If it's summer, The Educators are Meeting

It has been pointed out to me that my blog posts, during spring and summer conference and trade show travel, have dropped off to a nearly invisible level.

In my own defense: typing out posts about the cancer, biology, oncology, and other clinical science research and specialty medicine meetings on my calendar gets a bit repetitive. Especially for those who just aren't that jazzed by the latest development in customized gene therapies or sequencing speeds that boggle the mind, bring costs down for researchers, and eventually patients. New products, new proteins, new technologies, but no real bold-print, headline-grabbing buzz.

Now the longest day of the year is in the past and I am awash in education industry meetings. Educators meet during summer break - for obvious reasons. Less obvious is their taste for meeting locations that feature hot, sticky, humid weather and often minimal facilities. Budget conscious, I guess.

In any case: the big kahuna, The International Society for Technology in Education, is expecting over 18,000 attendees to plow through hundreds of booths offering, you guessed it, technology for education, and over 900 presentations presumably presenting positive ways to implement all that new tech. Atlanta, meeting the hot and humid directive, does feature fabulous facilities for all of these ed-tech geeks to meet, greet, and figure out how to get their favorite technology into budgets and classrooms, across the land.

School Nurses, the Online Curriculum Associations, Distance learning, Math teachers, Science curriculum specialists, College Financial Aid Officers, College Bursars, a plethora of Common Core and other curriculum working groups, school psychologists, principals, school boards, accredititation organzaiotns for every educational level and region, and many more educational specialty organizations, that I'll remember when I pull into San Antonio or Raleigh, are all meeting now, in late June and throughout July, with time off for fire works.

Each of these meetings has grown, is better attended, and has buzz, based directly on whether they are buying into the technology in schools buzz. If they aren't, they're still pretty small. Add automated health checks for students, empowering school bursars to auto debit fees, and voila, growing meetings and growing sales opportunities for the hundreds of start-ups flooding into the education technology space.

SJN Sales specializes in building sales for technology companies and service providers who leverage technology to make their customers' lives easier, more effective, and more profitable. Up until three years ago, SJN had one dedicated team that served all education specialty markets and those five people were plenty to handle demand on both tech companies wanting our services, and schools etc. needing what our clients were selling. Now everything has changed. SJN Sales has three full ed-tech teams and is hiring for a fourth. These specialized education market salespeople are in addition to the many SJN salespeople who sell security, infrastructure, and other enterprise solutions into schools and colleges.

Education technology is a market that has grown from a huge amount of money, a few years back when K12 and some of the earlier e-learning firms built sizable bases, to a start-up funding figure that, no-one agrees on as a number but all agree exceeds the total capitalization of several pretty developed countries.

Online resource explosion, 1 to 1 computing commitments at schools from preschool through university, Common Core (love it or hate it, everyone's got a new curriculum or tool for CC), STEM initiatives and their attractive funding bait, and perhaps most importantly, the realization that teachers decide what technology actually gets used in their classroom, have made one to one sales, based on relationships and knowledge of the whole education market landscape, including budgets, politics, and how both really work, critical to the success of every ed-tech vendor hoping to gain enough marketshare to stay in business, and grow.

I'm on the road with our education technology teams and I promise I'll report back with the latest developments and some predictions for what will sell and how SJN Sales will select the right ed-tech clients for the next years of change in US classrooms. 

Working from home: neither working nor home

Katie Roiphe at Slate has a point here: The infiltration of work technology into every corner of our lives is the meat, 'home office' is just the bread. Why wouldn't you want your employees to work remotely, if you think 'work' means 'respond to the items rated as urgent by the person at the other end of your electronic tether'? Really, how is having more places your staff can be made to report from, particularly places you don't even fund, a bad thing? Framed that way, remote officing is feudal. And it can be. At SJN Sales, we make a point of hiring only qualified self-starters. If you need to be contacted every 90 minutes, or reminded every 15, about your task list, you're not a fit here. We do engage in some structural design tricks to keep everyone on the job and producing, but we can't achieve anything moderately interesting, let alone strive for the extraordinary, when executive time is being used on task management. Best of luck to Yahoo! in getting the market to reward their offloading of staff. Meanwhile, if you're productive working from a home office part-time, we're always hiring.

Top salespeople live everywhere

The original SJN Sales employees worked in one centralized location but spread out as management first experimented with, and then fully embraced, greeting requests for location flexibility that came in, one after the other as our sales team members had opportunities to follow spouses to great jobs or to accept that grad school fellowship. Now SJN Sales is completely distributed, and though we retain an Albuquerque home-base and think having a Mother Ship location is really important, our people are making sales on the road and in-between trips they are living in towns and cities from Washington to Floria, New York, to Nebraska.

We're growing and still figuring out how to keep company-wide relationships strong as we add widely divergent specialty teams, in different industries. We continue to find new ways of getting all SJN Sales people in a room, in ways that make the gatherings  a treat rather than an annoying exercise in wasting time.

SJN Sales is, as mentioned above, growing. And we think it's a great place to work. If you think you have what it takes to build sales for our clients and want to escape your commute, your cubicle or live in Anchorage adjacent, check out our openings at  SJN Sales Careers