The massive shift to remote learning during the COVID-19 era is forcing education vendors to revamp established business strategies, rethink their approach to sales, and refocus district support to virtual environments. Some of those new practices and strategies will likely last only as long as the pandemic does, company officials say. But other changes may be here to stay. Education companies are doing business in a market that is quickly evolving, with many big districts choosing remote-only instruction as a safety precaution in the fall, while others are determined to offer some in-person instruction.
The plans for the 2020-21 academic year vary from state to state, and district to district. Company officials say districts are expecting even more responsiveness from them now than during the preCOVID era. Many vendors are accustomed to predominantly catering their products for in-person classroom use, and their sales and support processes largely revolve around in-person relationships. But how do they generate new sales leads, and nurture relationships when they can’t knock on doors or dip into a school for a face-to-face visit? How do they provide flocks of existing customers across the country — teachers, administrators and support staff — with training to use products? On the surface, the answer may appear simple: Go virtual, just like the districts the vendors are serving. The reality, however, for companies has been much more complex.
Firms are transitioning entire teams of field reps from a routine of road trips, hotel hopping and handshakes, to more digital sales and training methods, which can involve using webcam, email and other tools. And, in some cases, teams are being forced to do much more than digitize their professional development catalogs; they’re essentially reimagining sessions by making them more targeted and customizable for districts. As new school year gets underway, company officials say districts are relying on them more than ever before — not just for the nuts and bolts of how to use a piece of software, but also for much broader advice on how to effectively teach long term in a mixed or purely online environment.
In districts that have good relationships with vendors, school officials are “looking at their key vendors as trusted advisers because there’s no playbook for this,” said Stuart Udell, CEO of Achieve3000, which provides a literacy platform that seeks to deliver adaptive, differentiated instruction. “There’s no one at the state or federal level telling them what to do,” he said. “They might be telling them to put X’s on desks and stand six feet apart. But the real guidance on how to educate kids requires innovative thinking, and if you’re a school district, the folks you work with who are the most innovative thinkers are your ed-tech providers.”
Starting Point: Every District Will Use Virtual Learning
When COVID-19 shut down school buildings this spring, Udell’s company turned to webinars to try and drum up new business. He said when it came to existing district customers, sales or support reps could simply pick up the phone to get plugged back in with old contacts. But attracting new clients required more thought and work. So the company focused on a mix of resources around which it built a series of webinars. Topics included subjects such as how to close achievement gaps, how to improve education outcomes in Title I programs, and how to differentiate instruction in a digital world. The approach seems to have worked so far.
Udell said the webinars regularly generate hundreds of live attendees across a range of the education spectrum, from teachers to superintendents. And customers appear to have taken notice, he said. “We’ve attracted thousands of new leads,” Udell said.
At Voyager Sopris Learning, which offers math, literacy, professional development and assessment tools to K-12 schools, the company has created a series of webinars and blogs during COVID-19, sometimes tapping into their network of textbook authors to lead sessions. Oftentimes, that online engagement might just be “tips and tricks and different things districts might find helpful,” said Jeff Vincent, vice president of sales. In an attempt to remove some of the lingering uncertainty, Vincent said the company is operating under the notion that every district will engage in virtual learning at some point this school year.
Reorganizing Sales for a New Market
The sales team and district leaders, Vincent said, have become increasingly comfortable meeting on video conference platforms, in part, because there’s no other way to proceed at this point. However, opening the door for new customers and “helping them solve the problems they might encounter as schools open back up has been difficult,” he said. The appetite among some districts to take on new ed-tech products has been somewhat tempered by the immediate unknown. “We’re trying to be respectful of the conflicting priorities out there and understand there are a lot of other pressing needs that districts have to plan for that they never did in the past,” he said, noting the web series has been well attended. “Our hope is that will turn into an awareness that we have some things that can help them.”
We have to be more nimble, more entrepreneurial and more agile than we’ve ever been in our history. It’s vital that we don’t think we have it all figured out.Sean Ryan, McGraw-Hill Walter Sherwood, the chief executive of ThinkCerca, an online provider of literacy products, said his sales reps would have normally used the spring to build relationships with new leads at large conferences and events or at smaller gatherings like one-on-one lunches. With that option nullified for the time being, the Chicago-based ed-tech vendor is also relying on a webinar-based and virtual approach to generate leads, along with references from existing customers. Sherwood said the company has closed deals during the pandemic and that he’s pleased with new sales. But there’s an element of personal touch that’s missing to help guide district partners through what is usually a long, drawn-out procurement process, generally requiring approvals from multiple levels of decision-makers and a pilot phase before schools fully adopt a solution. “The bummer side of the house is we are a relationship-driven company. Those partnerships are invaluable and hard-won and it’s just been difficult,” said Sherwood. “It’s not ideal, but it’s also been interesting to see how we can still reach potential new customers through virtual events. The jury is still a little bit out on how we can convert someone from a webinar to a paying customer.”
When the pandemic hit, some education vendors stopped pursuing new sales for a couple of months to focus exclusively on supporting existing customers. Now they’re getting back into the game. Vernon Johnson, president and CEO of Accelerate Learning, a provider of digital resources for pre-K-12 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics products, said making the decision to hold off on sales during the early days of the coronavirus was easy because there were no shortages of businesses overwhelming districts with “free this and free that.” “We thought we could go get those customers later,” he said. Easing back the focus on sales in exchange for enhanced support has “paid dividends,” Johnson said, as many existing district customers ended up increasing their use of the company’s products. Now, he said, “our salespeople are very busy” and Accelerate Learning has rolled out new offerings to help districts during remote learning, including new micro certificate courses, a curriculum mapping tool and a system to track attendance virtually. “Things have picked up dramatically,” Johnson said. “We are on the right trajectory to finish out our year well. But there’s still unknowns. What’s going to happen in nine weeks? Nobody really knows.” For now, the company is focused on continuing to train its team of sales reps that worked in the field before the pandemic on how to be most effective via video conferences and on the phone.
How Are Education Companies Faring During COVID-19?
Leveraging the experience and specific skill set of an inside sales team, the company is attempting to get the field reps to learn how to pitch its products similar to their call center-based counterparts. “That’s a process that will be ongoing,” he said, adding that field reps rely on their ability to get in front of decision-makers and deliver a home run of a presentation and it may take some time to learn how to translate those skills effectively on a remote basis. “If we can do that, we’ll be very effective.” ‘Tidal Wave Shift’ Toward Virtual PD Mid-August typically signals peak time for professional development sessions in K-12 education, the period that marks the run-up to a new school year.
In normal times, an “army” of 135 trainers would be spread out across the country that time of year for Achieve3000, staging professional development training for educators. Udell, the company CEO, said he estimates that about 90 percent of all professional development training provided by his firm this year will take place virtually. That meant not only having to create an online professional development catalog but understanding “you can’t do a five-hour PD session online like you would do live.” So now the company’s professional development sessions are chopped up into targeted 60-90-minute virtual bites, and the topics have been adapted to cater to hybrid and remote learning, along with focusing on the needs of families and students. Some of the company’s existing professional development models were “chunked” all together, he said.
Udell called it a “tidal wave shift,” transitioning professional development from what he described as a live stand-and-deliver approach to one that’s “online and much more customizable and consultative.” “We’re working intimately with districts to say what are your specific needs,” Udell said. “We’re really letting schools and teachers do what they do best and let technology do the rest.”
At Illustrative Math, an organization that has created a math curriculum for grades 6-12, with K-5 launching as a pilot soon, the notion of having to convert its professional development catalog to online materials quickly came into focus when school buildings started shutting down earlier this year, said CEO Bill McCallum. What wasn’t as expected, he said, was how smooth the transition went and the range of interaction from teachers in the virtual environment. “It’s been an eye-opening experience,” McCallum said. “We didn’t have a complete virtual offering until a couple of months ago.” Since the onset of COVID, Illustrative Math’s sales have been down, he said.
The organization offers curriculum that is based on openly licensed resources, and professional development makes up a big chunk of the company’s revenue. Yet, districts, he said, “have other things to think about, and they have their budgets to worry about.” Illustrative Math, a nonprofit, has made up for the sales decline through grants from foundations. “We’re not gloomy, but it’s unstable times for sure. The crystal ball is pretty muddy for next year,” McCallum said.
It’s not as if virtual professional development is a new phenomena by any means. Pre-COVID, districts were already training staff remotely with on-demand online presentations created by an array of vendors. But adoption of virtual professional development has accelerated exponentially since the spring, said Deborah Rayow, vice president of Instructional Design and Learning Science at Edgenuity, which provides online curriculum and services, including preparation for Advanced Placement tests, credit recovery, and intervention. That menu of on-demand online training offerings provide teachers with “exactly what they want when they want it,” said Rayow. Now, not only are more districts requesting that but she said the focus has shifted toward training educators to enhance the remote learning experience. “We do have some sessions still about teaching in a hybrid environment,” Rayow said. “Most districts are at least planning to be able to pivot to an entirely distance learning model if needed and they want to make sure their teachers are well-armed with strategies to make that successful.”
Remote Sales and Virtual PD May “Never Fully Go Back”
Some of the changes made to vendors’ core business models during the COVID19 era could be here for good. While ed-tech firms are just as eager as districts for a return to normalcy, there have been a number of efficiencies and cost savings realized that can’t be ignored and are likely to continue being implemented long after the pandemic. Udell, the CEO from Achieve3000, said his company is saving hundreds of thousands of dollars every month in travel costs but is delivering the same quantity of professional development online. And Udell believes the quality of that training hasn’t fallen off either, saying “the reps now have more prep time and more time to reflect and follow up to districts’ needs.”
He predicts in-person training will resume at a 25 percent clip the first year after a vaccine, and will increase to about 50 percent of where it was pre-pandemic within a few years. But, he said, “I actually believe we will never fully go back.” Likewise, Sean Ryan, the president of McGraw-Hill’s school group, said professional development after the COVID era will never be the same. The company has created hundreds of PD videos in recent months and is working through the process of digitizing its entire training portfolio, along with rolling out a new platform for online professional development. We saved a lot of money because we’re not in airplanes or in cars driving to faraway places. Those are efficiencies.
Vernon Johnson, Accelerate Learning “Some are going to prefer in-person, but this has been proven effective so far,” he said. “This is going to change permanently to a certain degree how we deliver products for training.” Ryan also added that he also expects to see a “disproportionate investment” in inside sales versus field-based sales moving forward. And Johnson, the CEO at Accelerate Learning, said he also expects to see a decline in field-based sales in the future. Once everyone gets accustomed to handling that type of business via phone, email and video conferences, “a lot of people may never go back to saying, ‘Come and visit me.’” “We saved a lot of money because we’re not in airplanes or in cars driving to faraway places. Those are efficiencies,” he said. “If PD can be delivered in an effective way through Zoom or other digital means, both the customer and company are saving money.”
Strengthening Relationships, Revising Products
With the pandemic now in its sixth month in the United States, companies say that many of the districts they work with will have moved past the early, purely reactive days of the crisis to focus on broader needs, such as how to improve pedagogy in remote learning. And company officials have sought to leverage district officials’ interests to have broader conversations about improving their products.
Since May, Illustrative Mathematics has embarked on a so-called “listening tour” to gather feedback from districts. Those conversations have informed the company on what new tools to offer during the crisis, where to tweak existing products and training, and how to develop a roadmap for districts that can be used now and beyond the current crisis. “Teachers are not going to have everything figured out at the beginning of the year and neither are the companies that are going to help them,” said McCallum, Illustrative Mathematics’ CEO.
One striking development is the extent to which some districts have sought near constant guidance over the past few months, company officials say. A veteran field representative for McGraw-Hill who has worked with a major urban school district for almost two decades “feels like she’s on speed dial for that leadership team,” said Ryan, president of the company’s school group. “Very clearly and very obviously there’s a trust relationship there,” he said. The company is actively listening to districts, Ryan said. McGraw Hill is responding by modifying existing offerings and platforms, building deeper integrations within the ed-tech ecosystem — including within Google Classroom, for example —- and rolling out new products.
Those district conversations made it obvious that there’s “not one thing being executed by 15,000 school districts,” he said. “We have to be more nimble, more entrepreneurial and more agile than we’ve ever been in our history,” Ryan said. “It’s vital that we don’t think we have it all figured out. We’re finding there’s a lot of heterogeneity out there.” Teachers are not going to have everything figured out at the beginning of the year and neither are the companies that are going to help them.
Despite the focus on digital products to facilitate remote learning, some districts are still asking for print-based materials. Ryan said although most of the company’s offerings are digitized, they are “working very quickly to turn those outliers into PDFs.” Voyager Sopris Learning, the vendor offering math, literacy, professional development and assessment tools to K-12 schools, has print-based offerings that can’t be digitized, said Vincent, the company’s vice president of sales In those cases, the company is “having honest conversations with folks, and if that means they have to go out and find something that can be delivered for the virtual setting, that’s the best thing to do.”