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In recent years, private equity investment in the education sector has remained strong, with sustained interest in companies delivering technology, products, and services to the K-12 market. During this period, firms have discovered that growth playbooks used in other verticals do not translate seamlessly to this market.
More specifically, traditional go-to-market (GTM) strategies that rely on aggressive sales outreach or high-velocity lead generation are often insufficient to achieve the organic growth ambitions of portfolio companies.
Therefore, the key question facing private equity and portfolio company leaders is: "How do we align our commercial engine to how district and school leaders buy today?"
Outdated GTM Playbooks Don’t Work in Education
Many PE-backed education companies struggle with commercial scaling because their GTM strategies are designed for environments with faster sales cycles, clearer buyer personas, and lower regulatory complexity.
In education, those assumptions rarely hold. Decision-making can be diffuse, with different stakeholders influencing selection, holding budget, and using the product. Procurement cycles are long, often governed by compliance requirements, RFPs, and board approvals. And, perhaps most importantly, key decision makers place a premium on trust.
Effective GTM strategies for education require a fundamentally different approach. It starts with building a clear stakeholder map that defines roles, influence, and decision-making dynamics across the buying process. From there, sales motions can be structured to reflect how buyers—typically districts—evaluate and adopt new solutions. Also critical is the use of outcome-based messaging that speaks to what district and school leaders value: student impact, instructional quality, and operational efficiency.
At Grant Thornton Stax, we recently observed this firsthand in our work with a provider of K-12 professional development solutions. Despite strong brand equity and a high level of customer satisfaction, our client was experiencing stalled growth. Through a comprehensive commercial assessment, we identified a key gap: the company was over reliant on inbound demand and legacy district relationships while under-investing in outbound sales capacity and structured district targeting. By developing a segmentation-driven GTM strategy—including a refined and actionable Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), refreshed personas, and targeted messaging—the organization is now positioned to reaccelerate growth across both current and whitespace districts.
Start with Stakeholder Mapping
In education, the sales funnel is seldom linear. Accordingly, we advise clients to start by mapping stakeholder dynamics inside their priority segments. Key questions include:
- Who owns the budget?
- Who influences provider selection?
- Who will use the product?
These roles often sit in different parts of the education ecosystem, from district administrators and school boards to school-level leaders and teachers.
Once the stakeholder map is well understood, the sales motion can be purpose-built for success. As an example, this may require a company to:
- Build awareness with educators
- Gain commercial alignment with buyers and budget holders
- Ensure procurement readiness with compliance officers
Use Outcome-Based Messaging
District and school leaders seek to buy student outcomes, instructional quality, and efficiency—not flashy dashboards and integrations. Our work with several K-12 EdTech and services providers shows that messaging is most effective when it emphasizes the metrics that matter most to schools, rather than descriptions of features. These generally include:
- For student-facing solutions:
- Student achievement gains, overall and by segment
- Student engagement (e.g., usage rates, attendance improvements)
- For teacher-facing solutions:
- Teacher satisfaction and usage
- Teacher time saved per week
- For administrator-facing solutions:
- Administrator satisfaction and usage
- Administrator time saved per week
- Tangible cost savings and/or ROI
A common misstep we particularly see in EdTech is one-size-fits-all messaging that focuses on the platform, not the pain point. Differentiating this messaging and aligning it to clearly defined customer segments (e.g., urban districts focused on equity vs. rural districts focused on staffing gaps) can dramatically improve engagement and conversion.
Rebuilding the Commercial Engine in Education
Across our education value creation work, we consistently see companies realize their revenue growth goals when they adopt a GTM structure built for this market, actioning:
- Segment-level stakeholder mapping to define roles, decision rights, and friction points
- Persona-based messaging that aligns to real-world educational outcomes, not platform features
- Omnichannel marketing that prioritizes relational and influence-based channels (e.g., educator referrals, school associations, community partnerships)
- Salesforce alignment around long-cycle, multi-contact pursuits—with defined KPIs beyond quota (e.g., district advocacy, board engagement, pilot success)
- Salesforce enablement that equips the team to effectively navigate compliance, RFPs, and highly relational buyer journeys
Conclusion
The education market rewards alignment, not speed. For private equity firms and operators, driving commercial growth often means rethinking the sales playbook, reframing KPIs, and rebuilding the GTM model in accordance with how education decision makers buy.
Grant Thornton Stax supports private equity investors, PE-backed companies, and educational institutions in the Education & Public Sector landscape. Our team delivers insights and strategies to providers of—and investors in—software, products, and services across the entire ecosystem, from early childhood education to professional learning, and from municipal to federal government.
To learn more about Grant Thornton Stax and our expertise, visit our Education & Public Sector page or contact us directly.
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