Teachers are not buyers.

TLDR: Build for the classroom. Sell to the office.

I have a tiny bee in my bonnet. 

Okay

More like a large stinging hornet. 

I’m hoping to catch your eye if you’re a teacher moving to tech and you’ve been sold the tale that edtech desperately needs you to talk to teachers so they’ll buy.

I regularly see portfolios full of “stuff” targeting teachers and long posts lamenting the lameness an ineptitude of current edtech sales tactics that leave teachers out. 

That’s not going to work for you, because selling to teachers doesn’t work for edtech or teachers. 

It benefits the people selling you this story because you want to believe it, it feels fair, and it’s easy to hate on the evil people who aren’t marketing and selling directly to teachers with teachers.

 BTW: Always check the bio. Where have they worked. For how long. In what capacity. Writing well on Linked In does not equal marketing/selling well.

If you’re willing to hear a perspective that might help you break in, and offers some ideas on why *most edtech doesn't market or sell  directly to teachers-read on. 

What do we most often hear from teachers about edtech? 

“I don’t need another product.”

 “I had a product forced on me and it doesn’t work and I hate it.” 

“This product doesn’t solve a real problem I have, it’s fun and the novelty wears off.” 

OR

“I can’t get the products I want without buying them myself and I have $250 for the year.”
“I have to use the fremium model with work arounds that take forever.” 

“If IT finds out I use this, I’ll probably get in trouble.” 

Do these sound like buyer statements to you? 

No. 

Why are you, someone who cares about teaching and teachers, going to put the work of informing and persuading the *REAL*  buyer back on the teacher? 

That is literally the job of a marketer and/or partnership team. You are asking teachers to do the job for these teams. I promise these teams are making more than teachers, and edtech employees have more time to do this work. 

Teachers are INFLUENCERS and DETRACTORS. 

If we empower them in these roles we relieve them of the purchasing burden and empower them to influence what comes into their classrooms. 

And that means we start with administrators. 

• Build brand awareness so that when a teacher asks for a product, the administrator knows the product and feels comfortable moving forward quickly. They understand the relevant funding streams to purchase with. They know the product is compliant and effective.

• Offer new product ideas to administrators with collateral to share with teacher evaluators. They can pass it along to those teachers if there is a budget or need for the product. If not, no one bothers the teacher with more stuff to do. 

• If a teacher reaches out to the team requesting a product, educate their buyer FOR them.

• On request and when there is a budget and a need, provide demos to teachers that focus on classroom application, outcomes  and implementation, not higher level reporting, cost and the buying process. Preferably asynchronous so they don’t need to get a sub. Answer questions at the classroom level (this is where former teacher can really shine!) instead of an enterprise sales level. 

The long and the short of it is, with very few exceptions EdTech financial models don’t work with individual classroom licenses priced where a teacher can pay out of pocket.

Even if the company could afford to create content and maintain the tech stack with that money, do you want to be part of a company that plans on teachers to paying out of pocket?  Most districts don’t have a hotline where a teacher can call in for a PO number on a product they want. 

Which means…teachers aren’t buyers. 

Learn to write for, sell to, and talk with administrators in ways that open doors for teachers influencing products they really want. 

Build for the classroom. Sell to the office. 

*The BIG exception here are fremium models, where teachers pay nothing and have nearly full functionality. In those cases, The product markets to teachers for the freimum and to administrators for the paid versions.