Before FuelK12, Branching Minds struggled to build relationships with school district buyers.

Achieving awareness and creating demand at scale

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.

Finding the right partner

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.

Growth in numbers (and relationships)

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

“We went from a couple of qualified leads a month to 15 or more 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.