How to sell to schools in 4 easy steps

Wow. What a statement! If we all knew the answer to this, we would all be wealthy right? Well we are not here to give you a hard and fast answer as to how to sell to schools, but we can certainly help. We can cover some important considerations which although will not tell you everything you need to know to sell your particular product or service into schools, they will definitely give you some insights into how to sell to schools.

EdProcure is the UK’s largest online school buyers’ directory and is developed and maintained by an army of marketing experts and ex-teachers. We are therefore well placed to give you some great advice about how to sell to schools. So let’s begin.

1. Know your audience – think about who you are selling to. Is it the bursar, the head teacher, a particular staff member, or any member of the teaching staff in the school? Dependent upon the target you are selling to, you need to consider the best approach for getting their attention. What gets the attention of the bursar will not necessarily be suitable for a head of PE, so whatever you sell to schools, remember to pitch it according to the recipient.
2. Know your product or service – what you have to sell to schools is as important as how you sell it to the schools. EdProcure clients, for example, sell everything from lockers to grounds maintenance to schools badges. It doesn’t matter what you sell to schools, just remember to focus your marketing on the product itself, and to make sure your marketing is consistent with your brand. Your brand may be serious, it may be a little more fun and contemporary, whatever it is, stick to the brand. Selling to schools is no different to selling to the private sector. Your brand comes before the client.
3. Be consistent – start with your brand when you sell to schools, not the schools themselves. Don’t assume that schools will buy in a different way to your current market and therefore you need to change who you are. Let your brand be itself, and approach the schools with it – school buyers are human too! Sell to schools like you would sell to everyone else.
4. Continually test – the last piece of the selling to schools jigsaw is the ability to test. This may seem like a luxury to some, but doing split subject line testing on email campaigns or sending different postal mail campaigns to different types of schools are great ways to test the market and see what works best. Your product or service and your brand are all unique to you, so you need to know (and possibly already will) the best and the most effective way to sell them. If you want to be an expert at selling to schools and build your brand in the marketplace, make sure you test what works, and stick to what works.

Remember, if you want your product or service to sell to schools, you will need to know the buyer. You will need to know your product or service and how it fits into a school’s buying process. Most importantly when selling to schools, keep your brand consistency in check and keep on testing what works. This all may seem obvious, but the clients we know who sell the most to schools are the ones who follow these 4 pieces of simple advice the best.

EdProcure is the largest online school buying directory in the UK. 400,000 teachers access the service, and over 3,500 suppliers use it to get consistent business from schools.

EdProcure
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67-68 Hatton Garden
London
EC1N 8JY

This release was published on openPR.