March 21, 2010 « Ten "No Consultant" Actions to Increase Enrollments »
This Executive Briefing was prepared exclusively for senior decision-makers. The perspective taken in this Briefing assumes the reader’s progressive organizational experience leading to a senior position in a college or university setting.
Most readers are aware of our Executive Retreats and other forms of hands-on guidance in which we help leaders adapt enrollment best practice to their institution's mission, culture, and resources. Unfortunately, there are 850 adult-centered and professional programs that want to increase their enrollments, and InterEd is a boutique shop that can accept only a small number of engagements.
This Executive Briefing identifies ten things adult-centered and professional programs can do for themselves to increase and protectively diversify their enrollments.
While my recommendation is to evaluate your potential to accomplish unfinished do-it-yourself (DIY) business, your second option is to hire a firm to help you refine or take over portions of your enrollment system. Having worked in this arena for 25 years, we have seen countless enrollment consultancies come and go. It is important that you choose carefully, not only with respect to the return on your investment, but with respect to the cultural fit between the proposed solution and your institution. If you have already exhausted your DIY options, I can provide you with a list of considerations related to hiring a consulting firm.
You benefit twice when you pursue options for self-improvement before seeking outside assistance. First, small changes will increase enrollments. Second, we are better able to assist programs that have worked through self-improvement options before calling us.
Here are ten things you can do, tomorrow if you wish, to improve and diversify your enrollments.
Tip #1: Understand How You Present Yourself to the Market
Few executives possess an accurate and adequate grasp of how their institutions present themselves to prospective students. You need this perspective. You can hire us or someone else to conduct a Shopping/Front-end Analysis and provide you with a detailed report of opportunities for improvement. You can also make it a DIY project. We will provide guidance on how to complete this analysis to interested people. (There is no fee for this guidance but we will require that you agree to report your findings so we can tabulate and share results anonymously in future Executive Briefings.)
It is essential that you understand how prospective students make their way to your "door," how they initiate contact, and what they experience from that point forward.
More often than not, we find that that the institution's front-end is actively driving students away from enrolling. Merely removing the negative drivers will increase enrollments, even if you add no positive drivers.
Warning: it may be difficult to remove the negative drivers. Some of your institutional functions have insinuated themselves in the enrollment process as "evidence" of their importance but with no empirically demonstrable benefit.
Tip #2: Drive to the Call
Your marketing collateral – whether internet, website, billboard, print, radio, or television – should all drive the prospective student to initiate a phone call, submit an inquiry form, or send an email. You want prospective students talking to your enrollment counselors. Of course, those inbound contacts should be tagged so that you can calculate cost per lead by source.
Tip #3: Segregate the Website Enrollment Function
Most websites provide too much information . . . way too much. Within one click, prospective students should be taken to an area focused exclusively on enrollment. Achieving this goal generally means that the website must be designed by a website marketing specialist. It should never be designed by a faculty committee; if necessary, faculty can direct their attention to the post-matriculation side of the website.
Tip #4: KISS the Website
When the prospective student gets to the enrollment section of the website, the information presented should be clear, accurate, focused on initial issues, and (the hard part) sparse. The website should not be a self-service kiosk or an online sales tool. Focus on the true objective of your marketing collateral: initiating a conversation between the prospective student and one of your trained enrollment counselors. Your website's structure and the information it provides must serve this goal.
Tip #5: Optimize Lead Generation Forms
Some website inquiry forms ask too much. Some require too little. Either can reduce your conversion rates. We suggest that you ask for name (first and last), phone (at least one, designating whether work or private), program of interest (make it an easy pick list), and email address (include a checkbox to allow indicating preferred method of contact). You might also ask for preference in online, blended or on-ground delivery. Stop there!
Whatever you do, do not embed stupidity in the inquiry form or the management of the inquiry. You might be surprised at the number of institutions that do.
Example: The prospective student's lead generation form tells you she is interested in an online MBA. Your enrollment team's initial contact then asks her which campus she wants to attend and when she graduated from high school. The default perspective should be to treat prospective students as intelligent consumers (almost all of them are) and manage the occasional downside exceptions along the way.
Tip #6: Respond to Inquiries Quickly
When prospective students express interest in your program, they are considering or will consider several of your competitors. You should assume that at least one of these competitors will make a serious effort to contact the prospective student in a matter of hours. They will keep trying until they succeed.
If you are attempting a DIY project in this area but are operating with a primitive Client Relationship Management (CRM) system guided by fuzzy, incorrect or non-existent business rules and tracking metrics, you will be limited to socializing a simple goal of responding the same day if at all possible. First try the telephone. If you do not connect, leave a voice message that you will be sending an email. Responding quickly is not a complicated process, but it does require clear objectives, tracking, and adherence to standards. InterEd can provide guidance to interested parties.
Tip #7: Mail Nothing, Email Everything
Our clients are often surprised when one of the first things we do is eliminate $60,000 from their printing budget. Most initial inquires should progress to a substantive telephone or email exchange before delivering a significant amount of collateral. When collateral is delivered, it should be via email. (You can print the collateral and mail it to the 0.9% of otherwise eligible prospective students who cannot access material this way but I would suggest assessing ability to benefit before you go that far.) Among your managers may be those who insist that printed material must be mailed. They are not correct. Most demands for USPS service are an artifact of the way the options have been presented to the prospective students.
Tip #8: Focus on Building Relationships
A $50K degree is a relationship sale and not a transactional purchase. The ideal sales process progresses incrementally at a rate neither faster nor slower than required to identify prospective students' goals, concerns, and objections, address and accommodate the information the student presents, and build a helpful and trusting relationship between the prospective student and the enrollment counselor.
The enrollment counselor should be advancing, slowing, or terminating the relationship based on his understanding of the student's ability to benefit, unique needs, and problems and objections that must be addressed before the enrollment is allowed to close. This is good sales.
There is one more reason to invest in relationship sales. The drop rate for programs that permit the sale to progress largely or wholly online or otherwise without benefit of a strong relationship is substantially higher than for programs that require the development of a relationship, even if they slow the sales process while the relationship develops.
Caveat: Relationship sales is difficult, sometimes impossible, to develop and sustain in the absence of the right business rules operating in the right management environment using the right metrics and performance standards, all managed by an adequate CRM system.
It is not my intention to push you toward a consultancy. I want to inform you that you may encounter outsize difficulties in this important facet of your enrollment process.
Tip #9: Don't Abuse Prospective Students
I would caution against criticizing the for-profits before examining your institution's sales practices. Even though universities are generally on record in support of intellectual honesty, the self-awareness of some institutions is so low that they deny that they "sell" and prohibit the word "sales" in their management of sales issues. These self-deceptions restrict their ability to manage sales processes effectively.
A few for-profit universities and quite a few independent universities practice good sales. I am not aware of a public university that does.
I understand the kinds of sales-related excesses practiced by some for-profits. A few of them are deplorable and we make every effort to expose them. However, I see comparable excesses practiced by the slovenly public and many of the independent colleges. These schools also abuse prospective students, albeit in different ways: by ignoring repeated requests for real assistance, by forcing prospective students to attend meetings with faculty, by taking four or six weeks (or more) to complete a transfer credit evaluation, and by forcing students to run back and forth across campuses to secure signatures for processes that could have been managed better online or by the university's staff.
Recommendation: required physical meetings with instructors have no place in the critical path of enrollment/admissions. Faculty should train the enrollment counselors on an ongoing basis, making them knowledgeable about the degrees they represent. Managers should establish and monitor mechanisms to ensure that enrollment counselors' actions are faithful to academic considerations. On those occasions when the student needs to speak with a member of the faculty to resolve a subtle or complex question, the enrollment counselor should manage the process. For faculty that insist on being in the critical path, their on-time and on-quality performance should be monitored and made part of their performance evaluations.
Tip #10: Build Modular, Topic-oriented Collateral
Avoid sending catalogs, even via email. Instead, send individualized collateral addressing the prospective student's specific goals, concerns, objections, or questions. (You will know these if you are building a relationship.) A prospective student interested in your Criminal Justice program but who is concerned about time-to-degree, the vitality of online learning, and military tuition subvention should receive four separate short documents. One document will provide an exciting but accurate overview of the program that reinforces what the enrollment counselor discussed on the telephone. The other three documents will reinforce and document the solutions to the student's specific concerns presented by the enrollment counselor.
You Can Do These Things
Some of these ten tips can be implemented easily; others represent a substantial investment of time and carefully managed attention. You can implement each of them and increase enrollments enough to make it worth the effort. Additionally, it will feel better and be internally rewarding to develop more effective and smoothly functioning processes.
More Tips
These ten tips are presented more-or-less in a logico-temporal sequence, although the typical process is far from linear. We are interested in how your program has improved enrollment practices. Please share your experiences in the comments. I will present another ten tips if there is interest.
Robert W. Tucker is President and CEO of InterEd, Inc.
He can be reached through this forum.
The expression of other views by leaders in higher education is welcomed.
Reader Comments (2)
Thank you. These are helpful suggestions. The instructor part of #9 is not likely to work here. They want to be in the middle of things but have no tolerance for the drudgery of advising. We end up running them down for a signature.
Thank you for these excellent suggestions. I fear that we are chasing our students away as you suggest. We spend a lot of money on marketing then throw it away when a student tries to have a decent conversation with us. Office clerks answer the phone and, if they don't forget, will send you a catalog. Most of us are "too busy" to answer the phone or return a call. Our paychecks seem to come from some mysterious place that has nothing to do with students. Maybe we're an exception though.