Branching Minds excels as opportunity pipeline grows 700%

Branching Minds is a K-12 education technology company, established in 2014, that leverages the sciences and technology of learning to help districts personalize learning through enhancements to their Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) and Response to Intervention (RTI) practices. 

CEO and Co-Founder Maya Gat founded the company after her experience as a classroom teacher left her searching for a way to meet the needs of all of her students. Through Branching Minds, educators are able to personalize learning for every student to ensure success is attainable while also gaining insight into delivering personalized education. 

In its early stages, Branching Minds focused on supporting school districts through building impactful relationships. These methods ranged from putting the product in front of potential customers at educational conferences and brief email campaigns. Both tactics garnered success, but lacked scalability.

Those strategies alone eventually saw diminished returns, so the team began looking for new ways to build relationships with school districts. 

“You can only do so many conferences a year,” COO and Co-Founder David Magier says. “You can only send so many emails. It’s also pretty expensive to do both. We wanted to explore new channels of outreach to connect with district leaders, customers and stakeholders and one of those channels was phone outreach.”

“We found when selling to school districts that once we had a relationship and connection established, it was very easy for us to win the partnership,” Gat says. “But being able to get our foot in the door and build the relationships from the bottom was where we really struggled.”

They began seeking out a partnership that could help bolster their prospecting efforts by making the initial touch and familiarizing potential customers with Branching Minds — and doing at a scale they didn’t have the resources to do on their own.

Branching Minds received multiple recommendations to work with FuelK12. 

“(FuelK12) helped us understand how the model works and walked us through every step of it,” Gat says. “It felt extremely exciting and definitely worth a try.”

Magier says he was enticed by the experience and expertise FuelK12 has in the education field while also seeing how the partnership could create a consistent pipeline for the sales team to work with. 

“The idea of creating this regular flow of leads that we could count on every month was really attractive and interesting to us,” Magier says.

Through its partnership with FuelK12, Branching Minds saw its pipeline grow exponentially.

“We went from two to three qualified leads a month to 15-20 while working with FuelK12,” Magier says. “I think what’s been more valuable is the broader consulting and the fact that they really see themselves as part of our team and have really embedded their team into ours to really get to know us as a company.”

Beyond the results, Branching Minds leveraged FuelK12 as consultative partner that prepared the company to expand its sales team and ultimately build an internal SDR organization, even hiring directly from FuelK12. Their onboarding was seamless and accelerated due to their experience selling the product and FuelK12’s supervision.

“It has been a really beautiful symbiotic relationship,” Gat says. “It’s like a family.”

Challenges

• Struggled to build relationships with school districts from the ground up. 
• Relied on inconsistent methods of outreach through sporadically scheduled education conferences. 
• Desired a larger, more effective outreach plan but were unable to scale upward. 

Results

• Saw its pipeline grow 700% per month. 
• Gained insight into Fuel K12 process with ability to implement in their own setting. 
• Hired sales representatives directly from FuelK12, reducing time to full productivity.