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School's out!
The value of sports retailers selling to schools can hardly be exaggerated. In the first place, PE is part of the national curriculum and as such schools have a legal requirement to provide sports of varying types (see below). They are therefore buyers of a wide range of sports goods and in significant quantities which they need to replace and update on a regular basis. They are also financially secure customers. Equally important, the kids listen to their teachers (believe it or not), and so turn into customers. The purchasing habits formed in one's teens can and do last a lifetime. Being a respected supplier to local schools also engages your business with the local community. It adds authority to what you do; if school sports departments deal with you, you must know what you are about.
Sports retailers don't know much about the PE section of the National Curriculum. In fact the retailers I spoke to, who were very active in the market and, indeed very successful in it, didn't know anything about it. You might well say: so what? Schools, specifically the PE departments, are charged with implementing the overall package that is the Curriculum and they therefore interpret that and purchase for their interpretation. Why should a retailer know diddly-squat about it when the PE team at any given school know it precisely and from my researches do not appear to expect any such knowledge in their suppliers.
However, I suggest that retailers are missing a trick here. I can assure you that schools suppliers in areas such as IT or text books do know the requirements of the curriculum. In some respects it is a key sales tool. It is simply good marketing to understand in advance what is driving any given purchase and to know the parameters that your customers are working with. Consider, too, that if you've done your homework (pun intended) and know about the curriculum, in a competitive situation you will have a distinct edge. It would also mean you are selling rather than merely taking orders from PE teachers, who are, in general, not commercially focused.
Teachers are however nobody's mugs. They are aware of their lack of commercial skills and one way that they compensate is to be active networkers. PE teachers meet their counterparts from other schools at sports matches and you may be assured that one of the things they discuss is suppliers.
So you go onto the relevant bit of the government website - http://curriculum.gca.org.uk and follow the links - and guess what? You're inclined to be deeply confused. ‘Do I actually stock anything that fits with this?' would be a not-unreasonable reaction. Trust me, yes you do, and, trust me further, anything you don't stock you can source and provide.
The various sports are categorised under headings: Invasion (eg football and rugby); Net and Wall (eg racket sports); Striking and Fielding (eg hockey and cricket); Combat (eg karate or judo). Schools are required to provide access to students for each of the sectors and they are free to choose the sports which best suit their budget and facilities as well as reflecting local preferences.
You'll need to adjust your thinking in terms of sales techniques. The LEAs have lists of approved suppliers and clearly you need to be on your local one. That's the easy bit. The bigger change relates to access. Despite any prejudices you may have, most teachers spend most of their time actually teaching. Therefore you have to plan contact calls and visits differently to approaches to other businesses. Finding out when or if people are available for contact can be a major barrier and it's one that often stops people in their tracks when attacking this market. Note, too, PE teachers have commitments after school hours.
What's more, the education world is plain different. For instance one business which sells into the sector has a sales training manual which features no less than six pages of acronyms used specifically in education and you probably don't know any of them. There is also a level of suspicion: some teachers still have an automatic distrust of someone selling to them, not least because they are unused to commercial buying. In fairness that "them and us" attitude is disappearing and most are keen to harness available local expertise.
You won't just be selling your existing retail stock. Cones, hoops and quoits are necessaries at the junior level. Goal posts, nets and corner posts will kick in at senior level. You may not have such items in stock but you can order them for delivery direct to the school in question.
Within your standard stock, focus could well be onto the products which schools use fastest. A case in point would be cricket balls. Here is a first class example of where good sales skills can win the day. If you have established how many of such items get used and when, you can activate re-order.
So selling to schools looks like an uphill task if you are new to it. Don't see it that way. One senior teacher at a sports specialist school told me that 50 - 60% of heads of departments would give a good quality local retailer a hearing. You will also need to establish contact with the head of finance and follow whatever procedures they require.
Retailers who have developed the schools sector have almost always done it, initially at least, via school uniforms. This is an obvious way to bring parents and children into the store on a regular basis; kids have a convenient way of growing out of clothes. Schools are required not to have a sole supplier, so the door is open subject to local pressure.
‘Uniform' covers a lot of ground these days. The blazer, tie and football shirt of old has expanded and a lot of the expansion is in sportswear. Many schools like their pupils to have embroidered kit for all sporting activity and sweaters, sweatshirts and polo shirts carry the coat of arms too.
Crossover between uniform and sportswear and equipment isn't a gimme. Yes it happens, but you have to work at it. There's an important piece of staff training required here. It would be nice to think that the work put into the schools sector would generate a steady flow of referrals. It probably does, but retailers and school teachers alike have no idea how much.
If you're thinking: ‘I don't fancy competing with Tesco or Marks and Spencer on school uniform', who could blame you? But you won't be. The above named monsters and their competitors don't stock school uniform 12 months of the year. On the contrary, they throw big advertising spend at it in the school holidays, especially before the start of the new school year and then it falls off the radar. What's more, you can come close to price matching (where quality matching also applies) without robbing yourself.
This brings us to the geography of selling to schools. If you're looking at school uniforms, it has to be local customers, hence local schools. How far will parents travel for a blazer? So a local focus applies here. With equipment, however, it can be much wider. Certainly a county is a potential business area. There is no reason to limit yourself geographically if you aim to develop this business sector. How do you imagine the big boys got big?
