How reversing the order of a B2B2C motion turned cold institutional outreach into signed tie-ups at Uniquest
Company
Uniquest (ed-tech)
Role
Co-founder
Uniquest sold skill-development programmes to educational institutions. The buyer was the institution — directors, deans, principals. The user was the student. Those are different people with different incentives, and that gap turned out to be the whole problem.
I ran institutional outreach directly. Over the life of the effort we approached roughly 40–50 institutions.
The default motion was the obvious one: pitch the institution on the programme, describe the benefit to their students, ask for a tie-up.
It converted poorly. Sitting in those conversations, the objection underneath the polite ones was consistent — an institutional decision-maker has no reliable way to know whether their students actually want what you’re selling. We were asking them to take a risk on our claim about their own students. From their side, that’s an unfunded bet on a stranger’s assertion.
The people I was pitching weren’t sceptical of the programme. They were sceptical of the demand.
So I inverted the sequence: generate demonstrable demand from the users first, then approach the buyer carrying that demand as evidence.
Concretely, we ran free workshops for students at or around target institutions. The workshops were genuinely useful on their own terms — that mattered, because a bait exercise wouldn’t have produced honest signal — and at the end we distributed physical interest forms. Students indicated whether they wanted the full programme. We collected and counted the hard copies.
Across those workshops, roughly 70–75% of attending students returned affirmative interest in the programmes.
That number was never the pitch by itself. Its function was to change what I was asking the institution to believe. Instead of “your students would benefit from this,” the conversation became “here is what your students told us, on paper, after sitting through a session.” The institution was no longer making a bet on my claim. They were responding to their own students’ stated interest.
4–5 institutions signed tie-ups out of the 40–50 approached — roughly a 1-in-10 close rate on institutional outreach that had been converting far worse before we led with demand data.
Then COVID lockdowns closed campuses. The motion depended on physically running workshops with students in a room, and there was no version of that under lockdown. Outreach and further tie-ups stopped there.
I want to be precise about that ending: the approach didn’t fail — the channel it depended on became unavailable. We had validated the motion and were scaling it when it was cut off. I can’t claim it would have continued converting at the same rate at larger scale, because we never got to find out.
What transferred: in any B2B2C or multi-stakeholder sale, the fastest way past a buyer’s scepticism is usually not a better argument — it’s evidence generated from the people they actually answer to. Find the cheapest honest way to manufacture that evidence before you ask for the meeting. I still reach for that instinct now.