How to Cut Through the Chaos and Connect With K-12 Customers

District and school administrators are inundated. As sweeping changes take hold in federal education policy and funding, as well as on the state and local level, K-12 leaders are confronted with challenges on a host of fronts.

They’re under enormous pressure to raise academic performance, create a positive environment for teachers and students, and comply with ambitious state mandates. Yet they’re also being asked to do so amid daunting financial challenges — in particular, the prospect of federal funding getting chopped down.

As a result, education companies are facing their own dilemma: How do they cut through the cacophony and connect with potential new K-12 customers? Or support existing ones?

For vendors in the space and those who advise them, the challenge is how to quickly identify the strategies that are opening doors, and capitalize on them.

The answer for many vendors begins with the basics: having an intense focus on districts’ and schools’ most pressing needs, ensuring your products and services are well-equipped to meet those challenges, and positioning your organization and your team to continue to adapt to those needs as they change.

But success in these challenging conditions often requires getting beyond those fundamentals — and having clear and creative plans to identify customer needs, and find ways to distinguish your team from competitors who may be fighting for district officials’ time — and business.

EdWeek Market Brief spoke with education executives, and with sales and customer success leaders in the space to find out what’s working for them. Here are five main themes that stood out in those conversations.

1.Build Relationships — From the District Cabinet Through the Gatekeepers

When Discovery Education’s head of K-12 education, Todd Wirt, served as assistant superintendent of academics in theWake County Schools in North Carolina, a roughly 160,000-student district, referrals were one way he would connect with potential partners.

Wirt specifically relied on academic leaders at similarly sized districts up and down the East Coast, who would “really watch each other and what was happening and what was working.”

There is “definitely a skill with the gatekeepers,” as well, Wirt said, referring to building relationships and working with the executive assistants who handle superintendent and chief academic officers’ calendars in large districts.

Ultimately, it’s important to work through the layers of a district or school, building a coalition with principals or getting close with curriculum directors so “they can make the next level of introduction for you,” he said.

“That is where we spend a lot of our time,” Wirt said. “We get great referrals, but there is a lot of groundwork to be able to build the internal relationships necessary to where you then get that meeting you’re looking for with the CAO or assistant superintendent.”

Testimonials from peers in different districts have always mattered to K-12 leaders, said John Gamba, entrepreneur-in-residence and director of innovative programs at the Catalyst center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.

Gamba recommends leaning on relationships, including internal champions like chief academic officers or heads of curriculum, and help them become a positive voice for the product, both in internal district conversations and potential partners.

“Leverage that voice. Invite other prospects to call [your champion] and hear about their experiences. Nothing speaks louder than a testimonial, a referral, or a reference from a recognized leader who’s used your product and service.”

When companies do land meetings, he said they need to focus on three core competencies of an ed-tech product or service: its ability to engage students, its alignment to pedagogical priorities and standards, and the ease of adopting it.

“That’s going to give you a chance to be able to sell your product into a K-12 super system,” he said.

2. Be a Partner — in a Meaningful Way

Positioning your education company to be a strong partner to district and school leaders may sound like a standard piece of advice that applies regardless of the business environment companies are operating in, Wirt said. But it’s essential when districts are coping with rapid change and need help navigating them.

“They’re looking for legitimate thought partners and problem-solvers,” said Wirt.

He instructs his team to talk through challenges with a district, such as changes to a state policy, and work through how they might address those challenges from a professional development standpoint. That’s “where we can lean in and be of great support,” he said.

To provide meaningful assistance, education companies need to enter a relationship with a district having done extensive homework on major factors that play into their decision-making surrounding academic products, including their student learning goals, budgetary challenges, and demographic mix.

“I saw a lot of vendors come and go through my office, and every one wanted to call themselves a partner. There were only a few that I called a partner back,” Wirt said.

When a company representative has shown up having done the legwork, it’s much easier to have a conversation. But in instances in which they’ve arrived and tried to force the district into a pre-determined box, “I was going to move on pretty quickly,” he said.

According to a recent EdWeek Market Brief survey, there are a number of steps a vendor can take after those initial meetings to build a sense of trust.

The nationally representative survey, conducted in May and June 2025 by the EdWeek Research Center, asked 122 district leaders and 120 school leaders what makes a vendor feel like a true partner, as opposed to “just a salesperson.”

Three responses stood out. Nearly three-quarters of K-12 leaders surveyed say that continued support after the sale helps build a partnership, followed by 70% who believe having a willingness to customize or adapt offerings helps drive those relationships.

The same portion of respondents, 70%, say the same about transparency surrounding pricing and implementation.

More than half, 57%, say regular, open communication elevates a vendor’s status. And 47% say being sent content that helps them do their job – without an ask to buy something – also builds those bonds.

Nearly the same amount say getting to know one specific representative over time makes the relationship feel like a partnership, followed by 44% who say alignment with a district’s strategic goals create those connections.

3. When Possible, Cater to Specific District Needs

For Kiddom CEO Ahsan Rizvi, being a partner to a district means getting woven into their “theory of change,” and working with them to implement the tools they need most to meet their students’ specific needs.

As a digital curriculum platform, that means customizing his company’s offerings to align closely with state standards, districts’ learning priorities, and the support systems their population relies on.

Kiddom is positioned well to customize users’ experiences since it’s not a traditional publisher, he said. Instead, it provides districts with digital and print instructional materials alongside tools to manage the curriculum and adapt it to districts’ and schools’ needs.

Much of the hard work begins during state adoptions of instructional materials, Rizvi said, when they compile a list of materials that meet standards.

“When we enter a market, it’s a two-year decision. We have to review the business case and we have to understand the state,” he said.

Whether or not the product is on an approved list is often a major factor in school districts’ decisions to purchase academic resources. States give districts varying degrees of freedom to stray from approved lists. In some states, choosing from the list may also be a requirement to receive state funding to purchase the materials.

After receiving approvals, Kiddom’s ground team of outbound and inbound sales teams go to work.

The teams are a “combination of veterans and young folks who all have some sort of teaching background,” he said, which is intentional. He sees their backgrounds as providing an additional way to help the sales team better connect with customers.

“We think about: Are we the best people to provide the best experience for these teachers and students? And then we work backwards,” Rizvi said. “What will it take for us to do that? That’s fundamentally different from ‘Can we build a curriculum that we can sell to millions?’”

“Our industry is plagued with this idea that you just show up at the door with a bag of books to sell them,” said Rizvi.

4. Make the Strategic Plan Required Reading

While confronting a challenging business environment isn’t new for companies in the K-12 market, the moment is strikingly different than others in the past.

Today’s obstacles, for example, are in some ways more vexing than what played out during the pandemic, when district and school administrators were plunged into financial and operational unknowns.

At that time, K-12 leaders cast a wide net and worked to bring in a range of products to meet new and ongoing needs. (They were able to do that partly because they were receiving an infusion of federal emergency aid, which continued for years afterward.)

Now, they’re looking at each with much more scrutiny, Gamba said.

“Times are definitely different,” Gamba said. “Buyers at the district level are becoming a lot more judicious in how they’re procuring products and services.”

His top suggestion? Keep a district’s strategic plan at the center of your messaging. Administrators know that those blueprints that they’ve crafted are available online for vendors to access, and expect them to come prepared knowing what those plans entail.

“If you aren’t going into the district’s strategic priorities, its strategic plans, and aligning your product or service specifically to that plan, and using that plan in your opening presentation to get into the district or your actual demonstration … I think you’re committing sales suicide,” Gamba said.

Indeed, many district officials are continually surprised at how many vendors don’t read strategic plans — or do so on a surface-level. Showing a deeper commitment can open doors.

“There’s rarely an idea of, ‘I’ve studied the plan, I want to problem-solve with you. And I think I’ve got a resource or a tool with which to do that.’” Melissa Morse, chief learning and performance officer for the Henry County Schools, a 42,000-student district in Georgia, told EdWeek Market Brief a few years ago. “Because that does take time to study.”

5. Set a High Standard for Implementation Across Your Organization

Connecting with districts and working with them to understand their needs are just the first steps in what vendors hope will be should be multiyear relationships. After inking the deal, vendors face an equally important challenge: How do they maintain and nurture those connections?

At SchoolAI, an AI-focused startup that offers both teacher- and student-facing AI tools, it begins during the sales process, where reps “have constant communication” with customer success managers about product features and messaging, said Kasey Chambers, customer success manager at SchoolAI and a former teacher and technology coach.

The company also has a department that operates squarely in the middle of the two. The members of that team are “community coaches.”

Coaches work with districts directly, either in-person or virtually, to troubleshoot questions or problem when they come up, she said. In some situations they may provide an extra set of ears, eyes, and hands to ensure implementation runs smoothly.

“If sales needs support at a function, or a partner says, ‘Hey, we are doing this training, can you help and support?’ We send a community coach who knows the district, knows the area, has connections, and can be that on-the-ground support,” she said.

Separately, the customer success team has a set standard for all partners where they host monthly check-ins with district and school customers and talk about their goals and how professional development sessions are being received within the district. Those monthly meetings are in addition to their offers to meet with leaders ad-hoc as questions or issues arise.

Chambers said the team looks at usage data to track customers’ experiences. It it often focuses closely on teacher sentiment data it receives from surveys of users.

Sentiment is especially important to track for a tool that is centered around AI, she said, given users may be inexperienced with it or come in with concerns.

“We want to know how teachers are feeling about AI. We want to know how they’re feeling about it in the classrooms, with their students,” said Chambers. “That is a really important point so we can tailor our professional development and our resources to that as well.”

The company also provides a professional development platform, and it focuses on offering districts and schools PD through multiple modalities, including live instructor sessions or micro-learning moments.

“We’re really just trying to meet everybody,” she said, “down to the teacher, where they are at with AI.”