MAKE THE GRADE: GROWING SALES WITH AN EDTECH STARTUP.

• Author: Linton, Cory

So, you are ready to grow your sales--of course, as an entrepreneur, who isn't? In all seriousness, though, you feel like your company is ready to grow beyond your wildest dreams and change the world!

You have already accomplished a great deal with your edtech startup: you have created an MVP, sold it to a few schools or districts, made some tweaks based on feedback from real users, and launched a solid v1. Now you feel ready to scale sales. Let's go through a few things to consider as you think about expanding your distribution to increase your top line. Growing sales is a massive topic, and books have been written on many items contained in this short article--so I will just share key questions that you should ask yourself as you prepare to drive more sales.

ARE YOU TRULY READY?

Before we jump into growing your sales, there are a few important issues that you want to make sure are well thought out. First, is your product ready to scale and is the provisioning process for new customers manageable? What if a large district rolls out your product system-wide--are you ready for that? Can you setup the users fast enough to be ready for the district? The worst thing that could happen is that you make a big sale and then the provisioning and stand up process falls apart.

Second, is your messaging ready? This seems simple, but doing it right takes time and effort. To grow your sales you will be spreading your message far and wide--make sure you have the right message to do that. Do you have a simple message that clearly articulates the benefits from the customer's perspective and the problems that your product solves? Can you say it in a couple of sentences? What is the paragraph version of that message? What is the one-pager of that message?

An edtech customer typically doesn't care about technology, how you are solving a problem, or what features you have. They care about whether you can solve their problem and the benefit to them of implementing your solution. Spend time working through this with your team members to come up with a simple message that is easy to understand--it will pay huge dividends down the road as you grow. Based on your key messages, you can build out a standard presentation, product demos and content for your website--and if you start with the key message, all those communication channels will be aligned and you will look much more like the sophisticated company that you want to become.

LEADERSHIP SALES

Assuming your...