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A Tool To Stay In Control During Busy Times

January 22nd, 2010

As we enter is the busiest part of the recruiting cycle, it’s easy for members of the admissions staff to get swept up by so many activities and tasks that they lose sight of anything beyond what they are supposed to do today. Or right now!

Stress mounts. Productivity can suffer. Activity can be confused with accomplishment. Creativity and thoughtful planning can be jeopardized at a point in the recruiting cycle when it is most needed.

Regardless of how busy you get, time must be set aside on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis to assess where we are, where we are going, and how best we can get there.

Mind map example

A few years ago, I found a wonderful way to plan and be creative when times are busiest. It’s called mind mapping.

It’s a process that enables you to diagram your thoughts, ideas and plans very easily and connect all of those elements in a way that helps you visualize how all things are connected toward reaching a common goal. You can mind map something as finite as a campus event or as expansive as your year-long enrollment management plan.

Creating a mind map is easy. Anyone can do it. Everyone should know how. It’s a tool that enhances productivity and creativity. I cannot think of anyone in an admissions office who would not benefit from it. Mind mapping can help an admissions processing clerk contribute new ideas for minimizing incomplete applications. It can aid admissions counselors in honing strategies and tactics for managing their territories. It can help campus event organizers plan successful events down to do very last detail.

We have clients that use mind mapping as a tool to aid all department members in creating plans and sharing them with others. By sharing, everyone can see and understand the goals, strategies and tactics of co-workers, and see how they connect to them directly or indirectly. This promotes collaboration, understanding, sharing of ideas and a host of benefits that enhance teamwork.

You can draw a mind map on a cocktail napkin or use a computer program to draw one. There are a number of free programs available for creating mind maps. I recommend an open source program called FreeMind. The program (available for all operating systems) not only enables you to easily draw a mind map diagram, it also allows you to transform and export the map into a text-based document for editing in Microsoft Word or similar applications.

With as much as you have going on right now, there is no way that I would introduce a new tool or task that didn’t promise as much as the process of mind mapping promises to enhance productivity and effectiveness.

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Posted in Counselor Training, Organizational development

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Get More Production From Your Admissions Office

December 2nd, 2009

When you think about how much revenue a college generates annually and the source of that revenue, the trail typically ends in the office of admissions. For state supported colleges, the percentage of total revenue generated through tuition may be well over 60%. For privates, it’s often 80% or more.iStock_000009277706XSmall

When I suggest that the trail of this revenue ends in the admissions office, I’m referring to the department that employs and manages the people who are responsible for generating interest among prospective students, managing the “sales” process and “closing the sale”. The aim, of course, is to match the student’s needs and preferences with the attributes of the institution: to best serve the student’s educational aspirations and personal growth. Fortunately for students, they may choose among many fine institutions that are fully capable of doing just that.

In truth, academic sales and marketing is similar to that of the B2B (business to business) and B2C (business to consumer) marketplaces. That is, generate interest, prove that the institution is a good fit, and manage the communication and human interaction process toward a successful conclusion (enrollment).

Here’s the $64,000 question: how much does an institution invest in the people and processes that are central to generating the vast majority of the revenue collected by the college? I’m not referring to things like direct mail and website development. I’m referring to people and processes –  the hiring of  the admissions team, building a motivating culture, engaging in a comprehensive training program,  implementing effective sales management, providing CRM software designed to enable sales, and enhancing communication between people and departments.

The answer? Not nearly enough. And why not, when the potential return on investment is so large and immediate?

Every institution can find its own reasons why they aren’t investing in these areas. We’ll often explore those reasons as part of our consulting engagements with clients. The most common barrier is perceived cost. But that barrier is easily removed – at little cost – with a change in perspective.

Here’s something that any institution can begin doing tomorrow that promises improved functioning and production out of the admissions department: identify the strengths of each and every member of the department, fully align their tasks with those strengths, and lead them with an understanding of how someone with their strengths is most productive.

While this may sound simple in concept, it requires a radical change in thinking on the part of many organizations. All too often, organizations work more on trying to fix a department member’s weaknesses than maximizing their strengths.

strengthsfinderbook2I highly recommend two books from Gallup Press that define this philosophy and enable you to take immediate action. The books, Strengths Finder 2.0 and the companion title, Strengths-Based Leadership give you immediate access to assessing the strengths of each member of the admissions team and, what’s more, provide direction in managing each member of the team based on their individual strengths.

I suggest purchasing the Strengths Finder 2.0 book for every member StrengthsBasedLeadershipof the team because each book contains a unique code that provides access to an online assessment that isolates and reports their top five strengths.

When we work with enrollment management departments as a part of our consulting engagements, we use a similar model to enhance productivity. You would be amazed at the results achieved when people are allowed to discover and play to their strong suits.

Likewise, in our Interactive Training Workshops for admissions offices, we see team members revitalized by the commitment that their leadership has made by investing in their future with professional training.

We see it work every day: hire the right people, put them in roles that let their strengths shine through, give them the proper tools, and structure their compensation to reflect the value they bring in terms of revenue generation and populating the institution with students who will be successful and committed to the institution long after graduation.

Bob Longmire is the President and CEO of Longmire and Company and has been helping colleges and universities across the country maximize their yield for over 20 years.

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Posted in Counselor Training, Organizational development, Worthwhile Reading

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Innings, Quarters, Periods, Weeks….

November 17th, 2009

Baseball has innings.iStock_000002290367XSmall

Basketball has periods.

Football has quarters.

Admissions has weeks.

No matter what game you are in, measuring efforts in a particular time frame is vital to delivering a successful outcome.  Runs, hits and errors are measured each inning on the diamond.  Yards, sacks and turnovers are totaled each quarter on the gridiron.  Rebounds, points and assists are tracked each period on the court.  In the Admissions game, weekly milestones are marked with inquiries, applications and admits.

So how is the game going for you? Assuming you started  rolling admissions September 1, you are approaching  the end of the first quarter.    Where are those inquiries, campus visits and applications in reaching your first-year enrollment goals? What percentage of those needed by the start of the Fall 2010 classes do you have now?

Many experts in the admission’s field estimate that by Week 14 (roughly December 1) you should have received 81% of  your total inquiries, documented  49% of your campus visits and 35% of your  application pool should be completed.

Is your admissions team on a winning streak or is there a clubhouse wide slump occurring?  How many students will be left on base?  How many students will get intercepted?  How many students will there be on campus for the tip-off? If you aren’t tracking where you know you should be ask yourself this:  is it a coaching problem or a technique issue?

Staff training might be an answer.  It has been for college admission offices across the country who have implemented programs such as the Interactive Training Workshop that Longmire and Company offers.  Or, perhaps a better scouting report on your prospects is the key.  Literally hundreds of thousands of  students have told us that it was the school that best “understood” them as an individual that topped their list.

Read here http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/02momu/ about one young person’s “Aha moment” while visiting a campus and imagine how powerful it would be to know this in advance of your recruitment discussion with her. Longmire and Company’s Yield Enhancement Survey (YES) provides inside information on your prospects.  With the right tools, admissions teams are now realizing a home field advantage throughout the season and well into the playoffs.

If your weekly box score is not where it should be let Longmire and Company enrollment solutions  (www.longmire-co.com) team with you to  bring more victories to your win column before the 7th inning stretch, the two minute warning and the 24 second clock expires.

Mark Thompson is an Enrollment Strategist with Longmire and Company.  Mark brings his clients the benefit of over 20 years of “in-the-trenches” experience in enrollment with public, private and proprietary colleges and universities.

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Posted in Behavior, Closing the Sale, Conversion and Yield, Counselor Training

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How To Make Calls More Productive

September 28th, 2009

StudentPhoneCallTalk to an admissions counselor about some of their phone calls to prospective students and you might see some eyeballs rolling back into heads. Talk to some prospective students about some of the phone calls they get from admissions counselors and you might see some eyeballs rolling back into heads. Sound like a disconnect between students and counselors when talking by phone? You bet. It happens all the time. There is a fix, though – something that can make the conversation richer and more helpful for both the student and counselor.

The key lies in an interruption of the pattern that is commonly practiced by counselors and expected by students.

A little foundation: in a recent co-sponsored study we conducted for participating colleges about communicating with prospective students we asked students to tell us which methods they find most and least helpful in how colleges communicate with them. That survey question, by the way, was open-ended to elicit the qualitative insight that proves so valuable.

So, what did we find?

We recorded a large number of students who said telephone calls from admissions counselors were among the “most helpful” methods that colleges use to communicate with them. We recorded an equal number who said it was among the “least helpful” methods. What gives? You could speculate that there are simply some students who prefer phone calls and others who don’t. A review of the qualitative data suggests something different.

Here is a sampling of responses from students who say phone calls are among the LEAST helpful methods:

“I can’t remember everything they tell me.”
“It gets overwhelming.”
“I can’t comprehend everything they say about their college.”
“Unless I ask for more information, the call gets really boring.”

Here is a sampling of responses from students who say phone calls are among the MOST helpful methods:

“I like telephone calls b/c you can ask questions.”
“I can get out what I need and ask questions.”
“Phone calls allow me to ask my own questions and make the experience more personalized.”
“Personal calls because you can ask questions.”

You can see the difference. For the bad calls, the information flow is clearly college-to-student. So many admissions counselors have been conditioned – whether through explicit training or by some self-perception – that they should communicate ALL of the features and benefits of the institution. For the good calls, on the other hand, the flow is clearly student-to-college. Students ask questions. And they ask questions. And they ask more questions. Asking questions means they are intellectually and emotionally involved in the conversation. That level of involvement gives you a great chance of building a bond that will yield enrollment.

When Longmire and Company visits campuses to conduct Interactive Training Workshops for counselors, we focus on the tools and techniques that counselors must use to put students in a frame of mind to open up and ask questions. This includes proper use of close-end and open-end questioning, as well as asking open-minded questions that spark dialogue from otherwise non-verbal prospects.

I can guarantee one thing. A prospective student will engage, comprehend and remember any conversation that hits them at an emotional level. That’s the goal. Every conversation should be measured on that basis.

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Posted in Counselor Training