THE Journal

Sales Tactics

Breaking Down Silos of Funding

• 03/18/09

An unintended consequence of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) may be to break down the silos of funding in education, or at least punch some windows through the silos so that people from different funding programs can see each other and send signals about what they are doing.

In states like Arizona, Texas, and Alabama, state superintendents and commissioners of education are creating department-wide councils to ensure that they have good communication across their departments and that they are sending consistent messages to their school districts.

Arizona’s approach seems to be the most common: they are using an existing structure of the superintendent’s cabinet—the top 10 or so officials in the department—to coordinate how stimulus money is spent. Others like Texas are creating a special internal task force.

(See a case study of how Alabama is creating a cross-departmental task force to implement ARRA programs.)

Technology at the Forefront
Most of these state-level cross-departmental groups are not very far along in their planning because they are dependent upon guidelines forthcoming from the USDE that will  determine how they will be allowed to spend their money. However, it seems clear that technology will have a front-and-center place at the table, as both a tool to facilitate communication among task force members (e.g., webinars, teleconferencing, and so forth) and also as a means to deliver cross-program solutions to schools. 

Jerel Booker, the head of the Texas Education Agency task force, told EML that while TEA is awaiting additional input from the feds, the governor, and the legislature, technology is at the core of what they hope to deliver at program level. They intend to ramp up their distance learning for kids and they will use more online professional development.  They are anxious to find ways to increase their broadband access and to ensure that schools use it. 

Implications for Companies
Because there is so much urgency for states to spend the stimulus money quickly and wisely, companies that sell at the state-level should anticipate more state-level cooperation and coordination among the big-dollar programs of Title I, IDEA special education and technology, as well as coordination with the state governors’ offices that are administering the $53.6 billion dollar State Fiscal Stabilization Fund.  

Furthermore, what happens at the state level often gets mirrored at the local level. Hence, funding silos at the state level are almost always repeated at the local level; in this case, companies can expect more coordination and cooperation at the local level in states where that is happening.

We can imagine some groans among seasoned sales folk about how a committee approach usually slows down the sales process, and that might happen here. But we see here the potential for those entities that coordinate priorities to be more efficient—and certainly more effective—spending mechanisms than places where program heads are struggling on their own to spend that has so much accountability attached to it.

Sales and Marketing Tactics
Here are some specific thoughts about how sales and marketing folks can plan for states and localities that are taking this cross-programmatic approach to spending and implementing stimulus funds:

1. While applications for the various program funds will be separate because of the stringent reporting requirements of ARRA, there is a chance that goals and even emphases of these different applications will be similar and complimentary. Because applications for different program funds will be sent out from states to districts at different times, companies may be able to get a hint of what other programs may look like, such as the technology funding that will be released in the fall, by looking at applications for Title I which will be sent to districts in the late spring. 
2. But you don't have to wait for hints. Salespeople should be actively engaged with task force members. This might mean that they have to move beyond their "old reliable" contact in the ed tech department and get to know the people heading up other programs. Certainly your ed tech customer can provide the introductions. The opportunity here is that your company now has multiple points of entry for a sale that it might not have had before.
3. If cross-departmental fertilization is happening, be sure that your sales and marketing folks are well-acquainted with the priorities of the folks from the other departments to whom you may not normally sell. Coming into a meeting and speaking to the concerns of the special education or assessment or early education folks will afford your solutions some worthy credibility.
4. If you happen to work at a company with a large and diversified sales force (some sell “assessment,” others “professional development,” others “library products”) you should be creating your own internal task force to ensure that you are maximizing the synergies among your customers. Wouldn’t it be amazing if the walls separating the fiefdoms in larger education companies (which can be every bit as rigid and narrow as the funding silos in education) came tumbling down (or at least, lost a brick or two) as well?

Finally, there may be states and districts that need some technology upgrades (like teleconferencing equipment) to facilitate their cross-program approach. Depending on federal guidelines, these groups may be able to use stimulus funds to finance these critical tools that can enable wise planning.