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  • The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

    By Joshua Kim August 24, 2009 9:12 pm EDT

    In working with educational technology vendors I follow one cardinal rule: the person across the table could have been me.

    This is one of the reasons that I'm weary of the EduPunk crowd, as they don't seem to be terribly interested in a constructive dialogue with the ed. tech vendor community. (See Fast Company, Who Needs Harvard)

    From 1998 to 2001 I rode the dot-com bubble, founding and selling a website and selling it to Britannica.com. The idea was that Britannica's new dot-com education division would start a BritannicaU site. I was among the first hires for the EDU division based in San Francisco, a division that folded along with the dot-com division of Britannica once the bubble burst.

    While I failed to cash in during the dot-com bubble, I wouldn't trade my 3 years in the for-profit world for anything. It was from this job at Britannica (my business card said senior producer although I was never sure what that meant), I was able to move into higher ed. administration, learning design and program management (I started out as a regular sociology faculty member).

    What I learned about life inside the for-profit educational technology / publishing world can summarized as follows:

    • Most of the folks working on the for-profit side of educational technology are motivated the potential to improve teaching and learning.
    • The vast majority of sales reps, project managers, customer account specialists, developers and technical support people in companies that I have worked with are not primarily motivated by sales or profits. Rather, they are motivated by the opportunity to advance the status quo in higher education. If they were motivated by money then the would not be working in educational technology.
    • You can take it as a certainty that the vendor reps that you work with directly are much more frustrated with their company policies, products, and inane corporate strategic decisions then you are. They have a front-row seat to bad decisions by upper management, and are usually powerless to change the corporate direction and unable to admit their frustrations to their clients.
    • Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
    • If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education.

    Keeping these ideas in mind while working with and talking to colleagues from the for-profit world always results in better outcomes for both parties. Seeing your vendor as a colleague, as a fellow educator motivated by improving learning, allows for conversations to be candid, direct and forthright. Treating your representative the way you would want to be treated if you were on the other end of the phone call (or vendor booth) will always result in better information exchange and a stronger relationship down the road.

    This is not to say that companies always act in the best interest of their clients, or that we can trust what ed. tech. companies tell us. Trust the people in the companies (particularly the mid-level people), but be weary of the corporate message. In a future post I'll explore how companies can play to the strengths of their dedicated, mission driven employees by giving them the freedom to act more like the educators they are and less like the business people they will never be.

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Comments on The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

  • Ed Tech Vendors Have Your Best Interest at Heart
  • Posted by Shari P on August 25, 2009 at 7:30am EDT

  • Your insightful article offers a rare look inside the vendor/school relationship. As a former classroom teacher, now a doctoral student and vendor of ed technologies for the past 12 years, I agree with your assessment. In the world of sales, education technology is not anywhere near the most lucrative space. You have to be in it because you love making things happen for schools and the students they serve. The market for education goods and services is cluttered, confusing and noisy: most of the time products are tripping over one another's feet to get an institution's attention. It is no wonder that schools are distrustful and stymied by the many claims and offers.

    Yet, I take exception to your comment that as former educators, ed tech vendors rarely achieve the business acumen to which they aspire. Most ed tech companies look for former educators to rep their products - but they know full well that the sterotype holds true: teachers typically do not have the personality profile of the successful sales person. For that reason, the combination of educational chops and ability to make a sale is in high regard. If a former teacher or administrator manages to make the transition to sales, but they don't produce, "survival of the fittest" will take over - quickly.

    It is the sales professional who is frustrated with well-meaning buyers in school districts and academia who don't know the value of goods and services or even the questions they should ask. Rare is the education buyer who has done their homework, knows how to run a clean procurement, or negotiate price.

    Selling to the education space is a not for the feint of heart; it is a matter of building relationship and taking the time to partner with your customer for the long term benefit of the student.

  • responding to Shari
  • Posted by Joshua Kim , Senior Learning Technologist, Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College on August 25, 2009 at 2:00pm EDT

  • Shari...thanks for your great comments. They really made me think about this some more. I totally agree that folks who successfully make the transition from educator to for-profit-sales person is a rare and valuable commodity. It is interesting to think about how the market selects for these people, as those who develop a track record of building successful relationships and sales will thrive, while those who cannot make this transition are quickly exposed by their failure to make their numbers.

    Your thoughts on the need for people working in schools and colleges to become educated on how to work with vendors and with the sales process are well taken. This is a great point - and a place where I think our professional organization (Educause) could do a great deal in terms of offering education and consulting advice for its members on how to work with vendors, create requirements lists, negotiate contracts, and understand the vendors view. Great comments....thank you so much. Josh

  • One more thing....
  • Posted by Shari P on August 26, 2009 at 8:45am EDT

  • Josh,

    I appreciate the feedback. It might be of interest to Educause to know that in my doctoral specialization of "the business of education," I initially intended to conduct my research on how school buyers interacted with educational vendors. But there was so little (read, NOTHING) in the literature, so the topic was difficult to get approved.

    Every school vendor that I talked to, however, smiled and nodded their heads when asked if a study on the nature of buyer-vendor relationships in educational products would be of value. Down to the one, each agreed that the buyers at schools and colleges are the gatekeepers of instructional products and services, and hence hold the key to student outcomes. Think about it: if the procurement department buys the wrong product, at the wrong price (and they usually do) teachers and students suffer!

    Accountability experts should back the bus up and start looking at how products are selected for the institution in the first place.

  • Technology Decision Making
  • Posted by Kevin O'Brien , Technology Specialist at Pearson Education on August 29, 2009 at 2:15pm EDT

  • I work in technology sales and support for a major college publisher. I want to thank Joshua and tell him that with regard to the culture in our company he is dead on when he states, "they are motivated by the opportunity to advance the status quo in higher education." We are strong advocates for our customers and their needs and I appreciate that our company is willing to listen to us and quickly respond to the suggestions of our customers. I also feel lucky to be with a company that has the resources to develop and consistently improve our products.

    I also want to agree with Shari P. that often times the customers are not even aware of "the questions they should ask." I do not think this is the customers fault but it is more the fault of the culture of academic freedom and individual choice and the impact of these two factors on how decisions are made. Successful choice and implementation of technology requires that the customer knows what they want to get from the use of technology and that they implement an in-depth and organized review of what is available. I am still waiting for the customer who shows me the grid they developed with a list of the features of each publisher’s technology and how it matches their needs. All publishers can do some pretty creative things if the customer could tell us what they want to do.

    Several years ago I took a course in distance learning in higher education. My main takeaway from that course was that academia was still using the "craftsman model" of technology resource development in that single professors, chose the platform, created the content, and build the site according to their abilities. What I was told at the time was this would change in the near future so that technology resources would be developed using a team approach, with the professor as the content and pedagogy specialist, and others contributing their specific expertise as part of the team. Five years later I really do not see much movement towards this model and that seems to be attributable mostly to the tradition of academic freedom and its impact on how decisions are made in higher education.

  • re: to Kevin on decision-making
  • Posted by Menko Johnson , Academic Technology Specialist at Stanford on August 31, 2009 at 4:45pm EDT

  • Hi Kevin and Joshua,

    I've been reading these entries with some interest, and am intrigued by some of the points raised in the previous comments. Kevin I agree with your assessment of the situation, often times committees making technology choices are driven by teacher-champions who may or may not understand the complexities of the technology infrastructure of whatever product you are trying to sell. This tends to be the nature of committee work, the players are the table vary widely, and may not know the right questions to ask. In fact, I'd argue that a grid of features really take away from the bigger picture of the user experience that your particular product has over the competition.

    Conversely, on the two major technology/learning space projects I've been intimately involved with recently, we've found the vendor experience to often be the opposite--we know what we need and desire, and it does not fit within their "just-add-water" solution. Vendors struggle to make the best product to fit a certain set of needs, and academia is infamous for each having a very special set of needs, many common and often some unique. So I'd say that even if you got your feature grid, it may not be the silver bullet it first appears.

    I'd also pose one more angle to this dilemma: the folks with the technical expertise to make the decisions you as a vendor require for solutions, are often the ones furthest from the classroom and teaching experience, especially in higher ed. I've been on both sides of the table both selling and using technology, and as Joshua points out, we all want to sell or use a product that truly improves the educational experience. The problem with procurement is that it is often many people removed from the folks actually using the product, so any vendor who could provide more than a grid, but a way to help institutions conduct a simple needs/user analysis before making a decision would be one I'd love to work with.

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