust is already feeling.
Cutting Through the Noise
In a crowded market, engagement rarely comes from being louder.
It comes from being clearer and more relevant.
Suppliers who cut through tend to:
Articulate a clear vision for the change they want to create
Explain their mission simply, in terms leaders recognise
Show real impact, not vague claims
Frame their offer strategically for Trusts
Connect to immediate problems MAT leaders are already trying to solve
If your message does those five things, you’re no longer adding to the noise.
You’re starting a conversation that MAT leaders actually want to have.
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If you'd like to chat through any of this I'm always up for a virtual coffee. From monthly 'office hours' support that starts at £200 through to fractional work, there's lots of ways I support EdTech companies like your own. You can book me here.
Welcome to The EdTech Forum, where I share how to build repeatable, sustainable growth in education sales, where buyers are cautious, cycles are long, and trust matters.
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