A Course to the Top

And the process has gotten more complicated in recent years, says Vander Zanden. “Twenty five years ago, a district tended to buy everything. Then it moved to site-based purchasing. Then in the last 10 years, to classroom purchasing,” he notes.

To capture this market and meet the needs of all the different types of buyers, School Specialty developed a “top-down, bottom-up” approach to sales and marketing. “We come at it two ways because, in the education marketplace today, the decision about what to purchase — the control of the spending dollars — is really divided between those two segments depending on what kind of products you’re talking about.”