Breaking into American higher education is not just about having a great edtech product. It is about understanding a market that operates by its own rules — rules that are rarely written down anywhere and almost never explained to outsiders.
In the first episode of the Insight Lab, I sat down with Deirdre, Associate Provost and Dean of the School of Professional Studies and Innovation at Moravian University. With 25 years of experience buying, implementing, and evaluating EdTech across multiple institutions — including VP roles at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Centenary University — she has seen every approach vendors take to win her business. And most of them get it wrong.
What follows is what she told me about the things EdTech companies consistently misunderstand about the American higher ed market — and what to do instead.
1. If Your Prospect Mentions the Word “Grant” — This is What You Need to Know
At some point in your outreach to American universities, a prospect will tell you they are applying for a grant and will follow up once it comes through. For many EdTech vendors, this feels like a promising signal. It is — but only if you know how to read it correctly.
The most important thing to understand is that there is a significant difference between a grant that has already been secured and one that is still being applied for.
If the institution has already secured the grant and your product falls within its scope, the path to purchase can move relatively smoothly. The money exists, it has been allocated for a specific purpose, and a vendor who fits that purpose can move through procurement with more speed than a standard budget cycle would allow.
If the institution is still applying for the grant, however, you are dealing with a very different situation. The timeline becomes unpredictable. The grant may not be awarded. The scope of what it covers may shift. And in the meantime, your sales cycle is essentially on pause waiting for an outcome that is entirely outside your control and theirs.
Deirdre's advice was clear: if a prospect tells you they are applying for a grant, you can stay engaged, but be prepared to have a lot of patience. You shouldn’t count it as a pipeline commitment until the grant is confirmed. The worst thing you can do is build your forecasts around grant-dependent deals that may never close.
The best thing you can do is understand what the grant is for, ensure your product is a genuine fit for its stated purpose, and make it easy for the administrator to position your product within the grant application itself. That is where you can actually add value during the waiting period. And in the meantime, score that lead appropriately so as not to bleed resources on a prospect with an unsecured grant.
2. Your Early Customers Are Your Most Valuable Strategic Asset — Price Accordingly
One of the most candid moments in our conversation came when Deirdre described her relationship with a small AI curriculum development startup that gave her some of their most competitive pricing when she was one of their earliest customers. And because the price point was so affordable, she felt it was low risk — low enough that she moved forward without the established credibility she would normally require, and without speaking to an existing customer first, which she typically does before committing to any significant purchase.
She has been a loyal customer ever since. More than that — she helped them build out their product. She gave them feedback, flagged gaps, and contributed to making the tool better for every institution that came after her. That is not just retention. That is a co-development relationship that money cannot buy.
This is something Israeli EdTech companies entering the U.S. market cannot afford to overlook. Early customers are not just revenue. They are proof points, references, product development partners, and — if you treat them right — the people who will tell the next ten buyers to call you.
But here is the part that gets lost in the conversation about early-customer pricing strategy, and it is arguably the most important part: when your earliest customers help you build a better product, you are not just earning their loyalty. You are reducing churn for every customer who comes after them.
Churn is the silent killer of EdTech growth. A product that does not work well in a real institutional environment — with real LMS integrations, real faculty resistance, real IT constraints — will lose customers. And in a market where customer acquisition is expensive and sales cycles are long, losing customers is not just a retention problem. It is a growth problem. High churn puts a ceiling on everything. It caps your ARR, undermines your fundraising story, and — in a market as interconnected as higher ed — damages your reputation at exactly the moment you are trying to build it.
Early customers who co-develop with you remove that ceiling. Their feedback surfaces the gaps before those gaps become the reason the next ten customers leave. Their institutional context — the specific ways a university actually uses your product day to day — makes your product more robust, more integrated, and more defensible in the market. Lower churn means higher retention. Higher retention means compounding growth. Compounding growth means you have a business, not just a product.
The strategic calculus, when you lay it out this way, is not really that complicated. A reduced price point for your first five or ten U.S. customers costs you margin in the short term. In return you get live product feedback in a real institutional environment, a reference you can point every future prospect to, a co-developer who is invested in your success, and a relationship with someone whose professional network reaches across the entire higher ed community.
Higher ed is a small world. Deirdre said it plainly: "Everyone knows each other." The administrator who loves you will tell her colleagues. The one who feels she overpaid for an unproven product will tell them something very different.
Consider pricing your early customers for the relationship, not the transaction. The long-term wins will be worth it.
3. Cold Outreach Is a Long Shot. Conferences Are Where She Actually Buys
If you are investing heavily in cold email campaigns targeting American university administrators, here is something you need to hear.
"I get so many emails all the time from vendors asking me to buy their products or to look at the products or to set up a phone call," Deirdre told me. "And honestly, typically, it's just delete, delete, delete."
The reason is not that she is unreachable. It is that most cold outreach misses the most basic requirement — relevance. "They're not showing me anything that relates to my need," she said. "It's almost like they've done no research on me and my need."
This does not mean cold outreach can never work, and it certainly doesn’t mean you should stop doing it. It means the bar is significantly higher than most vendors realize. Generic emails referencing her title but not her actual pain points go straight to the trash. Outreach that demonstrates specific knowledge of her institution, her programs, and her challenges has a fighting chance.
But where Deirdre actually discovers and buys EdTech is at conferences. "I've had the most success at conferences where an EdTech company has a table and I can actually look at the product and spend time talking to the person," she said. "To me, that has always been my most successful endeavors and engagements with EdTech companies."
For Israeli EdTech companies entering the U.S. market, this is a strategic priority worth budgeting for. The ASU GSV Summit — held annually and considered the premier EdTech conference in the country — is the room where many of these decisions get made. Showing up with a clear product story, a demo-ready setup, and people who actually understand higher education is how you get in front of buyers like Deirdre and show them what your product is truly capable of.
The Real Takeaway
Breaking into the American higher education market is genuinely hard. But a lot of the difficulty is self-inflicted — the result of not understanding who your buyer actually is, how they think, and what they need from you at every stage of the relationship.
The companies that win in this market are not necessarily the ones with the best product. They are the ones who show up with clarity, earn trust early through customized free trials, engage salespeople who actually understand higher ed, and support their customers long after the contract is signed.
If you manage to nail these six items, you will be that much closer to breaking into and expanding in the US market.
Continue Exploring the Insight Lab
Learn directly from educational leaders and decision-makers across K-12 and higher education to understand the real challenges, priorities, purchasing behaviors, and adoption realities that drive — and derail — EdTech buying decisions in American institutions.
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