One of the things I’ve noticed working with edtech businesses is how quickly sales pipelines can become a source of frustration.

One month, there are plenty of conversations happening. Demonstrations are booked, proposals are going out and the team is feeling confident. A few months later, things have gone quiet. Suddenly, there’s pressure to generate more leads, launch another campaign or attend another event to get things moving again. Sound familiar?

The problem is that pipeline management often gets treated as something you focus on when you need more business, rather than something you do consistently. And in edtech, where buying cycles can be lengthy, school budgets are tight and decisions often involve several people, that inconsistency can be particularly costly.

The good news is that keeping your pipeline healthy doesn’t necessarily require a bigger marketing budget or a complicated sales strategy.

Sometimes it comes down to three habits.

 

1. Get your 5-a-day

No, I’m not talking about fruit and vegetables! I’m talking about identifying five people every working day who could be valuable to your business and making an effort to connect with them.

They might be prospective customers, potential partners, people working in schools or MATs, or others in the edtech sector who could become useful connections.

Five doesn’t sound like much, does it? But five new contacts a day adds up to 25 a week and potentially more than 1,000 over a working year.

Of course, not everyone will respond, not everyone will be relevant and certainly not everyone will become a customer. That’s not really the point. The objective is to build your network consistently, rather than suddenly deciding you need to find 100 new prospects because the pipeline looks a bit thin.

And this doesn’t mean sending five generic LinkedIn connection requests every morning followed by an immediate sales pitch – nobody enjoys that.

Take a little time to understand who you’re contacting and why a conversation might be useful.

Perhaps they’ve shared something interesting about school attendance, digital strategy or workload. Maybe their trust is expanding. Perhaps you’ve noticed a common challenge between their organisation and others you’ve worked with. A relevant comment, a useful introduction or a thoughtful message can be a much better starting point than asking somebody to book a demonstration.

Remember, you’re building relationships, not simply collecting names.

 

2. Keep everyone warm (without becoming a nuisance)

One of the biggest missed opportunities in sales is the number of relationships that quietly go cold. You have a promising conversation with somebody at an event. They seem interested, but the timing isn’t right.

You speak to a MAT leader who’s reviewing their systems next year.

A prospect attends a demonstration but needs to discuss the decision internally.

Then life gets busy. A few weeks become a few months, and before you know it, you’ve lost touch.

The difficulty is that when you eventually return to your contact list, there are so many people to follow up with that the whole exercise feels overwhelming.

That’s why I’d encourage sales teams to make relationship management part of their weekly routine. Sort your contacts by the date of your last meaningful interaction. Look at who you haven’t spoken to recently and consider whether there’s a good reason to reconnect.

The important phrase here is meaningful interaction. Sending somebody a generic “just checking in” email every few weeks isn’t particularly useful.

Instead, think about what you can offer.

Have you published an article that addresses something they were concerned about? Has something changed in the sector that might affect their plans? Could you introduce them to somebody useful? Have you learned something from another school or trust that they might find interesting?

And sometimes, simply remembering what somebody told you six months ago and asking how things have progressed is enough.

This is particularly relevant in education because buying decisions don’t always happen when suppliers would like them to.

A school might be interested in your product but unable to act until the next budget cycle. A MAT might be waiting for a contract to expire. Another organisation might have postponed a project because leadership priorities have changed.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the opportunity has disappeared; it means you need to maintain the relationship without applying unnecessary pressure. The best salespeople understand the difference between staying in touch and constantly chasing.

 

3. Use your CRM properly. It isn’t just there for management reports!

I have a bit of a thing about CRM systems. Businesses invest considerable amounts of money in them, spend weeks configuring them, create dashboards and reports, and then wonder why nobody seems to use them properly.

Meanwhile, salespeople are still keeping important information in notebooks, spreadsheets, emails or, even worse, their heads.

A CRM should make selling easier. It should help you remember conversations, understand where opportunities stand and identify what needs to happen next. But that only works if people actually use it.

Every meaningful conversation should be recorded. Every opportunity should have a next action. And every contact should have enough context that you can pick up the relationship without having to start again. That doesn’t mean logging every tiny interaction or turning sales into an administrative exercise. It means capturing the information that helps you make better decisions.

For example:

• Who is involved in the buying decision, and who else needs convincing?
• What problem is the organisation trying to solve?
• When are they realistically likely to make a decision?
• What concerns have they raised?
• What did you agree would happen next?

These details are far more useful than a pipeline full of opportunities marked “proposal sent” with no indication of what happens afterwards.

I’d also encourage businesses to pay attention to opportunities that haven’t moved for a while. An opportunity that has been sitting at the same stage for six months isn’t necessarily a healthy opportunity, however attractive its potential value might look on a sales forecast.

Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is have an honest conversation about whether the project is still going ahead. And if it isn’t, update the CRM and move on. A realistic pipeline is far more valuable than an impressive-looking one.

 

A healthy pipeline is about habits, not heroic efforts

There’s a wider point behind all three of these suggestions: sales success rarely comes from one big burst of activity.

You might have a brilliant event, launch a successful campaign or land a major new customer, but none of those things replaces the need to build and maintain relationships consistently. I think this is particularly important for edtech businesses.

Schools and trusts don’t operate around your sales targets; their decisions are shaped by budgets, procurement processes, academic calendars, leadership priorities and the practical realities of running educational organisations.

You can’t always control when somebody is ready to buy . . . but you can control how well you understand them, how consistently you maintain the relationship and whether you’re ready to help when the time is right.

Here’s something worth trying. For the next 30 working days:

1. Identify and reach out to five relevant people each day.
2. Reconnect with a few existing contacts you haven’t spoken to recently, making sure you’ve got something useful to say.
3. Spend ten minutes keeping your CRM up to date and checking that your opportunities have clear next steps.

That’s it.

Nothing revolutionary. No complicated framework. Just a little discipline, applied consistently.

If you only start thinking about your pipeline when it looks empty, you’ve probably left it too late. And if your pipeline is already full, these are the habits that will help keep it that way.