Essentials Magazine Essentials Fall 2017 | Page 26

From The Marketing Side
SCHOOL SECRETARIES
Best way to advertise
35
SCHOOL MARKETERS
Most effective media
34%
32%
30
30%
28.5%
25
20
15
14%
11.5%
10
9%
6.5% 6%
4%
5
2.5%
3.5%
.5%
0
2.5%
3.5%
Do Sales People Sell or Service?
Think about sales people. I would
expect that sales people would have
to check in at the school office before
calling on either a teacher or admin-
istrator. Most likely they would have
marketers and school secretaries agree.
That’s what we would expect, sellers
and buyers agreeing as to which media
are most effective. But how could there
be such disagreement, especially in the
case of sales people where the level of
disagreement was 30 to 1, or even over
email where the level was 3 to 1?
.5%
26 essentials | fall 2017
What They Disagreed Over
Thirty percent of school marketers
felt that sales people were an effective
means of selling to educators, but less
than 1% of school secretaries agreed.
Just over 11% of school marketers
thought that email was an effective medi-
um for reaching teachers and administra-
tors but 32% of secretaries said it was the
best medium through which to advertise.
It’s easy to understand when school
or sale of educational materials. But
their opinions greatly differed over the
effectiveness of sales people and email.
6%
5.5%
to check in with the school secretary.
Consequently the school secretary
should have an awareness of the num-
ber and times that sales people visited
the school. She would have a sense
of the role sales people played in the
purchase of products and services.
The question we put to school
secretaries was “what is the single best
way to advertise educational products
and services to administrators and
teachers”, and virtually none of them
opted for personal sales call. Could it
be because the time lag between the
sales call and the order is so great that
the secretary cannot connect the two?