Whose Problem Is EdTech Solving? | My EdTech Life 374

No, but that's great because it gives us some great insight.

And this is everything that I have seen you do on LinkedIn.

And just the way that you are so approachable, the way that you really do have a genuine intent of meeting and getting to know people and just getting to know their stories.

And I think that's something that is very important, and especially in the ed tech space when everyone, Everybody, like you said, is vying for everybody's attention and obviously for, you know, money, you know, at the end, you know, because you're selling a product.

You want to make sure that you share what you have and how that is going to make an impact on your students.

So, I mean, there's a lot of competition there.

So I want to kind of ask you now, Jacob, in your experience now.

And being a district office door opener, what have you learned about why so many district doors may be closed to a lot of ed tech companies?

Good

question.

I think some of it has to do with the fact that a lot of sales ed tech organizations are have clear goals that they have, right? As a company to keep the lights on, the reps need to talk to 10 people a day, and you got to have 40 meetings a month.

And their metrics show that if the reps can have 40 calls every single month, three of them will move into the next stage.

And of those three, one of them might move into some kind of contract day and go to the board and they will close one deal per rep, right? So everyone's, uh, from the edtech side looking at metrics of like we need to talk to this many people we need to dial this many times i have to call i have to email i have this and like i did that as well right at mcgraw hill i visited it four days a week and i visited 20 30 schools a day some days driving around la so like that is a map quest tweet thank you map quest I

don't even know if they're around anymore.

But I say that because the reps that are trying to get in front of the folks that are very, very busy at the districts sometimes forget that those folks are not thinking about anything ed tech related they're thinking about is the bus on time are all my teachers teaching properly today are any parents showing up that don't need them either for whatever reason uh are my spend teachers doing what they're supposed to be doing is the board happy are the things we have are the construction projects moving forward is everybody safe Is everybody healthy? Like all these things that like are second nature to us where you're like, oh, those are just standard things.

Like those are the things that they are worried about every hour on top of the 10 things that their teams are asking of them.

Then the ed tech side is interjecting ourselves into that to-do list, right? There's like 10 things they need and then we're like, we have this interesting thing.

We'd love to talk to you.

And here's the thing.

There's a very thoughtful way to do that, right? Like truly a thoughtful way to say, I've reviewed all of your data and I truly think that there's a potential impact to be made here.

I think we should talk for 20 minutes.

But when they get those, you know, look at the thoughtful message that if you send to one of my folks, my folks would be like, hey, if it makes it past their spam filter, right? They're going to be like, It is homework.

But let's see.

Right.

But on those calls, you've probably been on many of them, too, that like the way we're talking and building a relationship on this podcast is not how those sales calls go.