Your company’s marketers and sales staff are absolutely critical parts of your overall operations. These customer-facing teams build effective and engaging marketing materials, make contact with key stakeholders through a variety of means and close the deals that provide the revenue needed to fuel your operations.
Supporting these teams is a foundational consideration even when everything is moving smoothly. With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting the core operations of schools across the country, it’s even more important to provide tools, information and support to spur on the day-to-day activities and long term goals of your sales and marketing staffers.
Capably handling a complex and shifting situation
“there are few universal strategies when it comes to school operations.”
As edtech businesses are already aware, there are few universal strategies when it comes to school operations. Decision-making on the state and district levels can lead to wide variations between schools in different regions and even those in the same state. For example, EdSource reported that California’s county level monitoring system indicates some large counties like Los Angeles and San Bernardino are still very limited in possibilities for in-person learning. Other California counties, meanwhile, only have to adhere to relatively basic guidelines for reducing disease transmission. Similar situations can be found in many other states.
Your teams need to be appraised of new information related to their key responsibilities, helping them make adjustments to bring their sales and marketing plans in line with the current reality at a given school or in a specific district. This strategy of prioritizing and sharing information, as well as keeping everyone connected, helps reduce wasted effort and plans for marketing and sales that don’t align with a school or district’s capabilities or operational plans. At the same time, it also allows for the development of collateral, pitches and deals that take different strategies and limitations into account.
Ensuring access to up-to-date information about schools and districts
Accurate information is even more valuable as public health strategies and uncertainty around long-term planning impact education on the micro and macro levels. The more informed that marketers and sales staff can be, the better chance they have to build meaningful connections with prospects based on mutual understanding and a common goal of addressing issues and seizing opportunities.
Agile offers basic and rich data that combine to help build an accurate, current and relevant view of schools and districts. Understanding the best way to make contact with the right stakeholders is a good start, but marketers have far more sources of information to leverage. The address of a school or the phone number of the principal isn’t enough to create engaging outreach.
When your business partners with Agile, it can expect to enjoy access to much more rich data that informs marketing and sales efforts. We carefully gather, validate and update information related to enrollment, initiatives specific to districts and schools, PTO presence, high Title I versus low Title I status and similar concerns. Your teams can draw on this data to understand if a specific product aligns well with a school’s current academic programs, for example, or if the level of parent involvement seen in a given school could be a benefit or a drawback with your offerings.
At Agile, we make access to this valuable data a straightforward experience. Your company doesn’t have to worry about hidden fees for exporting fields or selecting specific audiences — your team will know exactly what you’re paying for.
Want to learn more about how Agile’s carefully curated and constantly updated databases can help your customer-facing teams? Get in touch with our experts today.
