Author name: Stella James

Business Development Lead Problem or Positioning Problem? How to Tell the Difference Every September, someone looks at a thin pipeline and decides they need more leads. Two problems feel identical from the inside — and the fix for one makes the other worse. SJ Stella James · 1 September 2026 · 4 min read Every September the same thing happens. Somebody who sells into education looks at a thin-looking pipeline, decides the problem is volume, and books a load more outreach. Sometimes they’re right. Often they’re not. Because there are two problems that feel absolutely identical from the inside, and the fix for one of them actively makes the other worse. The two problems A lead problem means not enough of the right people are finding you. The message is fine. The offer makes sense. There just aren’t enough schools or trusts encountering it. You’re invisible to a market that would probably buy if it knew you existed. A positioning problem means people are finding you and going away again. The traffic’s there. The conversations happen. Then they stop, and you never find out why. Same symptom. Quiet pipeline, nothing converting, September looking bleak. Completely different cause. Why this matters more than it sounds If you’ve got a lead problem and you pour effort into outreach, you’ll see results. More people find you, the message works, some of them convert. Effort in, deals out. If you’ve got a positioning problem and you do the same thing, you get more people bouncing off the same unclear message. Faster, and at greater cost. Every extra pound of outreach buys you more evidence that the thing isn’t working, and no information about why. Volume goes up, conversion stays flat, and the natural conclusion is that you still don’t have enough volume. So you spend more. Round it goes. I’ve watched businesses spend an entire academic year on that loop. How to tell which one you’ve got You don’t need an agency to work this out. You need to look at where things stop. Look at the top first Is anyone arriving? Website traffic, inbound enquiries, event conversations, replies to outreach. If the answer is genuinely nobody, that’s a lead problem and you should stop reading and go and fix your distribution. Then look at what happens next If people arrive and leave without doing anything, that’s positioning. If they book a call and then go quiet, that’s positioning. If they’re enthusiastic on the call and then can’t explain your product to the person who actually holds the budget, that’s very much positioning. Then listen to how people describe you This is the honest test and most people avoid it. Ask three customers what you do. Not what they like about you — what you actually do, in their words, as they’d say it to a colleague. If you get three different answers, none of which sound like your website, you have a positioning problem and no amount of outreach will touch it. Then check the shape of your losses Losing to a named competitor is a positioning problem — they made the case better. Losing to “no decision” is a positioning problem too, and a more serious one: you never made the case that this was worth doing at all. Losing because nobody in the trust had ever heard of you is a lead problem. The thing nobody wants to hear Positioning problems are more common than lead problems in education. Considerably more common. Schools are not short of suppliers. There are hundreds of companies with genuinely good products trying to get the attention of the same overworked people. Nobody in a school is sitting there thinking there isn’t enough choice. What they’re short of is clarity. A school leader has about four seconds to work out whether your thing solves a problem they recognise. If your homepage says you’re an innovative platform empowering learners, you have used those four seconds saying nothing, and they’ve gone. And here’s the awkward part. Positioning problems are much harder to admit to. A lead problem is external — the market doesn’t know about us yet. A positioning problem is internal. It means the thing you’ve spent three years building isn’t landing, and that’s a much less comfortable Tuesday morning. Which is precisely why so many businesses buy more outreach instead. It’s the more comfortable purchase. What you actually do about each If it’s a lead problem: go where the people are. Events where school leaders actually turn up. Partnerships with organisations that already have the relationships. Content that answers what people are genuinely searching for. Consistency over cleverness. It’s a graft problem, and graft solves it. If it’s a positioning problem: stop selling for a fortnight and go and listen. Talk to customers who love you and find out what they’d say to a peer. Talk to the ones who didn’t buy and ask what wasn’t clear. Then rewrite the first thing anyone reads about you until a busy head of a two-form entry primary could repeat it back. That’s a rewrite, not a campaign. It’s cheaper, and it’s much less fun. Find out which one you’ve got Fifteen questions. Four minutes. A straight answer on whether you’re dealing with a lead problem or a positioning problem, and what to do first. Start the scorecard — 4 minutes And if the answer is positioning, that’s the whole basis of Education Market Sales Mastery — concept-led selling built for education markets. BESA members get 15% off. None of this shows up in this month’s pipeline. It shows up next summer, when a trust you’ve never spoken to gets in touch already half-sold, and you have no idea why. SJ Stella James Founder of Seventh Sibling and host of B2Education Unpacked. Twelve years selling into education, now working fractionally inside education technology businesses as their commercial leader. Selling into education Business development Positioning Lead generation

SAASHOW Birmingham: Where School Leaders Come to Shape the Future of Education | Seventh Sibling Partner Content SAASHOW Birmingham: Where School Leaders Come to Shape the Future of Education Schools & Academies Show  |  August 2026  |  4 min read We are delighted to be partnering with the Schools & Academies Show this November! What is the Schools & Academies Show? School leadership has never been more demanding. From managing stretched budgets and navigating policy changes to embracing AI, strengthening inclusion and improving pupil outcomes, education leaders are expected to solve increasingly complex challenges. That’s exactly why thousands of senior education professionals come together every year at the Schools & Academies Show Birmingham. Taking place on 18–19 November 2026 at the NEC Birmingham, the UK’s leading education event brings together expert insight, practical CPD, innovative suppliers and invaluable networking — all specifically designed to ensure senior leaders return to school with fresh ideas they can put into action immediately. Learn from the Sector’s Leading Voices With more than 300 speakers delivering over 50 hours of CPD-certified content, the event offers one of the most comprehensive professional development programmes available for education leaders. Hear directly from influential voices across education, including: The Rt․ Hon. Laura Trott MP,  Shadow Secretary of State for Education Emma Wilson, Director, Education Value for Money Team,  National Audit Office (NAO) Benedicte Yue, Chief Financial Officer, Community & Partnerships, River Learning Trust The Rt. Hon. Suella Braverman KC MP, Spokesman for Education, Skills & Equalities,  Reform UK Sam Freedman, Senior Fellow,  Institute for Government Dr. Jon Needham, National Director of Safeguarding & Mental Health,  Oasis Academy Trust Stella James, Host, B2Education Unpacked — The Education Growth Podcast Gary Smart,  Trust Head of Capital & Compliance, Matrix Academy Trust Rob Peters, Director of Marketing and Communications, National Governance Association Edward Vitalis, Chief Executive Officer,  Invictus Education Trust Adam Sproston, Senior HMI for SEND, AP and Inclusion, Ofsted Dave Smith, Director of Procurement and Trust-wide Projects, Osborne Co-operative Academy Trust Save Months of Research in Just Two Days Finding trusted education suppliers can be time-consuming. At the Schools & Academies Show you’ll have the opportunity to meet more than 250 education solution providers under one roof, allowing you to compare products, ask questions and explore new innovations—all at one event, under one roof. Whether you’re reviewing your MIS, exploring AI tools, planning estates improvements or searching for cost-saving services, you’ll be able to speak directly with the organisations supporting schools across the UK. Build a Year’s Worth of Connections The show is also a unique opportunity for school and trust leaders to network and make connections with peers who are facing the same challenges as them. Across the two days you’ll meet headteachers, MAT CEOs, school business managers, SENDCOs, governors, estates leaders and more. Whether during networking breaks, dedicated networking activities or informal conversations across the exhibition, you’ll gain valuable insights from colleagues tackling similar issues in their own schools and trusts. Four Education Events. One Free Pass. Your complimentary pass for the Schools & Academies Show unlocks access to four specialist education events running alongside the main exhibition. This means even more opportunities to discover new ideas, attend CPD-certified sessions and meet sector experts at the: SEND Conference EdTech Summit Independent Schools Conference Whatever your area of responsibility, you’ll have access to even more tailored content and specialist expertise all over two days at one single event. Explore Interactive Show Features Throughout the show floor, you’ll also discover a range of interactive show features specifically designed to help you learn, network and solve problems in a more engaging way: The Government Education Village gives school and trust leaders a rare opportunity to engage directly with senior representatives from the Department for Education and key education bodies in an informal, accessible setting. The CPC Village gives school and trust leaders direct access to trusted procurement specialists and framework providers who can help schools reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. The Inclusive Classroom, hosted by Findel Education, brings inclusive learning environments to life through immersive, real-world examples designed to inspire school and MAT leaders.Inclusive Classroom What are the benefits of attending? Attending the Schools & Academies Show isn’t simply about spending time away from school— it’s about making that time count. In just two days you can: Stay ahead of sector developments and policy changes. Gain practical CPD that supports your professional development. Compare hundreds of trusted education suppliers. Learn from leading practitioners. Build valuable professional relationships. Discover ideas that improve efficiency, save money and enhance outcomes for pupils. Key Event Details: Schools & Academies ShowCo-Located with the EdTech Summit, SEND Conference & Independent Schools Conference Event Dates: 18th & 19th November 2026 Location: NEC, Birmingham Registration Link: https://hubs.la/Q04vDpJJ0 Free for all schools, including MATs, academies, independent schools, colleges, universities, local authorities and central government and the wider public sector. This article was supplied by the Schools & Academies Show. B2Education Unpacked — The Education Growth Podcast is the official podcast partner of the Schools & Academies Show, Birmingham NEC, 18–19 November 2026.

Sales Enablement Selling Into Education: The Phone Call Nobody Makes Every commercial team already knows the call beats the email. It still does not get made. Here is who it belongs to, why it goes unmade, and what it quietly costs you. SJ Stella James · 26 August 2026 · 6 min read There is a conversation that happens in almost every education supplier I work with, and it goes like this. Someone asks how a particular opportunity is getting on. Someone else says they have emailed. Everybody nods. And that is the end of it. Nobody asks when. Nobody asks whether anyone has actually spoken to a human being. The email is treated as the action, and once the action has been taken, the opportunity is considered handled. Three weeks later it is still sitting there. The six-email dance You know how this goes, because you have done it. You send the email. Four days later you get half an answer. You reply asking about the other half. Out of office. She comes back the following Tuesday with a question that opens up something else entirely, which needs another email, which needs a forward to a colleague, who is on a course. Six emails deep, three weeks gone, and between you the whole exchange has covered roughly what a three minute phone call would have covered before the kettle boiled. And the cost is not really the three weeks. It is that in three weeks a school’s priorities move. The person you were talking to gets pulled onto something urgent, the term rolls on, and the thing that was live in June is a vague memory in September. Email is not slower than the phone. It is slower than the school. Why nobody picks it up I spent about eight years being genuinely bad at this, so I am not writing from a position of great authority. I had the list. I knew who I was supposed to be ringing. I had simply decided somewhere early on that chasing people was rude, and email let me feel like I was working without ever having to test that. That is the real appeal of it. Email is safe. Nobody can hear you being uncertain in an email. You write it, read it back, take out the bit that sounds needy, and send something that makes you look competent. A phone call has none of that protection. A phone call has silence in it, and a person who might say no while you are still holding the receiver. There is a second thing underneath it, which is the belief that you are being a nuisance. You are not. Your email is not being weighed up and rejected. It is in a pile, underneath a safeguarding issue, a staffing gap and a leaking roof, and it was never going to fight its way to the top on its own. Whose call is it, though? This is the part that gets skipped, and it is the part that actually explains the problem. Everyone in the business already knows the call is the answer. Nobody is short of that information. It is in every sales book ever written and on every course anyone has ever sat through. The call still does not get made, and in most education suppliers I can tell you exactly why. The founder is delivering the work. In a business under about fifteen people, the person best at selling is usually also the person running implementation, doing the demos and chasing the invoices. Selling ends up happening on a Sunday night, badly, when they are knackered. Follow-up is the first thing to fall off that list, because nothing breaks visibly when it does. The marketing person was never hired for it. They were brought in for content, campaigns and the website. They will happily send a nurture sequence. Ringing a deputy head who downloaded a guide in June is not in their job description, was not in the interview, and is not what they are measured on. The two people in sales each think the other one has it. This is the most common and the most expensive. Nobody has said out loud who owns follow-up past attempt two, so it becomes a shared responsibility, which is another way of saying nobody’s. None of that is a motivation problem. Nobody in any of those businesses is lazy. It is a design problem, and it stays a design problem until somebody changes the design. What it hides Here is the uncomfortable bit. A pipeline full of unmade calls looks completely healthy on a dashboard. The opportunities are there. They have stages. Somebody has emailed them, so there is activity logged against every one. What you cannot see is that none of them have been properly tested. You do not know which are real, because nobody has asked a real question out loud and waited for the answer. So you forecast off a pipeline that has never been touched, and every quarter you are surprised in the same direction. An untested pipeline is not a pipeline. It is a list of people who were once polite to you. Three things that actually change it 1. Name the owner, by name Not the team. A person. Write down who owns follow-up past attempt two and make sure they know it is theirs. If you cannot name that person in under five seconds, you have found your gap. 2. Make attempt two a call, always Not a rule about persistence in general, which nobody follows. One specific rule: the second contact is a phone call, no exceptions, regardless of what the first one was. It removes the decision, and the decision is where it dies. 3. Resource it, or accept it will not happen If the call is nobody’s whole job, it will keep losing to whatever is on fire. That is not a character flaw in your team. It is what happens

Selling Into Education: What “No Budget” Really Means | Seventh Sibling Sales Enablement “It’s Never Money. It’s Always Culture”: What the Budget Objection Is Really Telling You Stella James · Seventh Sibling · 10 July 2026 When a school tells you there’s no budget, the money is rarely the thing standing in your way. Here’s how to hear what’s actually being said — and why a discount is the worst possible answer. Every sales pipeline I’ve ever looked at has a graveyard in it. A column of deals marked closed-lost, and next to most of them, the same three words. No budget. If you’re selling into education, you’ll know that column intimately. Schools are stretched. Trusts are stretched. The sector’s skint and everyone knows it. So when a deal stalls and the buyer tells you there’s nothing in the pot this year, you nod, you file it, and you move on to the next one. I want to pick a fight with that habit. Because “no budget” is one of the most misread signals in education sales, and treating it as a money problem has cost me — and I’d bet you — far more deals than the actual money ever did. “No budget” is usually true and almost always beside the point Schools really are under-resourced. That part isn’t a fib they tell to get you off the phone. But here’s what sits underneath it. The school that has no budget for your tool found budget last term for something. A trust with a hiring freeze still signs things off when it decides it has to. Money in education isn’t a fixed wall. It moves toward whatever leadership has decided actually matters this year. When someone says there’s no budget, what they’re often telling you is that you haven’t landed in the small list of things worth finding the money for. That’s a far more useful problem to have. You can’t manufacture cash for a school. You can absolutely change where you sit on its list of priorities. A line that’s stuck with me On a recent episode of B2Education Unpacked I spoke to Patrick McGrath, Director of Education at Everway, about the gap between selling something and getting it embedded in a school. He said something I’ve not been able to shake. “It’s never money. It’s always culture.” — Patrick McGrath, Director of Education at Everway Sit with that for a second if you sell into schools. The thing standing between you and the deal is rarely a number on a spreadsheet. It’s whether the people on the receiving end believe they can make your thing part of how they already work — without it becoming the fourth platform nobody logs into by October. What a school is really weighing when it says no None of this shows up on a purchase order, but all of it decides the answer. Whether staff will adopt it, or quietly ignore it. Whether the deputy head who has to champion it internally has the appetite for another rollout. What happened the last three times the school bought something that promised to change everything and didn’t. Who owns it in twelve months when the person who bought it has moved on. Whether asking teachers to change their Tuesday morning is a fight leadership wants this year. That’s the culture Patrick’s talking about. The capacity, the memory, the politics of change inside a building full of people who are already at capacity. A school can love your product in the demo and still say no, because the honest answer to “can we make this stick?” is “probably not, not right now.” How to hear it differently in discovery The mistake is waiting until the budget objection lands to deal with it. By then you’re negotiating. You want to be underneath it long before you ever put a price in front of anyone. So in discovery, stop interrogating the problem your product solves and start interrogating the building it has to live in. Who else has to change how they work for this to succeed? What’s the last thing you rolled out across staff, and how did that go? Who’ll own this in a year? What would make your team quietly stop using it by half term? The answers tell you whether you’re looking at a real opportunity or a polite dead end — and they tell you that while you can still do something about it, rather than after the buyer has reached for the budget line as the easiest way to say no. Why a discount is the wrong reflex When you hear “no budget” and your first move is to knock money off, you’ve told the buyer two things. That your pricing was soft to begin with. And that you believe money was the blocker. Neither helps you. You’ve done nothing about the thing that was actually going to kill the deal, which is whether anyone in that school will still be using your product when the novelty wears off. And the deal you win on a discount is very often the one that churns, because the cultural readiness was never there. You bought your way past an objection that was never about price, and the underlying problem turned up again at renewal. Holding your price and getting curious about the people is harder in the moment. It’s also the only version of this that builds you a customer rather than a refund. The bit I had to learn the slow way I’ve lost deals I should have won because I stood there arguing about price when I should have been asking about people. It took me a lot of those closed-lost rows to work out that the number was almost never the real conversation. So next time a school tells you there’s no budget, don’t rush to fix it with a discount or write it off as the sector being broke. Ask what would have to be true for