There is a real tension building in K-12 right now. The "no screens" conversation that started with cell phone bans has moved into legislative territory, with 17 states introducing screen time bills in 2026 alone and four already enacting laws that go beyond phones to target district-issued devices and classroom technology directly. If your product sells into schools, this is no longer a trend to monitor. It is a business reality to plan around.

At the same time, summer is not a selling season, and pretending otherwise is a fast way to lose trust with the educators and administrators you need on your side come fall. The question is not whether to show up in July. It is how to show up in a way that actually serves the people already using your product and the ones about to start.

This field notes episode covers what is moving fast right now: the legislative landscape around EdTech and screens, what smart marketing looks like in a non-buying season, what is working on LinkedIn this summer, and a few posts from district leaders and educators worth paying close attention to.

What You’ll Learn

1️⃣ Why the no-screens movement has moved from conversation to legislation

What started as cell phone bans has expanded into bills targeting district-issued devices and classroom technology in 17 states in 2026 alone. For EdTech companies, this is no longer a sentiment issue. It is a product positioning and sales reality that requires a clear, proactive stance.

2️⃣ What smart marketing actually looks like in a non-buying season

July is not a selling window, but that does not mean going quiet. The brands that show up well right now are shifting into implementation and support mode, meeting educators where they are and building the kind of trust that converts when procurement opens back up.

3️⃣ Why LinkedIn carousels are one of the biggest underused opportunities right now

Carousel posts make up less than 5% of content on LinkedIn and still drive some of the highest reach and engagement of any post format. The bar for standing out is low, and the data-backed best practices are straightforward.

Why It Matters

Education marketers are heading into one of the most complex back-to-school seasons in recent memory. Legislation is reshaping what schools can buy and use. Budgets are tighter. Educators are more skeptical of vendor outreach than ever. And AI is changing how content gets surfaced and who gets trusted as a credible voice in the space.

Showing up in July with the same playbook as the rest of the year is not just ineffective. It signals that you do not understand how schools actually operate. The marketers who will be in the best position come fall are the ones using this window to support, listen, and build credibility in ways that compound over time.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

• Screen Time Legislation Tracker (Claire Hollenbeck) and Clare Harrison
• A free tracker of screen time and device legislation across all 50 states, built by the co-founders of AlchemyK12. As of June 2026, 42 states have enacted phone laws or policies and 17 states have introduced screen time legislation this year alone.
• Elana Leoni on the screen time debate
• Elana's own take on the no-screens movement, including what EdTech companies should be doing proactively to get ahead of it.
• Andy Marcinek on LinkedIn
• Referenced for his framing of the critical questions educators and companies should be asking about technology in the classroom: Why is this tool here? Are students creating or consuming? What did the screen actually cost and what did it add?
• The SAMR Model (Edutopia)
• A widely used framework for evaluating how technology augments or transforms learning. Referenced as a useful lens for understanding when and how technology adds real value in the classroom.
• Amos Fodchuk on LinkedIn: AI Adoption Gap
• Shared a graph from Microsoft's AI Diffusion report showing that AI usage in metropolitan counties (32.9%) is nearly double that of rural counties (16.2%). A critical equity signal for EdTech marketers.
• Kip Glazer on LinkedIn
• School principal and author of Lead with AI, referenced for her honest post about the complexity of school leadership, inherited tech stacks, and the resistance leaders face when trying to make change.
• Kyle Brumbaugh repost: Build Products Our Agents Can Use
• A post from Chris Hagel, CIO at Peninsula School District, about why the future of EdTech is not more chatbots but district-owned agents that coordinate safely across every system a district runs. A signal vendors should not ignore.
• Richard van der Blom / Just Connecting HUB
• Referenced for his LinkedIn algorithm report and the three-positive-signals framework for social selling. Elana cites him as her go-to authority on growing reach and engagement intentionally on LinkedIn.
• Richard Moore on LinkedIn
• Founder of The Art of Sales community, referenced for his practical approach to social selling. Note: please confirm this is the correct LinkedIn handle.
• Connect with Elana: LinkedIn | Have a question or topic you'd like covered? DM Elana directly.

Welcome to All Things Marketing and Education. I'm your host, Ilana Leone, and I have had the honor of working alongside education and ed tech brands for almost two decades. As a marketer, I've built lasting connections with educators, innovators, and leaders who are all shaping the future of learning. And I don't say that lightly. On this podcast, I bring those voices forward so you can learn from their experiences, shift your perspective, and put those things into action.

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of All Things Marketing and Education. I'm Ilana Leone, and this is a new type of episode we've been doing monthly called Education Marketing Field Notes. It's solo episodes with me where I get to just throw the fire hose at you. And hopefully you'll find one to maybe even five things that are helpful right now. But I share what's changing, what's not, what education marketers should actually be paying attention to right now.

Everything in between. So let's get started. Today I want to start with something I've been watching closely for months and months and months, and it's been moving faster than I even imagined. So the screen time, no ed tech movement. And if you haven't heard about this, Google it. Basically, there's a lot of people out there saying, whoa, no more screens, no more screens with learning, no more screens in the classroom.

Now it's gotten to the point we're in full legislative territory. And if you sell anything into K-12 and higher education, this affects your business directly. So first off, I want to give you a resource. I'm on LinkedIn all the time. This last couple of weeks I've been so guilty. I haven't been on it posting as much, but I consume constantly. And if you are on LinkedIn and you're not connected to me, send me a connection request. I want to learn from you.

With that said, I found a great resource from Alchemy K12, Claire Hollenbeck and Claire Harrison. I'm gonna put those links in the show notes of where you can go reach them out on LinkedIn. And I also have some URLs I can share in the show notes. But, anyways, it is a free tracker that tracks all of the legislation going on with banning screens in the classroom.

The way a lot of this movement started was, whoa, kids are way too distracted. So starting at the higher level, we had cell phone bans. We have now a 42 states that have enacted phone laws or policies. And 26 of those are full bell-to-bell bans. So do not see a cell phone in the classroom the entire school day. So that is kind of like the new baseline. There's a lot of cool opinions out there on that.

I'll put this in the show notes. There's things like Kansas has a pending bill that would ban laptops and tablets entirely in K-5. I mean, holy moly, right? So if you are selling into K-12 in particular, you need to be paying attention to this really, really carefully. People are just knee-jerk reaction banning technology. And I wouldn't be in this industry if I didn't believe passionately that technology can accelerate learning like nothing else.

But it has to be used critically. It can't be used just for engagement's sake and just for, my God, did you know that this technology can do this? We call that kind of like shiny tech syndrome. Or you go into those, you know, the isties and the big national tech conferences, and it's like 50 tools that can do 10 million things. But we're never asking the question why and to what end. The coolest thing about this, if there is a silver lining, is

We are now all being forced to ask very critical questions about the role that technology plays in the classroom and in learning in general. My friend Andy Marcinik, he talked about it on LinkedIn. I'll put it in the show notes. But he said, you know, it's now getting us, it's forcing us to ask these questions. Like, why is this tool in my classroom? Are students creating or consuming? Can you tell their work from the tool's work?

And what did the screen actually cost and w what did it add? Let's look at those costs and benefits within it and think about what's the best way to show up and learn this particular topic. So I'm not torn. I think this debate is crazy polarized. And we are actually not, a lot of us are not seeing the nuance that it deserves. Technology will always have a place in the classroom, full stop.

I think the people that are trying to ban it entirely are it, I don't even know. I don't know. I I don't want to say anything that gets me in trouble here, but it's not the right approach. It's always a nuanced, more complicated layer approach with students being at the center. What truly works in a way that like I always go back to the SAMR model too. I'll put a link into the show notes if you don't know, if you're kind of new to education and you don't know the SAMR model, S-A-M-R.

model, but really what can technology augment? What can we reimagine that wasn't even possible from a learning perspective? So I will go off on this. I just wanted to let you know that this is moving very, very fast. And if you are not in involved in this conversation and following it, you need to be right now. Here's your wake up call. Speaking of getting involved in the conversation.

I want to talk about companies. If you're an ed tech company right now and you're on the marketing side, a founder side, a sales side, whatever you are, if your company is not addressing it proactively, that is a major loss on your end. People are looking, you know, in RFPs, this is coming up now. So you need to find ways to proactively address this and create a stance. Where do you stand? How do you design your products with learning in mind?

Adam Bello, he's good friend of mine, someone I've admired for decades in the industry, came as an educator, is an author as well, and he leads Breakout EDU as the CEO. I saw an email from him that stopped me in my tracks. He put a statement out acknowledging that technology matters, but that some of those most meaningful learning experiences will also be deeply human, but guess what? It involves some technology.

So being able to have your stance, your human stance of what does your company stand for in this no screens, no ed tech debate. I'll put a link to the show notes of my post on LinkedIn so you can actually see what he wrote. It was powerful and it made me trust them more. It made me think that, wow, they're a partner that really thinks critically about the role that technology plays in learning.

But I just I'll put those links in the show notes. But it's a very short list of companies actually jumping in on this. And I know there's risk involved, but for me, there's more risk not getting involved. So there is a fire hose, up to date moment on the no ed tech, no screens movement. You are welcome.

We're going to get into a bunch of other things today. Today we're going to talk about like the buying cycle. What does it mean right now to show up in the month of July? I'm going to give you some really good social media updates as well. What's happening on LinkedIn? How can we socially sell? What really works? And then I'm going to give you a little bit of, all right, we've got some stuff going on in terms of conferences and events in July. How can I make the most of it? All right, let's get into it.

All right, let's talk about where we are in the buying cycle. I always like to ground it to when and how and why, and to what level of emphasis are people even looking to purchase tools and services for the academic school year? And a little bit of a spoiler, and I am gonna talk a little bit about the nuance here, but we are not in a selling season right now. So

In July, not only is one week completely don't talk to me week because everyone wants to vacation, but it's resetting. We have schools going back in for the next academic school year. And technically that is when schools begin to start procurement processes. They begin to start and look and say, okay, now that we're in this school year with our locked in tools, here's what we want to do and buy for for the next year.

In reality, it's really not the case. July is like, my God, house is on fire. Let's make sure back to school happens, or we're prepping for back to school actively. We are not looking at future tools right now. And we might be scrambling to get tools in place that we weren't able to get, or something fell through, or we might be higher. There's all sorts of things that are way bigger priorities, right? So

End of story, not really selling. So what do you do? What do you do from a marketing and selling perspective when teachers are professionally developing, they might be taking a break. Same on that, the leadership side, they take breaks, but they are also fully employed and they're trying to get everything ready for back to school as well. So it is a busy time for them. But what do you do when there's a lack of attention or they're just doing something else, or they might be getting ready for back to school to actually implement, right?

And I always try to look at it and say, how can I provide as much value as possible? I don't ghost. I don't ghost because they're not buying. That's horrible. Right. What you need to do is look about my role is almost shifting into implementation and support. As a marketer, I am trying to go hand in hand with my customer success team, with my product team, and try to say, how can we help you make sure

that users and you know and ed educators know that this tool is available and that maybe I can surface up some of like the the quick I like to call them carrots, like those quick wins on the tool that get them excited so they want to learn it more, or the easy ways to get started uploading a crop a class roster, whatever it may be. But really how do we not overly force PD when it's not ready in the beginning of July?

But how do I start sprinkling in super helpful, valuable things? And remember, teachers are humans, educators are humans. And so how can I show up in feeds and emails and newsletters in a way that's human forward, right? In this world of AI slop, how do we become more human and connect? And we do that with empathy. We might do that with what I call edutainment, right? So we're we're jumping in with maybe something.

informational and educational, but also slightly fun. There might be empathetic content. There depending on what your tolerance is for that, you might have some fun memes, right? You always want to think about that magic in the middle though. So does it align with my business objectives? Does my audience really like it? And what do I have capacity to create? And sometimes you might go over in what I'm calling this Venn diagram. And if you see me online, I'm kind of doing some hand stuff, but sometimes you might get into just what does my audience want right now? It doesn't always have to be

This magic in the middle, too. So I want you to show up for schools and districts that have already said yes to you. I want you to show up for the new ones who are about to start using your product for the first time. All of those folks, how will you support them in the next few months? Determines whether they were new, whether they expand, whether they tell other districts about you. This is such a pivotal moment, right before back to school and during back to school, to be there for them and to be responsive.

I have a client that does a back to school virtual summit. So think about what your organization is doing and try to find ways to promote it before, during, after. Slice and dice the content. Make sure it's really readily available. Do things. If you're not doing a summit, maybe you can do micro trainings. Maybe you can do some webinars. Maybe you don't do any of that because you don't have time and you just slice and dice with some great video editing, some great tips.

Or you you collect amazing tips from your audience of here are the best things to do when you start the school year with the with your tool. So there's so many things you can do, but really all of this stems with the lens of how can I be as supportive as possible to stimulate usage in a way that accelerates learning. Okay. So right after that fourth of July holiday, the window between mid-July and early August, that's where you start shifting from maybe that.

Edutainment, professional development a little bit. You know, you might continue to do professional development, but start looking at your biggest. I if I were looking at how to be as useful as possible, I'd look at where my traction is as an organization. Do I have a lot of people in Texas, California, New York? If I do, I want to look it back to school dates in particular and say, gosh, you know, they're they're starting school earlier. And most of them are like 70% of our customers are in school.

By the end of July. If that is the case, I want you to align your marketing, your email, and your content to that too, and be as close as possible to how can I create value for them? Implementation. What you don't want to do right now is in June, when they're kind of just graduated or end of May, they graduated and you're like, hey, back to school. So read the room, read your audience. Don't make them mad, but also show up with intention, right?

So I hope that's helpful from a buying cycle perspective. And I say that in quotes because no one's buying. I want you to be supportive. I want you to be a thought partner. And I know so many of you are in education because of this. So this is your fun time to do that. So let's get into the events and calendar moments. We've already talked a little bit more about them, but I know y'all are multitasking. I do it too. So I'm gonna say it again for the sake of redundancy.

And I'm gonna give you some resources that you can go to later to download. All right, the first week of July. For those of you listening, what do we call that? We call that the dead week. I don't know, like we should find some even fun, like it's not dead, like morbid, is it as in nobody is online. Most educators are fully out, administrators take time off, the whole world takes time off, camping, all of the things, right?

So that's fourth of July weekend. We also have America's 250th anniversary on July fourth, which is a big one this year. I mean I always tell brands, keep it very light that week. There's a real people will be online. Humans are online, but they are not online to professionally develop. So unless you are willing to show up and edutain them, entertain them, show cool pictures of fourth of July something, something timely that aligns with your brand, right?

Maybe just keep it light. Some ideas is make a joke day is on July first. So if you're looking for a reason to add humor into your marketing, there it is. We have World Chocolate Day on July 7th. World Emoji Day is on July 17th. I know I'm getting past that dead week, but I also want you to be able to sprinkle in humor as it goes. National Ice Cream Day is July 19th. So what you can I've had science brands do really cool things with National Ice Cream Day.

You can also do giveaways, right? So for chocolate day, ice cream day, have fun, reward people. I would say that yes, chocolate isn't specific to education, but guess who consumes a lot of chocolate? Teachers. So know your audience as well. Have some fun. There's some other days that you could put on your radar if it aligns with your brand, like Amelia Earhart Day is July 24th. National Parents Day is July 26th. That's not as heavily celebrated.

But I've seen some brands do it where there's such a huge overlap of educators who are parents and w also recognizing what parents do to help accelerate learning, all of the things. It's always a good thing. And there is a holiday which I don't see being promoted too much, but I like it. It's called Support Public Education Day, and that's July 30th. All of these are in our planner. So our planner is now off.

Our website, but if you DM us on LinkedIn, go search for Leone Consulting Group on LinkedIn. We will give you the planner. It's a PDF planner. We take it down towards the end of this time because we are now in the mode of creating our next planner. So if you need it, let me know. You can also go to our LinkedIn, and every month we put this in a carousel format. And if you don't know what a carousel is, I'm going to talk to you about that on LinkedIn in just a second. All right. So

That's a little bit about days. Now I want to get into conferences for the second half of really the month in July. Again, most people aren't doing conferences during Fourth of July week. I would say that the ISTE conference is the, and again, apologies, I'm an old school person. I've always called it ISTE, ISTE, but ISTE recently got acquired from by ASCD. And now it is called the ASCD annual conference. That is happening in Orlando.

In the summertime, my god, why did they pick that? In the summertime, the end of June, and it ends on July 1st. So there are a good amount of companies going to it. It is one of the biggest ed tech national shows, if you are not aware of it. So that is something to put on your radar. I will unfortunately not be going. So let me know how it goes. But I've been debating because gosh, I love Disney World. I really want to go again.

All right. The other conferences to put on your radar, we have the National School Leaders Conference. That is the newly rebranded N A E S P. Used to be the National Association of Elementary School Principals, right? That is July 13th through 15th. That's also at Orlando. What's going on with Orlando? They must have a deal. because it's July. I get it. Hot July. And then we have NSPRA, it's the National School Public Relationship.

Re not relations, relations association. So it's all for school communications. If that is your industry, this is your jam, July 19th through 22nd in New Orleans. Nice. So not a ton of conferences. Always there are conferences in your own specific state, in your own specific county. And I do recommend you look at, you know, what's going on in your niche level of conferences. And in addition to that, how can I show up to my

Education agencies? How can I show up to associations? How can I show up and do lunch and learns to school districts, to BOSIs? All of those things are really good time of year to start reaching out and offering free lunch and learn services, workshops. So depending on what your conference strategy is, these big ones are really great sometimes if you've got a good strategy.

But what I've been finding is the more you can be really specific and align it with where you want to expand or where you already have traction, that can be a very smart approach as well. All right. So now I have overwhelmed you with conferences and all of the events going on in July. Again, I want you to really think critically about what matters most to your brand, what matters most to your audience, and come up with a plan that's truly valuable. So next we're going to talk about.

Some really fun social media updates. And this would be a good one to take some notes on or get your recording on for AI, because I'm going to give you some guidelines that you can put into your AI as you're crafting LinkedIn posts. So let's get into it. All right, folks, let's shift to social media. And in particular, I'm going to be talking about LinkedIn. So document posts. If you don't know what a document posts are, you are not alone. They sound boring, they sound traditional.

And nobody calls them document posts. They call them carousels. So we're going to be talking about carousels, which are PDF documents. So they are those swipable slide posts you see on LinkedIn. I want to talk about them for one really big reason is that they only make up about 5% of all posts on LinkedIn right now. And that's based on the latest data.

But when it comes to document posts, I see this as a huge opportunity because nobody's using them and they freaking work. So get on it. I think the reason why people don't use them is because it requires a lot of effort. And it doesn't require a lot of effort. I'm going to show you some best practices that you can take some notes on, put it in your AI as some guidelines as you start crafting these types of swipable, engaging document carousel style posts.

So let's talk about best practices. I want you to keep these document posts between six and nine slides. And I say that with like a really hard keep it between six and nine slides because after nine slides, it is like a 40% drop in attention. So what I'm saying is based on data and just put it in AI and we can figure it out together, right? Your cover, your first slide, it needs a title.

A benefit and some kind of curiosity thing. Like nine things I use to constantly get over 5,000 impressions on my LinkedIn post. Quick and easy tips you can do tomorrow. Right? So you want to keep it practical, benefit oriented.

But have a little bit of like, I wonder what it is, right? I don't want this to be a big infomercial polished slide. And for those of you in brand that have graphic designers that like to put your logo everywhere and big, I get it. It's cohesion. But the first slide is not for that. I actually don't even like putting my logo on the first slide. I want you to keep your caption short. If you don't know what a caption is, it's okay. That's not a stupid question. The caption is that copy that goes right above when you see this.

PDF that's usually an eight and a half by 11. And then right above it, it's the words. Again, when we're scrolling, we're going to look at the image first, the media first. Then we're going to look at the caption to complement it. That is really important as you start crafting your caption. But I want your caption to be short. You see lots of long LinkedIn posts, right? And there is a time and place for them. There's a time and place for text posts being very long and captions related to images being longer, right? But for carousel posts,

Say, hey, Alana told me, keep your captions short. I want it to be 300 to 400 characters. I don't want it to be redundant, to be like, in this carousel, if you swipe, you will find X, Y, and Z. Like, don't bore us. We are perfectly capable of swiping through a carousel if it does the work in piquing our curiosity. I want you to design it mobile first. Right now, 72% of LinkedIn users are on mobile.

I remember every single year I'm like, okay, there are more desktop users than mobile users. And then it was 50-50. And we have seen the shift. And the reason why we've seen such a slow shift is because this is a more professional platform. I use LinkedIn probably just as much on desktop as I use it for my phone too. But for right now, we are mobile first on LinkedIn. Welcome LinkedIn to the mobile first world.

I want imagery to be human first, right? So again, just on your image posts that you do, it's also humans win. Guess what? Machines, humans. We're, you know, smiling humans, people looking at the screen too. It'll stop the scroll and it'll stop the swipe too. Don't do it for humans' sake. Don't use really cheesy stock photography either. So look at what you have, see if it makes sense as it relates to the tips and things you're doing. Think of value first.

I want you to always close, reserve that ninth slide or that sixth slide, whatever it may be, that last slide. I want you to reserve that last slide for a clear call to action. Maybe it's like save this, comment below, DM for the template, like whatever it may be. But that is your call to action. And you can reinforce that in the comments. Don't make that your first comment, by the way. You don't want to be all like desperate of like download this, right? But

I want you to have a last slide that has a clear, compelling call to action. Okay. So now that you're super excited about LinkedIn documents or carousels, I don't want you to go crazy. I want you to do one of these a week. And then if those work, you can start introducing two a week as long as your cadence is four or more. Generally, I would say most brands just do one a week.

And see, right? Sometimes I turn job posts into carousels if I've got lots of jobs and I can have them swipe through on what the requirements are and all of the inside intel and things like that. So it doesn't have to be always educational, it is helpful for teaching, right? So seven tips or this, or these are five characteristics that successful school districts have to do what, right? So

Think about what your audience wants, make it timely, make it relevant, make it super, super valuable. Okay. Now go do some carousels and DM me, talk to me, and tag me because I want to help cheer you on in your carousel success. Second thing, this morning I attended a mastermind with two people that I want to flag for you to also follow on LinkedIn. Richard Vanderbloom, of course.

If you don't know him, I'll put the link in the show notes. He is the person that I respect probably the most when it comes to thinking about the algorithm within LinkedIn and how to show up consistently and grow your reach and engagement intentionally. But I recently met today, and I didn't meet him. I was even off camera because it was 7 a.m. my time, but it was Richard Moore. And he has the art of sales community and he talks about social selling a lot. Richard Moore. So I'll put his link in the show notes too.

I learn from people like them all the time. So micro learning is the way that you get better. And then you use that to create some consistency and strategy. So there's so much to talk about when it comes to social selling. If you don't know what social selling is, just take this as like your first introduction and maybe you'd you take away one thing you can do. But on a high level, social selling is I am on a social platform.

And guess what? My goal in marketing and sales is either to provide marketing qualified leads or sales qualified leads to the sales team. I want to close deals. That's how businesses run, right? But sometimes we forget because we're like, we have to be an influencer or you know, we have to comment all these posts. But to what to what end? So what why? Well, we never want to go in with transactional, let me sell you something. People can smell that a mile away. But I think if

There is a really good way to be curious and to be someone who wants to help figure things out and be valuable and still accomplish your goals of getting leads in the door. I'm just going to share a couple of takeaways, but one takeaway that stood out for me that made sense, but I was like, yeah, okay, is who do you target? And you can do this on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. That is expensive. And if you use it, I really if you buy it, I want to make sure that you use it.

I know a lot of people that buy Nat sales navigator and use it once a quarter. That is not going to help you. You could probably do the same amount of things that you would do once a quarter on your free version. Free version is very, very limited. But if you're not using LinkedIn Navigator, it's I I mean, I'd rather put that in paid ads than dollars, right? So who to target? So a lot of the times we'll go and say, who signs the deal? Maybe it's a C-suite, right? Maybe it's a superintendent.

Maybe it's a CTO. These are the higher level district folks, right? So maybe it's the chief academic officer, whatever. Those people are targeted all the time. We know this. And there's a lot of noise. And sometimes even on LinkedIn, they are there, but they're also slightly hiding because they're getting targeted quite a bit, right? So you can reach out to them. I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how you reach out to them, but just know.

That no matter what you do and how you show up authentically, there's a lot of noise there. So they are less likely to follow up with your requests. And even though they're the one that signs eventually and maybe the ultimate decision maker, there are better ways to reach people in the decision-making ecosystem that have potentially a higher rate of responding. And those are the influencers. So

Maybe there are instructional coaches, curriculum directors, department leads. You will know when you start looking at your ICP, your ideal customer profile of who the people are in your ecosphere of actually making the deal. So those folks, you can reach out to them and say, Hey, how are you doing? You know, and they will have a higher rate of responding and getting that relationship. They can get you in front of the ultimate decision makers. So I just want you to think about sometimes we go default.

To the people that are signing the contract when there's a lot of noise and it's a lot lower of a what I call a conversion rate of them getting back to you. Another takeaway is Richard Vanderbloom has this kind of thing where I think it's very smart is that he says you don't really go for a meeting request or anything else without having three positive signals from the person.

And that really increases your conversion rate. I think his was like at a 90%, like if he follows this, 90% of the people will actually say, yes, let's have a meeting. So they need to demonstrate three different points of positive reinforcement. So maybe the first positive rules are they accept your connection request. By the way, when you send a connection request, I want you to send it in a very personal way. Use the notes area.

And use the notes area and say, hey, really enjoyed your last post, or hey, I see that we went to the same school together, or I really love what you post on LinkedIn. I want to learn from you. Put in something that's personable to them. And I don't want you to send a compliment if if you don't believe it. True. Be authentic and see how you want to connect with them that it's in a personal, non-AI tool slop way.

By the way, my LinkedIn is Ilana D Leone, and D is the letter for my middle name. And so I know anytime AI Slop comes in and they're like, hey, Ilana D, how are you doing? So there's a lot of AI slop out there. Get through the noise by something personable. And a lot of the times they're gonna scan and say, yeah, that's cool that my last post resonated. Or maybe I asked about how ISTI went, because they just posted about it. So

being able to show that you're part of the industry and you're already looking and learning from them is really important. So let's get back to the three positive rules. One, they accept your connection requests. And I just gave you some best practices. They respond positively to your follow-up message. Right. So as soon as you request something and then they say yes, I want you to give them a follow-up message and say, hey, I'm really excited to be connected. And hey, by the way, I have this great resource. All my clients love it.

And I think it'd be really beneficial for you as your district navigates XYZ. Can I send it to you here or do you have an email address I can send it to? And that last part is really, really important is you don't want to just keep it on the DMs. If they say, no, here's an email address, that's so much easier to get a meeting down the road to. So keep it value-driven and then they don't respond.

Follow up five days later. Hey, I saw that we haven't been able to connect yet. Or I emailed a week ago, you might have been busy, but I've got this really great resource that I think will help you. If they ghost you again, there's a time to kind of, you know, move on. But most people, I think Richard Stat was like, he gets that follow up, like 80% of people respond. And they might say, Hey, you know, that resource isn't aligned with what I need, but thank you. Whatever. So let's say they respond positively. That's your second signal.

And then you follow up afterwards and you respond maybe a week later and say, Hey, how'd you find that resource? And if they say, my gosh, it was great. I sent it over to my team. We talked about it, whatever, or it was helpful. That is your third signal. Those are three positive signals. After that, I want you to ask for a meeting. And you can do it as like, hey, I really think that since this resonated, let's have a quick call and see how ways I potentially could help you some more. Let's get 15 minutes on the calendar.

And give them a specific time. Don't drop in your Calendly or your big thing where that they have homework to do those things, right? So have them say, How does Monday at 2 30 work Pacific time? Whatever. Or maybe give them two or three times because they are very busy. But you are also very busy and you want to help them too. So I thought that was really worth sharing that framework. There is so much more to impact on social selling, but

Those two things I hope can help pique your interest. And I might do some workshops on social selling in the future. Okay, so let's jump into the last bit of our show. And this is where I kind of look around and be a creeper and say, hey, did you like was that something that really stopped my scroll and made me think differently about a certain issue within education? So

Today's first post or LinkedIn post goes to my friend Amos. So Amos Fodchuk, he is the president of ALP, which is a consulting firm, a professional learning consulting firm for K-12 districts in the US and Canada. But he shared a graph that kind of made me sad. So Microsoft recently, and I'll put this link in the show notes so you can jump into the conversation and see the post.

But Microsoft, they really fund thing, it's like AI diffusion in the United States report. And it shows that AI adoption is spreading quickly, but unevenly. And we see this across the board. We saw this with one-to-one tech devices. We saw this with internet access. We've saw we keep seeing this. It's a funny world we live in, let's just say. Metropolitan counties.

Averaged 32.9% of AI user share compared with 21.8% in micropolitan counties and just 16.2% in rural counties. So you can see that disparity between almost 33% and 16% of AI usage just in counties. This isn't even just thinking about

schools, but obviously that trickles down. It's an education issue. And that's what Amos really points out too. It's also an economic issue. It's a civic issue. And how can we, as people that are helping schools and districts, try to show up for all schools? And if the access and the usage is is we're seeing significant disparity, that is something we need to know. And we need to start thinking critically about how do we show up for rural counties? And

How do we have conversations with what are the needs for rural education leaders in their districts? So that one was a good one. And let's go to the next post. I may not have time to go to the third post, but I'll put it in the show notes. this one's a good one. It's from Kip Glazer. Kip is going to be on our show. She is an author about AI. I'm excited about talking about her with her on my show about her new book, Lead with AI.

She is a school principal, an awesome human, but she tapped from a school leader perspective. And you should be following school leaders, district leaders, everybody, and learning from them constantly. I don't care if it's on LinkedIn, TikTok, join some Facebook groups, but that is your job. You need to constantly listen and infuse that as it relates to okay, is my positioning really aligned with what they need? What's my messaging like? Does it really resonate with with?

People that are constantly changing what their needs and challenges are and their goals are. So I'm not going to read this whole post. I'll put it in the show notes. But basically she said, I've been told this more than once. And quote, we've never had this issue until you showed up. And she said, the truth is the issue was already there. I was just the first person to see it or address it. And she's talking from a a school leader perspective. She said, This is one of the hardest parts of school leadership.

And people don't talk enough about it to fix it or to not fix it. That is really the question. It's hard because she says that, you know, most districts don't have a clear picture of what they're running, what it costs, what contracts renew, which systems are just like archaic and past end of life, which inherited decisions are drawing from the budget, but have never really been looked at. Right. And she said, I would add leaders face incredible resistance to change.

even when they have a clear picture. And she kind of goes a little bit more into saying it all, it's not that you're inheriting a tech stack, but you're also inheriting a school culture. So go ahead and read that post. It's really insightful because like everything in education, it is incredibly nuanced. All right. I said I'm not going to go here, but I'm going to go here because this one was a really good post. This was a repost from my friend Kyle Brumba.

He is great on LinkedIn. I'll put him in the show notes as well. But he reposted the chief information officer at Peninsula School District, Chris Hagel. And basically what he said is that they were covered. His school district, Peninsula School District, was covered in K-12 dive because they were building their own tools and sunsetting about $250,000 in software subscriptions. Like

They are building their own tools. They are making your tools irrelevant. So, like the short version of what he is trying to say is the future of ed tech is like, is not every product having its own chatbot. And I think that so many of us are saying, how do we integrate AI? And maybe they're slapping some stuff on. Maybe AI has always been in their product, right? But it's not just every product having its own chat bot.

It's and he really thinks, and I this made me pause. He thinks it's district-owned agents that coordinate safely across every system they run. SIS, LMS, HR, special ed, finance, transportation, all of it. So having district-owned agents that coordinate that work and integrate it in a safe way. And right now he said no single vendor assistant can do that. So he is talking directly to ed tech partners in this post.

But he said he wants people to build a product that is safe for agents to use instead. Real APIs, delegated permissions, audit trails, a sandbox, web hooks. That is the work, he said. So, and then he also said, district leaders, we need to be more agent ready. We need to have agent readiness in your RFPs this quarter. Okay, I'm gonna stop there because it that alone was like a huge shift. So I hope this was helpful.

I want you to, you know, DM me, reach out to me on email, let me know what's most helpful in this show so I can s make sure to emphasize that this is all about you. This is all about helping prepare you as a marketer, as a leader, as a salesperson in this wonderful world, what we call ed tech and education. So thank you so much. We will see you next time on all things marketing and education. Take care, everyone.

Thanks again for listening to All Things Marketing and Education. If you like what you heard and want to dive deeper, you can find more episodes at Leone Consulting Group.com backslash podcast. You can also continue the conversation with us on Twitter at Leone Group or on LinkedIn. And don't forget, if you enjoyed today's show, make sure to subscribe to our podcast and Libra review. We're so appreciative of every single subscriber and review we get.

And it helps us reach even more people that need help. So we'll see you next time on All Things Marketing and Education. Take care.