If you’re in EdTech sales, you know the story all too well. You have a fantastic product that you know can make a difference in classrooms or the central office. To get it into the hands of educators, you offer a free pilot. You make it as easy as possible to sign up, maybe a simple form on your website. Then you wait.
And keep waiting.
The pilot goes unused. The educator goes dark. The opportunity stalls. After weeks of follow-up, you’re forced to keep it in the phantom zone or mark it “Closed – Not Won.” The whole exercise is a drain on your time and your resources, not to mention your pipeline.
The good news is that the problem is not your product. The issue often lies within the pilot strategy itself. The hard truth is that by giving away our pilots with little to no qualifiers, we are unintentionally devaluing our own solution and attracting the wrong kind of attention. It’s time for a fundamental shift in the approach. It’s time to stop giving it away and start building value from the very first click.
The Mindset Shift: From Easy Pilots to Engaged Partners
My most successful clients don’t offer pilots; they initiate partnerships.
- A “pilot” implies a temporary, low-stakes trial.
- A “partnership” suggests a collaborative, mutually beneficial relationship with clear goals and shared skin in the game.
The goal shouldn’t be to simply flood the zone with free pilots, hoping the district will see the light and come back with a purchase order in hand. This strategy treats your innovative solution like a free sample at Costco. It’s an attractive plan—but not one that necessarily finds committed educators who will truly champion your product and fight for its budget.
The goal is to design an engagement that proves value—not just the value of your product, but the value of working with your company.
The Solution: The “Three E’s” Framework
To move from a stalled pilot to a thriving partnership, you need a structured framework. Think about using the “Three E’s”: Experiences, Expectations, and Experiments.
This framework transforms your pilot from a passive giveaway into an active, engaging, and qualifying process.
- Experiences: This is about crafting every interaction—starting with the initial request—to be a memorable and branded experience. Instead of asking for nothing more than a name and school email address, you create an engaging wizard that makes the applicant feel like they are starting a meaningful journey. It’s the difference between filling out an opt-in form and customizing your new car online. A great experience filters for commitment from the start.
- Expectations: This is where you transparently lay out the “quid pro quo.” A successful pilot requires effort from both sides. You must be upfront about what you need from the educator—and the school—to ensure success. This isn’t a hard sell; it’s about establishing the ground rules for a professional, responsible partnership, which administrators will appreciate.
- Experiments: Don’t just ask educators to “try” your product. Ask them to run a structured experiment with it. By requiring them to invest their own effort and intellect—for example, by testing a specific pedagogical approach with your tool—you create powerful buy-in. This is the “IKEA effect” in action: because they helped build it, they value the outcome far more significantly.
What’s Next?
Shifting from easy pilots to structured partnerships is the single most effective way to improve your conversion rates and build a real pipeline. It all starts with the belief that what you offer is valuable and should be treated as such from the very first conversation.
In an upcoming post, I’ll give a deep dive into the first E: Experiences. I’ll show you how to move beyond the boring sign-up form and design a qualifying process that attracts your ideal champions—the “Rudys” of the education world.