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Selling Technology Into Non-tech Budgets

By: Diane Rapley

10/1/2008

In today's education climate, tech dollars are getting increasingly hard to find. But that doesn't mean there isn't money for technology. It's all in how you sell it.

Technology budgets are shrinking, and funding is going away-these are laments often heard in our market. But is this real, was it inevitable, and what can we do about it?

According to funding expert and ECP columnist Jenny House, school tech budgets have been diminishing for a long time-- about 15 years-- and what we are seeing is a natural evolution. "When technology started in schools, it was a revolution," says House, "and revolutions need to be funded independently. But now we're in the evolutionary stage, and evolutions need to be funded differently. We knew that eventually the dollars in schools would be focused on the problem, not the underlying structure, but selling technology products was easier in the past, and that's what people are struggling with."

Schools want painkillers not vitamins, which are nice to have but not essential

In today's schools, digital materials are almost always associated with the curriculum, according to Brett Eaker of North Carolina-based reseller Hart Inc. "The instructional technology people used to be our only contact, but now they don't have the budget. Funds have to be combined, they have to get the curriculum people on board, and we have to talk to a much bigger group."

Yet Karen Greenwood Henke, co-founder of the Grant Wrangler website, a free grants listing service offered by Nimble Press, notes that for all the talk of curriculum, technology for the back office or organizational entity is still the spending priority. "Even though we talk about classroom technology all the time, infrastructure technology-- SIS and DDDM systems-- is still the big ticket item, and this is where most of the spending goes."

So how do technology sales people address a market that is evolving, seemingly shrinking, and increasingly a moving target?

It's All About Student Improvement

For the past 10 years, Henke has been involved in an ongoing research project, speaking with technology-planning people about how they do their budgeting. She says that over the course of her research she has seen technology budgets become much more integrated with the overall plan. So even though Henke says the lion's share of technology spending may go toward infrastructure, it's infrastructure in support of educational goals. "Now it's all about student improvement, productivity, and professional development. Technology supports these efforts but [in and of itself] has become less and less of a focus."

Chuck Kleiner, Vice President of Sales and Marketing of SMARTHINKING, a college and K-12 online tutoring service, couldn't agree more. Being positioned as a tech product is a big problem, in Kleiner's opinion. "Products selling into education should always be positioned as improving student performance. If you come in as a tech product, you get pigeonholed as a tech budget item-- a big mistake."