EdTech Go-To-Market Planning for 2026

And I'm John Faig, Director of Technology at St. Patrick's Episcopal Day School in Washington, DC, and the person who is on the other side of those demos, booths, and emails.

If you're an educator trying to cut through the noise, or a vendor trying to earn real trust in K-12, then you're in the right place.

For today, we're going to help you build an edtech agenda for the year. We're going to talk about an overall plan, the metrics used to measure, what to measure, and the review and adjustment of that information.

For sure. Can't really get into the season without thinking about Santa's list and checking it at least twice. And if you're an edtech company, you should be checking it more often and more than twice.

It varies by company and the maturity of your company and what you're trying to achieve. If you are a later-stage company, you can have sales-related and marketing-related metrics that show your company is getting brand awareness and closing deals. That could be signaling data like the number of demos, gated content downloaded, anything that gives you an indication the business is headed in the right direction. If you're an earlier-stage company and you're brand building, the metrics will be less tangible, less focused on revenue and conversion and sales leads and pipelines, and more focused on: does anybody know we exist? Are we getting engagement with buyers online? Are they engaging with our founders, and are we becoming a trusted source? Those metrics may be more marketing- and social-media-oriented.

And it's interesting, I do sense a discomfort from a lot of early-stage companies who are looking for more tangible ROI information. But ROI information is usually more tightly coupled with financial metrics, deals, pipeline, and sales-qualified leads than with brand building. Brand building is really important, but the caveat I want people to walk away with is there really isn't an ROI for brand building. There's only effort. There's only going to the gym every day to get better, stronger, faster.

Knowing your ICP is key, and hopefully in early customer research you're crystal clear and have one or a few ICPs to go after. You don't necessarily need just one. It's okay to have a few, especially if they're related titles in a school. You don't want a shotgun approach, but it's okay to work one, two, or three ICPs at once to see which get traction.

In the process, it's also helpful to have an anti-ICP. As a small, young company, resources are scarce. It's important to know your ICP, but it's most important to know the people not to engage with, because they're not going to close in a reasonable timeframe and they're not the best fit. Anti-ICPs keep people honest and focused on the mission.

And speaking of the opposite of saying no, which is saying yes, what do you think about item number two on the checklist, pain severity?

Totally agree. The pain is the real key metric, and a lot of companies don't focus enough on ascertaining the pain level. They tend to over-resource poorly qualified leads chasing that. So make sure you've identified the ICP with the most severe pain for the solution you provide. Don't try to coax and convince them they have the pain. If you need to do that, you have a very poorly defined ICP.

This is probably the number one thing underestimated by edtech companies. Everybody who works at a school, that information is knowable: titles, phone numbers, emails. But just because you can find the person doesn't mean you can cost-effectively nurture them through a sales journey to closing a deal. That takes anywhere between 20 and 50 signals, micro-interactions, to get somebody over the finish line. So you have to think about everything you need to do, what it costs, and whether there's automation that can be put to work.

For sure. B2B sales, particularly in edtech, is about relentless experimentation. It's trying different channels, different calls to action, different ICPs, and seeing what works. We talked about a plan, measurement, and adjustment, and that's what it comes down to. Measure what's happening, make adjustments quick. Of the companies I've worked with, I really stress having a two-week learning period. Everybody's working hard at a startup, lots of effort, 100-hour weeks, passion. You should be able to look back every two weeks and find something meaningful you learned about the business that moves the needle. With that as your micro goals, your sprints, that plays into identifying ICPs, the messaging, and everything around this.

Generally there are signals. We talked about signals along the buyer journey: requests for a demo, downloading content. You could use firmographic data. You could see an RFP on a school website, which would be the most direct way. But often the intent is more ephemeral. It's seeing where the ICPs are online, what platform, what they're talking about, and whether they're talking about it as a serious problem, which would indicate they're ready to buy soon. It could relate to the time of year, or new legislation in a state that affects the school. I find the conversations on LinkedIn with educators enlightening. So I'd encourage edtech companies to invest significant dollars in social media listening, both automated and manual, to be part of the conversation. It's in those conversations you'll know who has your problem and how close they are to solving it.

100%. I actually think companies get this a little wrong. They're trying to identify the 5% of the time when a buyer is buying a product. Instead, they should be working on the 95% of the time when they're not purchasing. You can use that low-stakes, low-pressure time of year to nurture the environment and build a relationship. You're building the relationship prior to being in a position to close a deal. You're not asking for a marriage proposal on the first date. You're dating, you're building a relationship, and it's that relationship where you'll know when the person has the problem you solve and they're getting close to a purchase, because of what they say and how they say it.

The number one misstep related to a product is poor positioning and messaging. Positioning and messaging make it easy for the buyer to know what you do and what to expect from the product. You're helping them make a decision. Poor messaging muddles your solution and it gets relegated to obscurity. You need a very clear message to rent space in a buyer's head. The buyer needs to think about your product and company in a certain way, so they know you're one of the companies to solve this particular problem. It's poor positioning and messaging that usually hurts very good products.

To be honest, the features often detract from your positioning and messaging. If I think back on starting a company, I'd encourage founders, and I've talked about this with regard to idea-market fit and messaging-market fit: you define those ideas in the research phase when you're looking for ICPs. You define the positioning before you start coding, so the coding reflects where you want the product to be and the messaging for your intended ICPs. Often the mistake is that you have a product that solves some problem, and by that point you've locked yourself into only a few ways to position and message it. Often it would have been easier and better to do that work before you coded a single line.

Once you have a product, it's real, and your options for positioning and messaging are pretty well established. It's really hard to reposition an existing product when your messaging is not hitting. So keep that in mind when you build a new product. There's a marketing roadmap, a messaging roadmap, and a positioning roadmap, in addition to the feature trajectory.

Perfect.

Cold email is dead. You'll never reach my inbox. I have too many filters. I don't click on emails from people I don't recognize, regardless of the subject line. If for some reason you do get in my inbox and get me to click, and I regret clicking, you'll be in spam and blocked forever. I did a review of the emails last calendar year, called out how many cold ones I clicked on, and made a list of the best. You can find a blog post to that effect. But only about one out of 1,000 will I click on if I don't know the person or the company. And I probably get 500 to 1,000 emails a day.

I don't mind warm emails at all. Well-designed nurturing campaigns, designed to provide incremental nuggets of gold in my inbox over time, whether a feature update, a product announcement, or an event, I don't mind, because I know the company. I know if I'm going to buy from them, or I might already be a customer. So I love warm nurturing campaigns. However, caveat: please allow me to set the rules of engagement. I'd like to set the cadence myself. I don't need an email every month, even if you have something to say every month and you're a vendor I like and trust. So when you interact with people, give them the license and agency to adjust what they want to hear and when.

The edtech companies I have a relationship with, I look forward to meeting at a conference. I'm not a big schmooze person, so I usually decline gifts and dinners, but I appreciate an in-person visit, a cup of coffee with a vendor I do business with. On the other hand, like cold email, I don't wander the floors much at conferences. If I've never met you before, I'm probably not going to take your swag, stop by and say hi, and you're probably not going to get to scan my badge.

It's a confirmation event. It's not a prospecting event.

I find it a low-risk way to engage or be engaged with. I engage with peers and educators in conversations around topics on LinkedIn a lot. I don't mind if those conversations include vendors, especially if the vendor is adding value and not merely reminding us they have a product in that category. It's one of the few places, LinkedIn that is, where vendors and educators can have a conversation side by side. I haven't found that on other platforms, where there are protected groups you need to be invited into, and those groups frown upon vendors. So LinkedIn is the primary platform for edtech companies to engage with their buyers and users.

You mentioned brand building. People buy brands. They don't necessarily buy products. I'd encourage edtech companies to have their founders build a significant presence on LinkedIn, because people want to buy the story. They want to buy the person more than the product. I find only a few companies doing a really good job of having their founder share a day in the life, or some personal aspect of the business, not simply pounding the product, but showing there are people and an idea and a mission behind it.

You mentioned sponsorships. There are probably tens of thousands of educator organizations, and they all have sponsorships. In Texas alone, there are over 30 principal and superintendent organizations based on ethnic background, location, or some other school metric, and they all have opportunities for sponsorship. The sponsorship could be a website or advertising in a directory. It could also be attendance at a highly focused, very small conference. So I'd double down on sponsorships and getting access to people the way they'd like: being part of these organizations and being asked to have a booth at a focused, high-level conference where there are 50 vendors, not 50,000.

100%. One of the things you'll know about edtech is that word of mouth is the most powerful sales engine you can have, and this is probably true of other sectors too. Educators are local in nature and talk with their peers in other parts of the country. So embedding yourself in a community is really important, because it's self-reinforcing. If that community has a favorable, valid view of your solution, that'll be reinforced. In my community, both here in DC and online, we talk about vendors and products all the time. If you have a product successful for a particular type of school, in my case independent schools, you'll get additional marketing leverage from us once you've sold a couple of us. The whole idea of marketing is leverage. You sell to one or two schools in that community and it branches out from there.

I run into a lot of founders who are working hard but not necessarily productively. I've asked them to recap their last two weeks, and they can tell me all the things they've done, bug fixes, talking with customers, marketing efforts, but they're not cataloging what's working and what's not. They're not refining what they do. At the end of two weeks, they don't have any aha moments. When you're running a business, aha moments are critical, because they let you pivot if necessary and do more of what's working and less of what's not. So this two-week sprint, looking back on things that move the needle, is critical. If you look back and don't have anything on that list after two weeks, you're not measuring or documenting the right information.

That's the real critical aspect. Edtech is a challenging environment to sell into and scale. You need to rely on data, because the data and processes you document will let you purchase RevOps automation tools to lighten your load. In cases where a founder looks back after two weeks and doesn't identify significant changes that move the needle, there's no way they can become a big business, because they're not being self-reflective enough and making modifications. They're just racing and running and doing the busy work, and that's not sufficient for running a business. The busy work might be part of it, but it shouldn't be all-consuming.

The most important experimentation you can do: pricing. It's very challenging to understand the pricing you can charge for various schools and situations. Pricing models should absolutely be one of your primary experiments. I think it was Clever, when they were starting out and introducing single sign-on, a completely new product that solved a big, audacious problem, but they had no idea what to sell it for. So they did the next best thing: every deal they closed, they doubled the price for the next deal. How did that work? Really well. How did they know when to stop? When the deals stopped, and then they dialed it back. Knowing what a product will sell for is very challenging, because there are other products, pricing proximity, and budgetary concerns. Experiment and find your pricing level.

Do pressure-test ICP with the six risk questions we mentioned.

Do build clarity-first messaging that is committee- and stakeholder-safe.

Now the don'ts. Do not rely only on cold marketing techniques.

Do not confuse product features with a go-to-market strategy.

Don't invest in lists of ICPs before you have a proven motion.

And if you haven't noticed, we've emphasized planning. Plan these short two-week sprints, execute hard, experiment, learn fast, and adjust fast.