It’s tempting for MSPs to write off event sponsorship in education as a waste of money. You sponsor an event, hand out flyers, follow up with an email, and hear nothing back.

Rick Cowell says you’re judging it on the wrong timescale.

Rick spent 20 years as a school network manager, and he founded the Association of Network Managers in Education (ANME) in 2014. When I talked to him about this experience, he laid out a sales philosophy built on being remembered at the right moment, instead of chasing an immediate sale.

The planting seeds philosophy

ANME brings companies into its regional meetings for two reasons, to cover event costs and to put vendors in front of the network managers who might need them one day. Rick says this isn’t about generating leads on the spot. He has a name for this sales strategy.

It’s a term I use quite a lot, planting seeds.

The logic cuts against how most MSP marketing gets built. A network manager sitting in an ANME meeting today might have no budget, no urgent problems, or no plan to change suppliers. But at some point, when something does come up, Rick’s bet is that they’ll think back to that meeting.

It’s when they say, yeah, we’re looking at this, I saw that company at an ANME meeting, let’s contact them. That’s what it’s all about.

You don’t get an immediate conversion, and you can’t control the timing. Still, entering the prospect’s top of mind at the right moment will eventually lead you there.

They could move jobs tomorrow and then the new school might need the same sort of things.

For an MSP, that reframes what a good sponsorship looks like. No sign-ups on the day of the event don’t necessarily mean failure. It might just be seeds that haven’t come up yet, Rick told me.

It’s not about an immediate thing. I understand the importance of ROI, but you never know what people are going to look at in the future.

Why education sales move slowly

Being patient with this process is a must. It’s how things with school IT support work. School network managers attending ANME meetings are not there to buy.

People meet and talk and rant about the latest government initiatives and budget restraints.

For an MSP, that’s an opportunity to look into the challenges the customer faces. The next step is to build relationships, trust, and awareness regarding the solution you have to offer. It’s time to plant the seeds, as Rick says.

This isn’t new. Local education authorities used to run this kind of relationship-building for schools directly, until academisation broke the model up school by school and the meetings stopped.

This story made me see how trust between vendors and schools was never designed to move fast. It ran on termly meetings and familiar faces seen again and again over years, instead of one-off pitches.

The ANME’s activities follow the same pattern. Things keep changing, you need to be there, and you need to be patient. So, they kept organizing events and members kept coming.

We’ve done 140 odd meetings now. We’re doing them in eight regions and three times a year.

There’s over 2,000 current members… we’ve had a lot more than that over the years because we’ve had a lot that have retired or left the wonderful world of education.

That last point is worth sitting with. Turnover in education is driven by career moves and retirements. So, the person you meet today might end up making buying decisions at a completely different school years from now. A transactional sales approach can’t capture that. Showing up year after year at the same events can.

What this means for your MSP

The planting seeds sales philosophy goes against the instinct to chase a quick win.

You shouldn’t judge a sponsorship by the leads you walk away with that same day. Rick’s experience shows most of the value comes up later, sometimes at a school you’ve never heard of.

ANME’s credibility comes from 140 meetings across eight regions, not a single well-funded push. So, show up more than once. Treat visibility and building relationships as the goal rather than conversion. Aim to be the name a network manager remembers when they’ll be ready to buy.

Education buying cycles are long because the sector’s own structures, from local authority consolidation to staff turnover, make them long.

If you build your education strategy around quarterly wins, you’ll likely read a quiet room as failure and give up before it’s time. If you plant seeds and keep showing up, you’re playing the sales cycle that actually exists in this sector.

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