With BETT Show upon us, it's that marker of the school sales year when everyone reflects on revenue.
If you're exhibiting, ROI is probably on your mind. It's becoming more of a mountain to climb each year.
If you're not, FOMO might be creeping in. "What if we had a stand at BETT, surely we'd make hundreds of sales."
Whatever school sales related thoughts are circling you at this moment, I'm here to share how I'm seeing the market changing and what I believe the path ahead will be.
What's not working anymore
It's best to start with a clean slate, so let's take a look at what's not working when it comes to selling to schools.
Big general events / tradeshows - Now if you're in that former camp and you've just dropped most your marketing budget for the year on BETT, you might want to stop reading now.
For anyone but the big established players, getting ROI out of BETT is now so so hard now. If your marketing meetings have time and budget for 'branding,' then you're big enough to ride out a poor BETT show.
If your company isn't big enough to write off a 5-figure tradeshow spend, then take a beat and plan which ones you're focusing on.
The larger, general shows have become really poor value for money in my experience. There are exceptions to this rule of course, but in general the prices have crept up while attendees have become more discerning. It's easy to scan lots of badges, but when I've run the analysis win analysis with a few companies, I'm not seeing the leads turn into customers.
Cold email marketing - It pains me to say this because I've invested so much time and money into getting really good at email marketing. It's one of my favourite channels, but in terms of reaching decision makers in schools, it's pretty much dead. Unless you have some level of connection or relationship with the person behind the email, they're not going to open your cold email no matter how good the subject line is.
A major nail in the coffin of this channel has been schools adoption of Cyber Protection tools (as per DfE requirements now). If you're not up to speed on this, schools have become a major target for hackers. They have huge sums of money sat in bank accounts and are technological poorly protected which makes them great targets for phishing emails. I saw plenty of this when I was COO within a MAT.
I became suspicious of email open rates about 18 months ago as I saw them (and CTRs) climbing quickly across multiple companies I was supporting. Nothing had changed within these companies, yet all of a sudden, more people seemed to be opening and clicking the emails. It didn't add up so I went down a bit of a rabbit hole.
In the end I learnt that school firewalls and malware scanners are the reason. Email providers don't distinguish between a human open and a domain level scan - and the email provider is disincentivised to give you the accurate figures. So many people believe that switching to a different email platform can improve deliverability. In general, it can't.
You can filter bot clicks on some platforms, but I haven't seen any that filter bot opens. You can see this in the time stamp of your sends. You send an email and within seconds you'll see schools opening it - that's a malware / firewall level scan that is reported to you as an open.
This is a massive issue as there's now no reliable metric to measure the quality and effectiveness of your email marketing. You're shooting in the dark.
Generic case studies. Every EdTech company has 3-5 polished case studies, nicely designed as a PDF. It's table stakes - no longer enough. Schools want to see feedback in public and far more of this. Capture this on platforms they already trust - Google, Feefo, Trustpilot, Review.io. Do not capture reviews on any platforms that gates this content behind a signup or login page. Teachers really don't like this. It also hampers your Agentic Search Placement (appearing in AI summaries or as a recommendation)
What's working
Now onto the good and positive stuff
Public proof over PDFs. If you're sitting on positive feedback but it's all locked away in private emails and Zoom calls, you're missing the point. Get it out there. Make it easy for schools to see what other schools genuinely think.
One platform I absolutely love is Senja - I'm not affiliated with them in any way, it's just such a cool, fun way to capture and display teacher feedback.
Regardless of what platform you use, the key is that it's visible, accessible, and credible.
Community-led content. Schools buy from people they trust, not brands. When your founders and team share real insights - not branded content - it shows you're human. This isn't about posting motivational LinkedIn content. It's about sharing real expertise, examples, and demonstrating you understand your niche.
All of my sales demos are auto transcribed with AI. Bringing these together, I've just written up a content piece of the key trends 20 forward thinking MAT leaders are focused on. I'm rolling work that I'm already doing (sales demos) into my next marketing messages and campaigns.
It doesn't have to be polished. It just has to be authentic, because in the age of AI, authenticity is becoming rare.
Consistency over campaigns. The old approach was campaign-based. Send a big email blast. Run ads for a month. Do a push at the trade show.
That's interruption marketing and schools tune it out.
What builds trust (and sales pipeline) is consistency. Sharing valuable insights regularly. Being visible when schools aren't in buying mode. Demonstrating that you understand their world through ongoing engagement, not one-off pushes.
With sales cycles lengthening, having more prospects in your pipeline is now more important.
The uncomfortable truth
Building trust feels like an indirect path to growth - it takes longer and requires more effort than running a paid ads campaign or sending a cold email blast.
But here's the thing - those quick hits aren't working anymore anyway.
In the last week I've had dozens of messages from founders and marketing leaders saying they're finding it much harder to generate leads, and the leads that they do generate don't convert as well.
The EdTech companies that master trust based marketing will have a lasting advantage. Trust is harder to build than features. It's harder to replicate than a good website. But it compounds over time in ways that traditional marketing doesn't.
The companies that don't evolve will keep wondering why their pipeline has dried up despite spending more time and money on marketing than ever before.
Begin your evolution sooner rather than later.
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As always, thanks for reading and if you'd like to chat, do get in touch.
I offer focused advisory, a few hours a week, to help you prioritise the right bets, fix revenue leaks, and stop wasting time on things that won’t move the needle.
Book a virtual chat / coffee with me here
Best,
Jay
