Demystifying the K-12 EdTech Buying Cycle: A Conversation with Ian McCullough

Elana Leoni:

Hello, and welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. My name is Elana Leoni and I've devoted my career to helping education brands build their brand awareness and engagement. Each week I sit down with educators, EdTech entrepreneurs, and experts in educational marketing and community building. All of them will share their successes and failures using social media, inbound marketing, or content marketing and community building. I'm excited to guide you on your journey to transform your marketing efforts into something that provides consistent value and ultimately improves the lives of your audience. And now let's jump right into today's episode.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. In this episode, I got to sit down with Ian McCullough. He's a consultant that specializes in marketing, go-to-market strategies, and business development for the education technology industry. This conversation actually started over lunch, an in-person lunch. I know that we don't do as many of those since the pandemic, but I met Ian for lunch and I remember over some really nice pasta he started talking about the K-12 buying cycle. And I know that that might sound boring, but for me, I think it's fascinating. And I know a lot of you in EdTech also think it's fascinating because it's changing, but it's also has always been challenging. So as he started talking about the K-12 buying cycle, I immediately stopped him and said, "wait, stop, everything you said we need to say on this podcast. So please come on." So this is the continuation of our conversation over lunch.

In this episode, we do talk about all things EdTech buying cycle, how to navigate it and pay attention to the way Ian talks about the metaphors within the K-12 buying cycle. It helps solidify so many things for me and really helped orient me on how I talk about it, how I navigate it and make sense on how if you are an EdTech person selling in B2B or B2C, but mostly B2B, and actually Ian says it's B2G, business to government. It just helps you understand why things move the way they do and to be patient and go with it. So pay attention to its fun metaphors. This is a very entertaining episode and it's a great way to learn about something as complex as the K-12 buying cycle.

But before we get into the episode, I'd like to talk briefly about Ian's background. Ian has over twenty-plus years in education and creative technology. He has experience in consumer corporate training and institutional market. He previously led the North American K-12 marketing team at Turnitin for the past five years, and he's now a consultant that specializes in marketing go-to-market strategies and business development specifically for EdTech.

So sit back, enjoy this wonderful and exciting episode on the K-12 buying cycle. I know that sounds ironic, but it is not. He makes it sound exciting and there's so many fun metaphors that bring it all home. Enjoy this episode.

All right, welcome Ian to All Things Marketing and Education. I'm so excited you're here. You have some great knowledge to share. We're going to be talking about marketing, all things marketing in K-12 education, getting into some things like the buying cycle. How is it different from K-12 and higher ed? There's so many people that come to EdTech in particular, and they might be successful marketers in other places, and it kind of hits them like an anvil, like, "oh gosh, this is a different place entirely." So we're going to get into the nuances of why this industry is really different and how you're able to navigate it through Chartered In's marketing lens too. So welcome, Ian. We're so excited to have you here.

Ian McCullough:

Glad to be here. It's a pleasure talking with you, and we clearly have to have more of these conversations much more frequently.

Elana Leoni:

Always. So why don't you tell our audience your career journey to date. I always love giving a beautiful intro of you that makes you blush and be very humble at all of the things. But beyond what I talked about, talk about how your ins and outs of different parts of businesses have given you the perspective that you have now.

Ian McCullough:

So currently, as you mentioned, I am director of marketing for Global Secondary Education at Turnitin. And when we say global, that's a bit of a work in progress. So tracing back a step of one step, and then we'll go back to the beginning and I'll go David Copperfield on you. For the past four years, I have worked at Turnitin and really built out the regional marketing function for what was the North America K-12 business. And we had a lot of success with an integrated operating model across sales, customer onboarding, and marketing at a company where the majority of the business is higher ed. And so the executive team challenged us to see if we could bring the focus that we brought to US and Canada's secondary business and apply it to other regions. And so that has been one of my big opportunities and challenges since the beginning of the year. Busy, busy year.

and defined that market from: 1995

And that's what I consider my backbone. I started in product development and for me, being the curious person, I hit a point in my product development career where I looked around and recognized that I was creating artwork and working with people on code and audio and animations, and then I would deliver them. And then maybe six to nine months later I could walk into Target or Toys R Us and be like, "Oh look, mice, that's that thing I made, except that there's several dozen of them and I have no idea how they got into that show." So I made a lateral career move into operations and supply chain and worked on global launches at LeapFrog from that perspective and really seeing the business end to end and hit a point there where I actually met my wife at LeapFrog. And like I said, many lifelong friends, including our mutual friend, Monica Brown.

r mode, changing companies in: 2008

And so picked up some contracting and consulting clients very quickly. Again, ex-LeapFrog people. As I think you and I had the conversation one time, networking is really about making friends. And so when you are in need, your friends will come seek you out if you do good work. And so that started out and then I built out other clients and what I kept noticing, which was I would be there mainly for project management and product development gigs, is that I kept getting requested to do something like, "Can you do a competitive analysis for us?" And I'd be like, "You will pay me for my time." And they'd be like, "Oh yeah, why then yes I can." And so then slowly by slowly I began to transition my career into marketing, which I was enabled by the fact that I happened to by that point be married to a marketer.

So I'd come home and look at my wife who has a CPG background, like I said, met at LeapFrog, and I'd be like, "Am I doing this thing right?" And so I really learned a lot from her and then solidified the transition when the aforementioned Monica Brown approached me again when she had somebody on her product marketing team going out on maternity leave and she was like, "Are you available and do you think you can handle this?" And I'm like, "Money, yes I can."

And so it became the case that I wound up. It typed out pretty well for me. There was a series of maternity leave fill-ins where I was back at LeapFrog for about another three years and just staying in the same spot, working on their app store business for that generation of the Leap Head. And that's really the point where I solidified into marketing and the other experiences I'd had along the way informed how I, as a marketer was able to interact and cross-functionally collect, which has been a huge advantage for me, I think. Even if for no other reason to recognize why other departments or other team members sometimes get frustrating, those of us in marketing and how to recognize and acknowledge that and still ask for the rainbow unicorn with Pegasus wings yesterday because recognizing that demand and pushing things forward as part of the job in my opinion.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah, so I would say as a marketer, it's key. Yeah, got to talk to people. You got to collaborate outside of marketing, I talk about that a lot on this show, especially even specifics like you can't isolate and silo social media. They need to be collaborating and understanding what everyone's needs are. Same with community. So what you're saying is ringing true. And I love how you kind of gotten the nooks and crannies because even being individual as a consultant coming in with a fresh perspective for being a traditional kind of in product marketing and then operation, going through all of that really helps you understand how fundamentally different EdTech and higher education are.

Ian McCullough:

Yes.

Elana Leoni:

So you went B2C, B2B. You talk about B2G. Why don't you talk to me about that?

Ian McCullough:

Well, I think one of the contracting clients I picked up, so one of my career stops along the way during that period was also Pearson. And it doesn't get more core than some of the old line publishers. And I think the distinction that's really important to make, first and foremost education is a world unto its own with its own motivations. And we can take an example like I've done meal. LeapFrog is the backbone of my career, part of my client based during contracting and consulting, I worked with a company called Socratic Arts which did corporate training and that is ultimately B2B. So corporate training as a point of education is business to businesses and on those cycles, but when you get into institution, which is what Turnitin does, you really have to accept and acknowledge that part of the cycle is so much longer.

think maybe about I would say: 2002

So LeapFrog was a wonderful learning ground. Learn something new every day as the big banner across the warehouse. And when we look at the challenges and opportunities, and when I talk about B2G, I mean business to government. And if we are going to be at a certain point, we as marketers and storytellers have to be able to romanticize things. And then other times when we're getting down to things, we have to de-romanticize things. The vast majority in the United States, overwhelming majority of schools are government institutes, like school board. There's annual processes, there's government funding, and in the K-12 sphere there is legally mandated attendance. You have to go to school. And so one of the collisions we sometimes see with marketers who have other backgrounds is I'm going to come in, I'm going to run a 90-day program and we're going to have new leads coming in.

I'm going to run this in Q1 and by Q2 we're going to have leads coming in and everything's going to be fantastic. And I'm like, "All right, well let's see how that works out for you." Because everything is attuned to the school year right before and back to school season and all of the institutional purchases, it's still going on and some, but the vast majority of things, teachers are getting ready for the school years and schools do not like changing while instructions happen. They will think about changing throughout the year, but we're tied to the fiscal cycles and we're tied to the academic cycles for actually committing to purchase and rolling things.

You and I had lunch a few weeks ago. I'll use the metaphor that I used that you lit up with. Schools are government and it is a fair, although potentially uncomfortable analogy to compare education and military because military is also a government function and it is a useful analogy to think of schools as kind of like an aircraft carrier. They're a floating city and it's only when they're in port, but you can change stuff about them.

And in the case of schools, if you bear with my analogy, that time is summer break. And so you have to coordinate all of your activities in the spring semester in order to influence purchasing that's going to happen aligned with the fiscal year. Most government is on a July 1st to June 30th fiscal year certainly in terms of school districts. So everything has to tie around that. And so how you manage these waves, how you plan and anticipate for a process that really can take a long time, I think as a useful fact is in many states, textbook purchasing cycles happen on a seven-year cycle.

And so when we look at how school textbook publishing has morphed into various pieces of educational technology, that's the baseline that things are slowly coming from. Another good example is with due respect to technological innovations, especially the next time I show up at the DMV and want to get a license renewal or something, the Department of Motor Vehicles is a slow moving institution and that's what you have to walk in with and think about when you're trying to connect with and influence change.

Elana Leoni:

There's so many good things I want to impact there. I always say on top of what you said to add, I always talk to marketers on not only the buying cycle, but when you're talking to actual users, always keep into account how an educator is feeling. When I talk, I talk about how do we become value oriented? So we're not trying to sell, we're trying to recognize what their challenges are throughout the year cyclically and be able to say, "Hey, if you're having this challenge, here's a really helpful resource. Let's give you value. Let's demonstrate value, value, value and not sell."

And for me that's a very parallel journey from what you're talking about within the buying cycle. And maybe let's dive in a little deeper into this metaphor because, so say I'm in this aircraft carrier and I'm in the middle of the ocean, but I'm about to go to port in two months. What are they doing to prep for port? What should you be doing? And then how do you make the most of that time when they're in port and if there's any wiggle room to be able to sell them when they're leaving port, right?

Ian McCullough:

It depends on the size of the institution. So some schools are aircraft carriers, others are yachts, homeschoolers are speedboats, I guess. There's a lot of that. We're going to stretch this a bit. Essentially so it's staging. And so when we look throughout the annual cycle of purchasing, I think the other thing which you just keyed into which is really important to recognize is who has needs and who makes decisions and the tools that Turnitin offers to the world. When a school licenses, they serve instructors, they serve instructors and students. That is at the end of the day supporting the relationship between instructor and students. That is where many EdTech tools, that's where the value lies and where the warm fuzzies lie, that's what gets us out of bed in the morning. Those are the stories we like to tell. However, we also have to recognize that those are not the people who are necessarily making purchasing decisions.

And that distinction between the buyer persona and the user persona and that the buyer persona's agenda may not match the user persona's agenda and the user persona may not have the influence needed. You have to be very careful in terms of speaking to the needs so that you can actually drive sustainable use. So winning new customers is one thing, but especially in this environment where we're largely talking about software as a service tools and platform tools, the business imperative is to get a customer who stays with you and to continue to serve their needs. And so that's where what you highlighted in terms of building value, it's really serving the users at your customer institution and continuing to provide value there so that they tell all their friends and get to build positive buzz, but also just sustain the business.

To come back to your question, where the inflection point which we're all in the middle of right now is if we look, and I think that I've been focused on the secondary education business, that's where all is going to be the case. It is largely true of higher education as well, because they have an academic cycle. They also have the similar fiscal cycle, where essentially you have to deal with the fact that the purchasing cycle starts for all intents and purposes, October 1st because that just as teachers have learned the students' names and what desk they sit in. Hopefully, fingers crossed, that's usually when department chairs show up and say, "Hey, what are the things we should be asking you for the next school?"

So that's where this is, and then in the first quarter of the year in which you want to sell, that's where you have to really get, if we want to really oversimplify, let's assume that you can pull off a nine-month cycle of interest. Really, it takes years to nurture. You can look at Q4 of the preceding year as TOFL, first quarter of the year as MOFL, and then second quarter as bottom of funnel. And then in Q3, that's when you have to be closing the deals because during that summer break, that's when the fiscal funds are released and that's where you're onboarding. And so really putting a lot of attention, if we look long horizon total customer value over the lifetime of the relationship, which hopefully will be in perpetuity.

As I like to say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, which I forget who I'm citing which source I'm citing on that one, but back in the day when we had television advertisements instead of YouTube advertisements, I saw that one. Now I'm going to have to check out exactly what it was. And so amongst the cross-functional relationships that I maintain very closely is with our customer onboarding team because that's where we can really have connection with the teachers who are getting instructed and oriented, hear what initial reactions are and get the feedback.

Turnitin's flagship product is actually Feedback Studio. And so those formative feedback cycles, we try to practice what we preach there and really listen to the users at our customers and connect that to the people who are making purchasing decisions, which it is a privilege to be at a company like Turnitin that has such a huge global customer base and penetration and wide familiarity that there's a lot of trust that goes into that. And so people have heard of us.

Elana Leoni:

So I think that what you talked about is super helpful around just this is a buying cycle, but one of the things that made me just stopped in my tracks when you said it was sometimes it takes years and a lot of the game is nurturing. And so for those of you EdTech companies out here, whether you're trying to market to higher ed or K-12, you heard Ian say this is a slow moving institutional process. It's also full of stakeholders that move around a lot too. You might have a great relationship with someone, you think you're going to sell a deal and all of a sudden they get to be a superintendent on another school system, right? It's slow moving, it's nurturing and you want to add something to that?

Ian McCullough:

lly easy, dangerously easy in: 2023

And so yeah, those relationships, you have to be able to, as a successful EdTech company, your relationship has to span beyond one person and you have to be providing value at multiple points because if your champion goes then, especially in this post pandemic wave, we've had some conversation about Chat GPT, which has been an excellent topic to be a marketer at Turnitin about since we deal with originality and original thinking. But the underlying wave, especially in the K-12 space is post pandemic technology spending rationalization. And you see articles about the number of EdTech tools that any given school is using. And depending on how it's either 137 or 612 and right now the process that we're seeing where the response to the pandemic was to throw money at distance learning technology. What's fundamentally happening and unwinding in the market right now is do we need to be spending all of this money?

Did we take on more than we needed? And that's where you really have to be onboarding and demonstrating and have a cohesive story across your organization. And that is where beyond campaigns having a wide surround that you have tight alignment with your onboarding and training team. And if you don't have an onboarding and training team at your organization, go build one now. Your product team so that there is a cohesive fluid experience where you can live up and deliver value. Because when you're trying to make money over the long term, it's the retention game. That's what SaaS is all about. When we come back to the nurturing question, you have to have enough familiarity that enough people know who you are and know what you're about, that you can get the conversation.

it was funny story from ISTE: 2020

en evaluating our tools since: 2016

Elana Leoni:

I think it's really true, because there's so many people that are under pressure, especially if you're more of a startup in EdTech too, that have this pressure from VC investment and they come to me or other people say, I need some quick qualified leads that we can turn around and show traction. And as much as we can, I like how you quantify middle of the funnel, top of the funnel, and you don't ever want to hedge your bets just on one aspect of the funnel. Every seasoned marketer knows you have to pay attention to every part of the funnel. And for those people listening, I'm going to give you a homework assignment because what Ian was talking about was around personas, even though he didn't say it, he talked about who is your influencers in the process? Who are your users, who are your buyer? And a lot of the times it is different depending on the different type of school district or university you go after.

So if you don't have up-to-date of those and you are constantly asking questions and talking to people to make sure they are as up-to-date as possible, pause this episode, go do that. You will save yourself tons of money, tons of mistakes around that. So I just wanted to put that out there. And then the way you phrased, it's really important for you to talk to all people in the buying. If we just wanted to talk about buying. The users, make sure they understand all the features so that they want to renew. The influencers and the buyers, it's a way to diversify your risks, so you're not putting all your eggs in the basket of the decision maker, and that's not convenient.

Ian McCullough:

Well, and on this one, I'm in a case where the decision maker in terms of the budget holders, chances are is never going to touch the Turnitin tool. So if it's a school principal or a superintendent, no, they're not going to be in there. So the value delivery has to be with the user. But I think that a common trap that I've seen in startups is that... And so here's part two of the homework assignment that Elana just gave you is after you've done that and really thought through your personas, who's the influencer? Influencer, user buyer, then go Google and go to Google News and find stories about how many teachers have to pay for their own construction paper and pencil and room decor. And then you go back and reevaluate your assumption that a school or a district is going to buy your thing because it makes teachers' lives easier.

There's got to be more than that given the funding environment. And it is a common trap on that one to both assume that your user is your buyer or holds sufficient influence to get the buyer to spend money. And in terms of the renewal cycle on that one, because you want them purchasing forever, that's where the money comes in, is that your buyer will be your champion. And so you have to cover all of these bases as part of the development process. And this again is where having a really well-thought-out customer onboarding experience, thinking about strategically across the business, that's where that inflection point really in a SaaS play and any play where you want people to buy again, it can be hard goods as well. That first experience is so, so, so critical and so work closely and collaborate on that one.

Elana Leoni:

I love that.

Ian McCullough:

There was one thought on that. And I think coming back to the long horizon piece where I'm going to give Elana a shameless plug, I know what she does, she's also a friend, so we look at social media as an environmental thing and something that requires focused attention where when we look at that long nurture cycle and just having familiarity that with the fact that your brand exists and that you exist in a competitive space when there's lots of other companies who want the attention that you have, having a sustained social media strategy that you are prepared to commit to for the long haul, that's important as part of the long nurture.

So if you're just getting started here, you really need to think longitudinally about building up that audience and it's a constant set of trade-offs. Getting into tactical terms. If you are not a marketer listening to this particular podcast, pardon me for what I'm about to say. So essentially what you can look at here is you can buy impressions, you can buy clicks or you can buy email addresses or contact. Usually email addresses. Those are the only three things that you can buy. And as you build up, you kind of have to start with impressions and the fundamentals of marketing are repetition, repetition, repetition and repetition.

Elana Leoni:

Don't be annoying in the repetition and lead with value. And so we can buy eyes, but I have also seen buying screens and eyes in terms of impressions. You can annoy people if you don't do it right.

Ian McCullough:

Well, and they will shut you down. Also, we're patient, where it's easy enough to say patience, which as a human virtue is a great one, but from a business practice you have to have your financial planning in place and set the expectation of whoever the equity stakeholders are, whether it's a VC or a board or shareholders, that in order to get entrenched and to make change, this is going to take time. Here's the financial plan to actually do it. If you are looking for rapid growth and the rocket ship curve, my frank advice on that one is look for another industry.

With that said, the business attraction of EdTech when you continue to provide value is that once you are entrenched and once you are there, there's cycles and there's cost challenges and you have to continue to provide value. We can ping that word a lot, but once you're in, again, you become a beneficiary of the fact that institutions are reluctant to change. Government is reluctant to change. It takes slowness and time and if you are continuing to provide value, that long horizon revenue can for me, it helps eventually put my kid through college and pays for health insurance. I like those things.

Elana Leoni:

Yeah, and one of the questions I was going to ask, but you already naturally answered it was around if I'm a marketer and I've got to go to market plan and I'm going to get everyone on board and I've got all these different marketing things I can do and how do I figure out my smart goals and do I go for the top of the funnel and impressions or do I go for clicks and engagement or do I just go for lead generation? All of those things you answered quite eloquently around, it's a long haul. Whatever you do, be thoughtful. I heard you talk about diversification, but managing expectations based on the marketing medium.

Ian McCullough:

Yeah, I think as a broad statement, you have to be thoughtful and strategic is another one of those words like networking and self-selling. We could have a whole other episode about what does it mean to be strategic? Consider me signed up. You have to have a long view on this thing. I think as just a practical advice for any marketer is don't be poetic, be right. And so if you commit to something, do that thing.

And so if people, no, we need email addresses, we need email addresses and your assessment of where things are at is like we are not going to get email addresses. We're going to end up wasting sales rep's times. I would rather take a lot of lower impressions at a, in an abstract hypothetical, we have to define a bunch of things. If I can buy a lot of impressions at a low CPI and drive those to a webpage where they'll convert for a rep, that is much better than collecting a lot of email addresses that have no interest in what you're doing or just are only tangentially interested in your content piece. Content pieces are great for building up your nurture program and filtering things out. It is a game of large numbers and anytime you see a funnel, you're going to lose a certain amount of people at every step. Plan for that.

Elana Leoni:

Yes, I feel like one of the conversations I always go back to whether I'm building communities, social media or go-to-market strategies is depth versus breadth. Does your board get really excited about shiny numbers that actually don't convert? At some point you do need to play the politics and satisfy them and say, "Oh, shiny numbers", but you also need to show that you're not wasting your time and that maybe 20 really solid leads that give you two proper districts are going to be better than 500 leads if you go to a fancy conference. So being able to figure out that and manage and tell that story is really important.

Ian McCullough:

And if we look at within an organization, what's the point of marketing? It's reducing friction to sale. Sales rep time is a lot more expensive than an ad campaign in most cases. And so if reps have to chase things down themselves, that's a lot of human time. Our job as marketers is to reduce the friction to the sale, ideally to the point where people are coming in as inbounds and saying, "Hey, I've heard about your product. I saw that social media post that you clearly partnered with Leoni Consulting Group on. Now I'm at your webpage and I'm filling out a contact sales form because you've connected with me."

Then great, the rep will pick that up and bring it through and there's still a funnel effect there. But if you're just going out into scrap, if they're just going out into scrap, that's incredibly time-consuming on an individual basis. So our job is friction reduction. Make that smoother and make people come to us.

Elana Leoni:

I love the way you frame that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to steal it, but I'm going to cite my sources.

Ian McCullough:

Excellent. Cite your sources.

Elana Leoni:

All right, so our last closing question here, Ian is a lot of the times at EdTech it is mission-driven. We do get the feels when we are making a difference in educators' lives and students' lives, but it also is a very challenging, can be sometimes draining industry. So I know you're a big traveler. Beyond traveling, what are a couple of things that you do to just put a little pep in your step to make it through the next day after you've had a really challenging day?

Ian McCullough:

My recreational hobby, don't laugh on this one is, as I said, I got a fine arts degree as an undergraduate, but if I'm curling up in bed and I got my smartphone with me and I'm consuming some content, maybe it's a book, but very often it's actually science and math videos. And so as somebody, in order to be in EdTech, you have to be passionate about education and learning yourself. And maybe your topic isn't quantum field theory. Yes, I totally do.

But finding new ways that are not directly connected to your work to learn new things, that's what does it for me that. And if learning new things isn't your jam and isn't something that motivates and refills you, then I think that you might want to try another industry. EdTech might not be for you because it is draining and it does take a long time. It takes patience and determination and it can get frustrating on some days.

And at the end of the day, let's be clear, it is a for-profit business. There are not-for-profits out there. Even not-for-profits have to make more money than they spend, so let's not get too convoluted about that. But how that purpose gets fulfilled, if that is something that you need from your job and your career, then be excited about learning and find new ways to learn. Maybe download a language app and learn a new language or go take a class at a community college. Community colleges are amazing resources in the educational sphere. Community colleges and libraries, they are bastions of lifelong learning and we should all be aspiring towards. So shout out for those institutions as well.

Elana Leoni:

And I can't add anything better than how you just ended this show. So Ian, I thank you so much for your time and your knowledge and just being so open and transparent about what it's like to work in this tumultuous world of K-12 and higher education as a marketer. At the end of the day, we're all just figuring it out, but we're using educated guesses and we're using those lifelong learning that you talked about to kind of move through it all and being as audience-centered as possible. Like you talked about personas, identify the people, all of the things.

Ian McCullough:

Well, and I think in terms of the personas that there's my parting bit of tactical advice is in the context where we're dealing with the institutional sales, which is where my career has taken me. You have to find out how to balance the individuals and group and so recognizing that you're dealing with-

Elana Leoni:

Yeah. Well thank you so much for being on the show. I will drop all of your contact information and all the resources you talked about too in the show notes. But thank you so much for your time, Ian. We learned so much. And you'll be on the show again to talk about all the things, I'm sure.

Ian McCullough:

My pleasure. Happy to be a guest. Had a great time, thanks a lot.