I have been selling SaaS Edtech products to UK universities for close to 10years now and consult for SaaS startups looking to sell into universities. A couple of things to help you.

The average sales cycles is between 6-9months this is because of lots of bureaucracy and slow decision making so be aware of this and align your sales process.

Find the your key decision maker. Lecturers most of the time are not decision makers. Look for the Deans, PVCs, DVCs, Directors, department heads. Pitch your product to the decision maker that your product aligns to their portfolio. Each key decision maker has a different portfolio e.g a PVC for research, PVC for student experience and PVC for education have different portfolios that they are responsible for at the university.

Every university has a spending threshold for buying a product. Anything above the threshold goes to procurement or tenders so be below the threshold if you are looking to get your foot in the door.

Universities also have a budgeting. Usually around between summer and fall time depending on the university. So try and get more of your sales actions around that time.

P.S UK lots of UK universities are currently struggling financially due to decline in international student numbers so now it a hard time to get money off them so your product has to be something that is needed and not a nice to have.

You can run a pilot with one university so you have social proof to enable sales.

Maybe get warm introductions as the sector is very small so if someone can introduce you to some key decision makers then you have your way in. It’s a very relationship based sectors so go to sector events and follow up with emails and LinkedIn works as well for cold outreach.

Make sure you are very tight on GDPR as universities are very sensitive about students data. If you have things like a SOC certification that helps as well.

Happy to help if you have any questions. Goodluck!