Your Best Deal Might Be a Feeling

Your most promising deal might not be a deal at all. All that enthusiasm in the meetings has told you nothing about whether the district can buy. Not a little. Nothing.

You know the deal I mean. The meetings went well. The administrator asked thoughtful questions and meant every word of her excitement. Someone even said, This is exactly what we need. But months have passed, and nothing has been signed. The deal isn't dead, but it's not moving forward either. It's just stuck at interested.

After forty years of selling to K-12 districts, I can tell you the answer isn't what most founders expect. Districts don't fail to buy because they aren't interested. Interest is usually obvious in the meeting. The real problem is that interest and readiness are not the same thing, and most people selling to districts don't know how to tell the difference.

It took me years to learn the difference. Interest is just a feeling. Someone at the district has it. You notice it in meetings, in their questions, or in follow-up emails. Readiness, on the other hand, isn't a feeling. It's a set of conditions the district either meets or doesn't, and enthusiasm can't replace any of them. Founders focus on interest because it's easy to spot. Readiness is invisible unless you know what to ask. That's why founders often spend months nurturing what's visible, while the real deciding factor goes unnoticed.

Let me show you how this plays out in real situations. When a founder tells me their deal is stuck, I don't point out mistakes. Instead, I ask them to walk me through what happened and listen for what's missing.

I had a great meeting with the curriculum director. She really liked the product. I sent her a proposal.

Did you check if this needs board approval? No, we didn't talk about that. Did you meet with the business office? No. Did you confirm where the funding would come from? No.

These conversations all follow the same pattern. The founder focused on the interest, because it was obvious in the meeting. But no one paid attention to the conditions, since those aren't visible in the room. She truly did love the product, but her district was never actually able to buy it.

So what does readiness actually mean? After forty years in this field, I look for four specific conditions.

First, there needs to be a funded mandate or priority that your product addresses. Money flows to funded mandates and priorities, whether it comes from Federal, State, Local sources, or grants. If your product matches one, there's a way forward. If not, there might be no path at all, no matter how much people like you.

Second, timing matters. You need to be at the right point in the budget cycle. About 70 percent of district purchases happen between July 1 and mid-October, based on decisions made months before. If you get interest at the wrong time, it has to last until the next buying season.

Third, you need access to the real decision-maker. Many people in a district will say they make the decisions, but most of them don't, at least not by themselves. The teacher who loves your product can influence things, but can't sign off. The administrator who's excited in the meeting often can't actually write the check, because that money is already committed to other mandates.

Fourth, both sides need the capacity to implement. Does the district have the staff and infrastructure to use what they're buying? And can you deliver at their scale? Both answers need to be yes.

Here's the honest math: if the first condition isn't there, the other three don't matter. You can't turn enthusiasm into a purchase order without money tied to a priority. Always check the mandate first.

Now comes the hard part. Take your most promising deal, the one with all the excitement, and rate it honestly against all four conditions: strong, partial, or absent. If all four are strong, you have a real deal and should treat it that way. If you just have enthusiasm but the conditions are missing, you've only been chasing a feeling.

That discomfort is valuable. Every month you spend building interest in a district that can't move forward is a month you could have spent finding one that can.

Interest is where a sale begins. It is not evidence that one is happening. The founders who close deals with districts aren't the ones who create the most excitement. They're the ones who can tell early on which enthusiasm is backed by a district that can actually say yes.

If you just rated your best deal and didn't like the result, there's still time this fall to find districts where the right conditions exist. And if you'd like a second set of eyes on where your deals really stand, that's a conversation I have with founders every week. Book a call with me right here on the site.

This article first appeared in my LinkedIn newsletter, Why Districts Don't Buy, where I write twice a month about how school districts really make buying decisions. You can subscribe on LinkedIn.