Oates Associates

We work with education companies who are innovative and focused on what's best for the child and the school: doing well by doing good! Let us help you with a marketing and communications plan, sales training, or an innovative approach to penetrating the education market.

Rita and her colleagues can make presentations, lead workshops and webinars and deliver keynote speeches at conferences.

Let's get creative in solving educational problems using your products and services!

Services include:

Grants from the Vendor Perspective: Helping Your Customer

Facing an uncertain future because of federal shifts in education policy and budget, schools and districts may need to look to other sources of funding for your product.

• How to help districts apply for specific state or federal grants that would incorporate your products
• What to have on your company website to help a school or district get funding to buy that product or PD to support it
• Using social media to promote specific grant opportunities for your products
• Determining what federal programs, state initiatives and local foundation funding could be used for specific products or services and making potential customers aware of that
• Resources to help districts and school find funding or partnerships
• Creative ideas for partnerships where potential customers can find support to acquire the products and services you believe would help improve education

Customer Voice through Advisory Boards/Focus Groups/User Meetings

Advisory Boards: We will jointly select participants from our network of educators and those you suggest. We will develop the talking points around your questions and answers.  The Advisory Board could meet once or guide you for a year with touch points. 

Focus Groups: Selected educators will meet with you and your team to give feedback on your products and services, marketing plan, ideas for funding sources, or other questions you want answered.

User Meeting: This could be online, and in the future, on-site at your organization, off-site, or held as a meeting before a conference.  Our team will help target the right customers to present to your clients and prospect base. Then we will work with those customers to tell their “success stories” in a format that creates the best practices utilizing your products and services.



Maximize Conference Participation: FETC 2021 and beyond

Make your event investments produce a strong ROI.  Every dollar that you spend to close sales needs to generate revenues.  We will create a matrix that helps with the selection of the events and how to utilize them. We hope to be live and in person at FETC 2021 in Orlando, January 2021.  FETC: The nation’s largest, independent education technology event focused on leveraging technology to drive preK-12 student success. Services could include:

• A matrix to select and evaluate your event schedule
• One sales training webinar "How to effectively use events to generate revenues"
• Work with your organization to get sessions at key events using your customers as case studies
• Coach your executives how they can present at events
• Develop ideas for pre-events at targeted conferences
• Focus group at conference to test new features, marketing plans, or other issues
• User group at conference to update best customers on new offerings, have them help you meet new potential clients

Sales into the Education Market

Cold calling a list of phone numbers isn't going to generate the sales you need. Let us help you with proven techniques and strategies and grow your market share, especially in the new Covid-19 setting.

• Sales training; who to sell to; talk with a potential client about what they are interested in
• Review of current sales initiatives with guidance and advice from perspective of school district
• Solution sales methodology: What are you doing now? What buyers think you should be doing and how your organization can build stronger alliances with school districts
• Understanding public school, charter school, private school market and IDEA funding. Where are the best targets of opportunity for your product and most likely sources of funding?
• Our experience includes K-12, higher education, and home/parent markets, and we tailor our suggestions for the best fit
• Partnerships and sponsorships and other creative ideas to help generate sales

Editorial Services

We can edit your website, your print materials, magazine articles, books, PowerPoint decks, how-to manuals, or even your tweets! We write articles, white papers, case studies, success stories, research papers, blogs, and books. Our skills include:

• language and tone matching the intended audience, for parent, teacher, or district leader
• superb data analysis skills for your big data or your surveys
• evaluation research for both small and large projects

We can help conceptualize how to best present information for your audience and create the document--or refine the documents your staffers create--to maximize communications effectiveness. We have relationships with outstanding translators if your message needs to be in Spanish or Haitian Creole. We can help design surveys or conceptualize research efficacy studies of your product.

Strategic Communication to the Educator and Parent Markets

What do educators know about your company, and how current is that information? If parents are important for sales or funding assistance, how are you helping them help you? 

• Develop communications plan for six months and a year and execute to develop more warm leads.
• Seek publicity in education press and in parent outlets such as Parenting Publications of America.
• Target associations and parent groups that would be most likely interested in the products and services. 
• Suggest media outlets for interviews and news or work with your PR staff or external firm to increase awareness and knowledge of your company's products