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.

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 when a task with no deadline competes with tasks that have them. Either someone's week has protected time in it for this, or it goes back on the pile.

Do the first two this week and you will find out fairly quickly how much of your pipeline was real. Some of it will not be, and that is useful too. Better to know in August than to carry it into a forecast you present in November.

Ring one of them today. The one you have been meaning to email again.

Listen: what investors want from education technology now

Episode 9 of B2Education Unpacked is out this week — Ed Tranham of The Assignment Report on funding, defensibility and where the money in this sector is actually moving. Listen here.

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