Are You Just Selling to Schools — Or Improving Them?
Originally posted in March 2023, this post was updated on October 16, 2025
This post helps education innovators reframe how they engage with education stakeholders, after the sale, to ensure better use-case outcomes, and in messaging as well, before the sale, to build interest and credibility with their audience.
“Change plans rarely survive intact from their initial interaction with people.”
The hard truth. Schools don’t buy products — they adopt change. And the moment your innovation enters a district, it’s reshaped by the very system it’s meant to improve. That’s Rogers’ implementation paradox in action: change efforts often end up preserving the status quo instead of transforming it.
If you’re working to bring an innovation into schools, this post will help you break that cycle. You’ll learn how to position your work as part of the improvement process — not outside it — and how to both partner with and communicate with educators, in ways educators recognize as authentic, evidence-based, and aligned with their mission.
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1. What Happens When You “Sell” to Schools?
Organizations that sell products to schools often think key product features are reliable predictors of results. This is often not the case, however. Studies show that many innovations schools adopt may never come out of the box. And those that do see the light of day can have impacts that vary wildly. A wide range of ecosystem and implementation dynamics — referred to as “local variation” by experts — can mean the same tools and features lead to disparate results.
This means, without the right follow-through and partnerships, the “sale” may not deliver the desired benefits — resulting in a lose-lose outcome: the school loses, and so does the vendor.
Failing to understand local variability and educators’ experience of the complexity they create can limit use-case outcomes (after the sale) and can result in mis-aligned messaging (in the effort to increase sales):
Misunderstanding or ignoring implementation dynamics and local variables is likely to limit the anticipated or promised benefits and impacts of your education offering
Messaging emphasizing features and benefits — and other kinds of “one-size-fits-all” messaging — often fails to connect with how district or school site educators think about their priorities and the solutions they need
Vendors looking to get valid and positive use-case feedback and data after the sale, to drive further engagement and wider adoption, are likely to wind up disappointed (along with their clients)
Schools don’t buy features and tools — they want to adopt and implement solutions — solutions that fit their ecosystem and that will grow and adapt with it.
2. Why Schools Are Fertile Ground for the Implementation Paradox
As complex organizations, schools are subject to wide-ranging forces: factions, policy shifts, and leadership interruptions or failures, funding swings, and more.
As a result, it’s hard to make reliable predictions about outcomes based on the attributes, features, and funtions of an educational product or innovation.
Research shows that:
when a school or district invests in a new instructional program, new education technology, or new instructional practice, there may be little to show for it in terms of improved academic achievement
it’s very difficult in the school market to draw clear and convincing lines between product investments and actual impacts and benefits (i.e., there’s little reliable “ROI” data)
the same offering or solution can lead to very different outcomes within different student cohorts within the same school setting or across different school settings
3. Key Implementation Challenges in Complex Organizations
A. Goverance Complexity
If you’re selling a software solution to a conventional B2B company, such as an auto parts maker or a large real estate firm, your clients’ organizations may be large and internally complicated, but they are not for that reason a “complex organization” in the same way that schools, hospitals, and federal service agencies are typically “complex.”
A key point is not to conflate size with complexity, at least not in context of systems change within organizations.
Let’s take the example of the large real estate firm and explain why it’s less complex than a school, despite its size.
the real estate firm it has a very simple definition of success: increased revenue and profits are the essential metrics
the decision-making structure is relatively centralized and static — senior leaders are in charge and have wide autonomy, and even if there are policies or processes for more delegated decision-making, any such policy or process is likely largely controlled by the senior leaders.
Schools are different…Like many organizations in highly-regulated sectors, schools have many layers of dynamic complexity and school directors have limited managerial autonomy compared to leaders in many profit-driven business models.
School organizations—big and small—are frequently buffeted by a range of shifting federal, state, and local policies, laws, and mandates.
School leaders not only need to manage staffs and complex bargaining agreements, but they also need to serve, support, protect, and “manage” large student bodies and be responsive to a range of interest groups, both internal and external (including shifting ideological or personnel-related interests or factions, parent and student interest groups, community interests, and social and political interests, both local and national…).
B. Overlapping, Intersecting, and Conflicting Success Metrics
For example, a school leader may institute solutions, programs, or policies narrowly focused on improving academic achievement as a key success metric, but isolating and evaluating linkages between specific inputs and outcomes can be difficult to do…
Likewise, a focus on academic “success” as such is going to wind up competiting with other priorities and values — such as student wellbeing, student choice and voice, equity, or other “value-driven” interests related to the kind of broader educational experiences parents and guardians want for their children, or that students themselves care most about…
C. The problem of Local Variability.
In addition to this kind of organizational complexity, differences in local communities, demographics, funding, and leadership capacity make school environments highly variable. This makes it harder to achieve change through “replicable” practices and hard to predict how innovations will land and work out in different settings.
These local variables are typically anchored in factors related to:
differences in leadership beliefs and competencies and professional culture
differences in student, family, and community values and demographics
differences in technology readiness and technology proficiencies
differences in the mindset, and attitudes of rank and file educators
differences in educator proficiencies and prevailing organizational and instructional norms and practices
4. Measuring ROI vs. Organizational Complexity
Because of the multi-layed aspects of school governance, overlapping success metrics, and due to local variability:
1) it’s hard to measure how innovative tools and offerings will align with existing priorities and frameworks when messaging to prospects, or how any offerings and the impact they achieve will be buffeted by any number of irrational or abrupt directional changes
2) it can be hard to predict how the same offering will perform from one school to another, or even from one classroom to another…
Exhibit A: The Rise of the EdTech Evidence Exchange.
Schools are so complex and so fraught with localized variables that the federal government has established a coalition called the EdTech Evidence Exchange in response.
The mission of this clearing house agency is to find ways to accurately “measure” the connection between specific EdTech tools and programs schools have purchased and the actual “ROI” they get in return, especially in the form of academic achievement gains…
At its core, the EdTech Evidence Exchange came into existence because schools, education researchers, and public funding agencies had to acknowledge that there was no way to gauge the actual benefits accrued from the millions and billions in annual education technology spending!
The goal of the exchange is to discern use impacts using lenses that account for local variability in order to “rate” the effectiveness of an innovation, and by extension, the ROI that different products deliver.
The approach is not only dubious overall, it can be a double-edged sword for education innovators.
Hopefully you’re already seeing the potential fallacy here:
If governance complexities and local variability undermine a “scientific approach” so to speak — thwarting or complicating efforts to measure direct impacts of an innovation and to achieve predictable “replication” — then how will folks credibly “rate” different offerings based on ROI?
As evidence of how dubious the approach is, one can look to the maze of local variability and complexities the Exchange researchers themselves call attention to. Researchers that lead the EdTech Evidence Exchange settled on defining at least 10 types of local variability and complexity in K12 settings!
And, There’s the “Anything” Variable…
If 10 variables wasn’t enough already (and perhaps not), the Evidence Exchange experts also decided to tack on an 11th variable — a placeholder for any additional variables yet to be discovered!
Education marketers, therefore, face a similar dilemma…
If schools and school researchers can’t figure out how to gauge the value or benefits of EdTech tools or other education innovations because of complex school system and school culture variables — in order to measure the academic “ROI” for their EdTech spending — then education companies also can’t meaningfully draw a clear line of attribution between their own EdTech product (or any of its specific features) and verifiable gains in academic achievement (until and unless, perhaps, their product demonstrates strong and consistent impacts over time and across a range of K12 settings).
While some kinds of benefits may be easier to isolate and measure in some settings, such as a time-saving benefit for teachers, for example, the problem remains that making a meaningful connection between many potentially powerful and consequential learning innovations and specific outcomes and benefits can be much more difficult…
The “Fidelity” Myth
As an education innovator (or education leader) you’re probably in fairly good company if your solution to all of this lies in ensuring “fidelity of implementation.” Many educators strongly believe this is how you measure an impact accurately, based on the assertion that a highly prescribed implementation protocol minimizes the “noise” from local variability.
In reality, though, “fidelity of implementation” is arguably a myth more than a real thing… School managers often value this approach a way to ensure (or convince themselves of) a return on their innovation investment; teachers however tend to see it much differently, and the variables will typically prevail.
As experts like Michael Fullan — and others on the front lines of large-scale school reform efforts know, the diffusion of innovations within school cultures is never straightfoward and it’s not something that can be overcome with managerial directives or decrees.
5. Making the K12 Marketing Mindshift: From Selling to Partnering
In the midst of organizational complexity and local variability, how can education innovators message more effectively to prospects (before the sale). and partner more effectively with clients (after the sale)?
There are ways your organization can connect more effectively with school leaders, primarily by making the mindshift from “selling” to schools to “partnering” with schools for long-term school improvement.
Selling Mindset Improvement Mindset
Transactional Relational
Product-first Problem-first
ROI metrics Impact metrics
One-time sale Long-term partnership
Empathy (and Checking for Mindset Bias)
In this context, t’s important for K12 product vendors not to compare school leadership and school dynamics using the same metrics used in a business mindset (despite the potentially strong assumption about what’s rational and what’s not).
For example, we’ve written elsewhere about the lack of evidence that charter schools — freed from many public governance restraints and focused on core metrics and more centralized decision-making — also get results widely similar to those of traditional public schools.
In fact, by partnering more relationally with educators, students, and school-decision makers, you’ll build empathy: in order to more deeply shift your mindset, moving away from a business-centric or engineering-centric perspective, to one with a much more nuanced grasp of school dynamics.
6. Beyond Buy-In: Aligning Strategy With What Schools Need
Here are some tips that may help EdTech companies and marketing teams message more effectively to K12 prospects AND also partner effectively with K12 clients, after the sale, to help ensure more meaningful outcomes for student learning. Key are:
Empathy — starting with the educator’s daily reality and current framework of paint points and goals
Evidence — promote your offering with more emphasis on real-use scenarios and outcomes, not pitches and promises related to a list of features (cool as they are!)
Alignment — highlight how your offerings are responsive to district goals, planning, and policy contexts
Trust — build credibility by getting into the weeds with educators and engaging in informed problem solving, instead of popping in with a suit and tie for a quick sale
For example…
Identify how your innovations solves larger challenges in school setting specific to current instructional challenges at local sites. The same insights that align your EdTech product with key challenges and goals in specific school settings might inform marketing content and improve how your EdTech company approaches new prospects and initiates relationships with them.
Identify and anticipate potential obstacles to full and effective implementation by taking stock of potential challenges or obstacles related to local factors such as:
a) levels of student engagement with academic content
b) teachers’ existing professional competencies and performance challenges (at the specific client school or district)
c) leadership readiness and organizational capacity generally for driving longer term innovation in instructional practices
Build partnerships in candid dialogue with school clients because each school or district will be in a different phase of its innovation journey…This journey on the road to innovation is impacted by a range of local variables related to factors such as:
a) teacher competencies and teacher professional learning modalities
b) educational values and organizational culture
c) existing IT proficiencies
d) underlying beliefs about teaching and learning
Understanding specific client schools and districts and their readiness for implementing instructional changes — where they are on their journey — is critical to building an effective implementation plan and road map
It’s important to go beyond teacher “buy-in” when planning for the successful adoption of a new instructional technology…Teachers, or most often, a particular small cohort of teachers poised to serve as change agents, are typically in the role of “first adopters”. These change leaders will often play a pivotal roll in implementation success. It probably pays to partner and dialogue more deeply with leaders and instructional change agents at client schools in order to support successful understanding, adoption, and end-use practices.
If teachers are not receptive to or don’t fully understand the rationale for the adoption of and transition to a specific EdTech tool and any related instructional practices and routines, then implementation may be impaired as a result.
Engage in more sustained partnerships with school clients…In addition to working with school staff as you approach a school and develop plans for relevant professional support and classroom implementation, it’s also important that deeper partnerships allow your business-oriented leaders to join their managerial acumen with the school-based knowledge of school administrators to figure out with them and alongside them how to
a) actually measure the impact of your product on learning outcomes
b) achieve practical and sustained data-gathering routines
c) identify, implement, and monitor strategies for using the data to improve instructional practice and boost learning
Investing in this kind of deeper learning with a commitment to iterative implementation successes can be a boon for both schools and EdTech companies who sell to schools…
Final Thoughts
If school leaders and researchers like those at the EdTech Evidence Exchange can’t figure what schools are actually getting for their EdTech spending, then EdTech companies and marketing teams are likely to face similar challenges.
The real question isn’t “did you make the sale?” It’s “Did your offering make a difference?”
This means it’s imperative that K12 vendors lean into the process of school improvement (and learn more about school improvement dynamics) by developing and using deeper insights to drive meaningful impacts after the sale, and to align messaging, in order to increase sales.
What To Do About It…
Here’s a few steps education innovators can take to apply lessons from this discussion…
Revisit your value proposition: is it educator-centered and does it lean into partnering for measurable school improvement?
Audit your language: are you spotlighting a checklist of “features & benefits” or are you messaging a commitment to better outcomes (and acknowledging genuine challenges)?
Put use-driven scenarios in the foreground: replace “sales decks” with evidence-based, use-based narratives and case studies.
Let us know what you think about this post!
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