If you’re like most EdTech businesses, you need to be the best, and you need to close business. Which means you’re probably primarily focused on product, and secondarily on sales. Right?
We’ve written before on Why aren’t more Edtech products reaching more students, Lead generation, and The Fallacy of If You Build it, They will Come.
But no matter how great your product, or how well you are at selling new customers, if you don’t retain and grow existing customers, you won’t stay in business for very long. Especially in education; where there is a limited universe of potential customers . There are fewer than 4,500 districts with more than 2,500 students, and about the same number of Higher Ed institutions; how many of these can you afford to lose?
Renewals? Upgrades? Lifetime value of a customer? Maybe it’s time to shift priorities.
Effective management of the lifetime value of a customer needs to permeate every phase of your operation: product, sales, implementation, support, and marketing.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Product: How does your product make teachers, students, and administrators keep coming back? What else can you offer them to help them solve problems?
- Sales: To what extent are you communicating long term gains through long term use?
- Implementaton: How well are installation and training aligned to the reasons the school chose to use you?
- Support: How do you help schools find out what else they can use you for?
- Marketing: what conversations are you having with prospective and existing schools that help them work better and smarter?
Do you want to talk about account management, renewals, and upselling in greater depth? We’re running a session at Ednet on Sept 27 or just contact us.
