The Buying Committee
District deals are won and lost on the committee. The standout insight from discovery: the champion is not a fixed title — it’s whichever district is seeing the outcome data. Proof-of-impact creates the champion. That reframes the whole sell: lead with data, and the internal advocate emerges.
Sign-off / economic buyer
- ✅ Multiple superintendents + the school board hold budget authority and final sign-off.
- 🔎 “Multi-superintendent” suggests larger districts (multiple assistant supts) and/or selling across several districts in a cluster at once. Confirm which.
- Implication: the board is both a gate and a channel (see board-meeting presentations in go-to-market-motion.md).
Champion
- ✅ Whoever is seeing the data. Not role-bound. The person/district looking at outcome results becomes the advocate.
- 🔎 In practice this is likely a C&I / Teaching & Learning or PD leader, or a principal at the foothold school — but the trigger is data visibility, not the org chart. Design the motion to put outcome data in front of the right person early.
Renewal drivers
- ✅ Student outcomes are what determine renewal. Leadership renews when the data shows measurable impact.
- Implication: renewal = a data/reporting problem as much as a relationship problem. The product/program must continuously surface outcome evidence leadership can report upward.
Personas to develop (v1 design work)
| Persona | Role in deal | What they need to see |
|---|---|---|
| Superintendent / Asst Supt | Economic buyer, sign-off | District-level outcome impact, board-ready narrative, low-risk partnership |
| School board | Approval gate + presentation audience | Public-facing results, community/student benefit, fiscal responsibility |
| C&I / PD leader (likely champion) | Drives adoption, sees data first | Proof it works, low PD-fatigue, implementation support |
| Principal (foothold) | Pilot host, ground-level advocate | Practice change in their building, teacher buy-in |
| Instructional coaches / teachers | End users, adoption engine | Usefulness, not “another initiative,” time saved |
🔎 These persona rows are scaffolding from discovery — flesh out with real quotes/testimonials (which the client has) in the design session.
Blockers to design around
- ✅ Funding-cycle timing — grant cycles, board-approval windows, fiscal-year timing.
- ✅ Small competing vendors — lots of small PD vendors crowding the space. (Differentiation = full long-term partnership + measurable outcomes; see proof-and-positioning.md.)
Open threads
- ❓ Map the full committee for a typical target district (titles + names where known).
- ❓ Who, specifically, tends to become the data-champion most often?