10%, 50%, 100%? How productive is your admissions team?

Chris (00:00):
You guys, Hey, this is Rob Thatcher. So since founding sales come in 2008, Rob and his team has designed in-person group one-on-one and ongoing training opportunities to greatly improve sales conversion rates for prominent brands and small to mid-size companies across almost every major US market conducting up to 120 virtual trainings and 39 hours of in-person trainings per month. Rob has helped hundreds of admissions and service employees improve brand reputation, increase sales, and decrease no-show rates by as much as 60% in his learning modules and service offerings. Rob accounts for varying factors that impact clients and diverse industries, including legal, medical, cosmetology, and vocational institutions. As his longtime clients will attest, sales comm’s subscription model enables companies to maintain consistent operational excellence despite employee turnover and market changes. Rob, you’re going to be talking about not 10%, 50%, 100%. How productive is your admissions team? That’s what you’re going to be talking about. People want to hear from you. I’m going to turn it over to you. Love you. You look great. The camel looks great. The background is fantastic. Thank you. You’re smart, handsome. Go on. That’s all. There’s too many to list.

Rob (01:41):
Too many. That’s better. Okay, well welcome everybody. Hey, there’s a couple of things I want to talk about today and you may be a little kind of unused to this sort of layout. As you can see, I’m kind of in a comfortable chair. I’m literally doing this all day looking into this silly little camera here and helping people with admissions. One of the things that we’ve evolved into, so we have this big long curriculum. So we teach how to do take calls, how to get people to show up, and we also teach how to do tours, how to close, how to intro, how to do the walk around, and then how to close. And so we do all of that. One of the things that we’ve seen is we’re only as good, our system’s only as good as people actually will use it just like anything else.

(02:29):
So if you use it, it works. If you don’t, it doesn’t, and that should be obvious, but it isn’t sometimes. One of the things that we’ve noticed is when people, well, let me put it this way, a question I get a lot is, so Rob, you say, make a lot of calls, you say do a lot of tours. How many calls should the average school be making every day, right? And my answer is, well, I don’t know how many tours do you have a day? And they would go, oh, that’s a good question. Well, how many tours should I be doing a day? And I would say, well, I suppose it depends on how many calls you’re making. And they would be like, so is this a riddle? And we kind of laughed that I was kind of tugging ’em along. But the reality is, is that’s true.

(03:18):
And then there’s another piece. The other piece is how many enrollments are you doing per day? How many signatures are you getting per day? Now it doesn’t mean full enrollment because sometimes that’s going to take one or two appointments, but at the end of the day you should have enrollment set if not every day, hopefully every other day or every third day, depending on the size of your school and things like that. But all of these things play in. In other words, you can’t be in two places at once. So if you’re doing a tour, you can’t be making phone calls. And if you’re making phone calls, you certainly can’t be on a tour.

(03:55):
So one of the things that I really want to push today, I have such limited time, is I want to talk to you about productivity. So what does a productive day look like? Well, in order to answer that, you kind of have to actually fill out a form. It sounds dumb. I hate forms if anybody knows me. I hate people with better mustaches than I can grow and I hate forms. So both of those things are hard on me emotionally, but sometimes it’s the only way to look good is to have a great mustache. And the only way to actually have really get good numbers on the ground is to be able to look at it and say, how many calls am I making? How many tours am I doing? And kind of have an algorithm. So what we did, and I’m going to see if I can share my screen really fast, okay, here we go.

(04:49):
Alright, so this right here is a form that we created. I want to move it just a little bit so I can see it better. What happens is, at the end of the day, if you want to know how productive you’re being, and maybe this is just for you, right? Maybe you say, I want to know my school. I want to know how productive I am as an admissions person. Maybe you’re a director saying, I’d like to know how productive my admissions people are doing so I can know how to help them. Now, if you’re going to try to micromanage with this, don’t do it. It’s actually going to be counterproductive. If you’re going to say, I want to know how to help, then you should use something like unto this, right? So this is a glorified Excel sheet, but it interacts. So basically what you do is you create your go down and you ask certain questions, how many hours did I work?

(05:32):
Well, let’s say minus lunches, minus my breaks. I worked seven hours and 30 minutes. Your people work seven hours, 30 minutes. Then we say conversation attempts. This is how many times, how many phone calls did you make? Whether they answered or not. How many phone calls did you make? Well, let’s say that I made 25. That’s a low number. Ideally, we’d like to see 35, between 30 and 40 per day. On an average, if you don’t have a lot of tours, you should be making more like 60 to 70 per day. Those are good numbers. That’d be a really great number, but certainly you should be averaging probably somewhere at 30, 35 calls per day if you have a decent amount of tours. But again, those are averages. They’re all going to depend on each other. Text only. This is a text that you sent. So you’ve maybe tried to call people three different times because we always say call people, hang up, leave a message, hang up, send a text.

(06:31):
I’m going to say that again. So when a lead comes in, I’m going to make the phone call, I’m going to leave a message telling them that I’m going to send them a text. Usually I hang up and I’m going to send a text. Now that’s not text only because I’ve actually left a message and I’ve made the phone call, but this is somewhere you’ve tried to call in three or four days, maybe in a row or two days in a row, skipped a day. Third day you made another call. Then by the fourth day, maybe you just send a text. That’s what this would be. So let’s say we did three of those because we shouldn’t be doing a lot of that. But it depends too. Sometimes you’ll send out mass text to old leads. We call ’em old crusty ancient leads. How many responded?

(07:11):
This is how many conversations you had. So let’s say if you called a hundred people, average, what is your call to prospect rate? In other words, if I call a hundred people, how many should answer? It depends on what time of day you call, but I’m going to tell you, our research right now is showing between 11 and one is the best time to call the morning calls eight thirty, nine o’clock. I got to be honest with you, they’re just not panning out. We’ve started to track this 11 to 11 to one. Those are your times. Those are your times. Then again, in the afternoon, you can get a lot around four or five going up even into six. You can get some responses there. So let’s say out of a hundred phone calls, how many you answer, a good response rate would be 30%. We’d like to see you somewhere around 20, 22, 20 3%.

(08:04):
If you’re at like 11, 12%, your response rate is too low and you need to change two things. One time of day that you call, and two, the number of times you’ve called. The more times you call, the more likely they are to start picking up. Now you would say, yeah, but Rob, then if I’ve called more, then my percentage will change. Yes, but the more you call, the more likely they are to respond. So it actually is not equal across the, it doesn’t come out in the wash anyway, so how many responded? Let’s say I had six conversations. In other words, six different people we spoke to, I made six appointments. And then the next question is how many tours? Well, I did three tours today and how many enrollment paperwork. So again, these are questions we use our form or not. It doesn’t matter.

(08:49):
My point is these are questions you should be asking yourself every day. We call these the big five, okay? And just to be clear here, if you look, one conversation attempt two, text only three conversations or prospected, how many answered four toss completed and five enrollment paperwork. This means you either got signatures or some sort of applicational registration fee or both. The third thing it would mean is if you help someone fill out a financial aid form or at least got them logged in before the tour or before they leave the tour, right before they leave that first appointment. When you do any of those things, the information goes on here. So let’s say that I did three tours and two of them were willing to fill out a form, give me a signature and give some sort of, maybe give me an application fee.

(09:37):
Maybe again, help with financial aid, but I did two of them. I did one or all of those things with two tours. Any helpful comments? This is where we get to the end. Now, this is a really important part. I want you to understand, and I know I’m going to run out of time. I’ve got 10 minutes left and I know I’m pushing a lot of this is coming fast, but these are the questions. What I want you to get out of this is these are the questions that you should ask yourself at the end of every day, at the end of every week, you need to be asking yourself, how productive was I? I know I’m busy during the day. I know you’re busy during that. If you’re in admissions, you’re usually not sitting there doing nothing, playing Facebook, playing solitaire, playing Facebook. A lot of people play Facebook.

(10:16):
It’s a new thing playing around on Facebook playing solitaire. I know that’s not what’s happening. It’s the question is, are you doing what’s pulling you away from the big five? And really anything that pulls you away from the big five would go on here. Now, some of those things are good. I’ll give you an example. So let’s say career fair at whatever school, and let’s say I was there for, I did one hour. That’s a ridiculous, by the way, it probably should be like three hours. Wow. So let’s say I did three hours at a career fair. Then what I am going to do, and then I do maybe three or four of those and then I’m going to put it in here, career fair, good. Lemme give you a bad one. That’s the number one sucker of admissions folks. Time met with students, you go, well, a student, you go, Rob, I need to meet with student.

(11:09):
Once they’re enrolled, really you should hand them off. They come in and ask you questions because you’re the first line event. They met you, they liked you. Now they come in and sit down and talk to you for a half an hour at a time, 20 minutes at a time, and you have three of those a day that just pulls you away from the big five for an hour, hour and a half a day, times that over five days. That’s a lot of time. And so you just have to mark this so you can actually see it at the end of the week how many times. So then you’re going to go, well, gosh, that really blew about two hours of my time. Now here’s the beautiful thing about this with what we built. I want everybody, if you can grab a pen and paper, I’m going to tell you about how this works and I’m going to stop.

(11:48):
I’m going to, in fact, let me do this real fast. One of the things that you need to do is you need to figure out how much time each one of these things takes. Grab a pen and paper. I’m going to tell you on average about how long this takes. Okay, here we go. I’m going to do it just really fast. Each one of these things, this is what we marked them at. Okay? So conversation attempts. This takes about four minutes to make a phone call. If no one answers four minutes, you got to look up the phone number in your CRM, you got to make the phone call. You got to listen to the ringing, you got to listen to the voicemail, then you got to leave a voicemail, and then you got to leave a note in the system. It’s about four minutes, give or take a minute, okay?

(12:29):
Text only. We give about two minutes worth of time for text only. You’re going to just send a text. You’re going to look it up, send the text, done, text only. Now, once they respond, they go into conversation. How many responded they go into this next category? We say about average eight minutes per phone call max. We want it to be about nine and a half. But to be honest with you, sometimes people hang up on you. Some people answer the phone and say, I got to go. So it lowers the average. So it’s about eight minutes tours completed. This is without a close, no signatures. It’s about 60 minutes. We give you about 60 minutes worth of credit for a tour. Enrollment paperwork is about 45 minutes. Now, this is a really positive activity. So if you’re getting signatures and you’re getting money, you’re helping people fill out the financial aid form or get logged in, that’s a 45.

(13:18):
We really want to give you a lot of credit for that because too often people do a tour, rush them out to get to the next tour. Why the devil are you doing that? They’re sitting in front of you, get as much done as possible. Then what happens at the end? You’re going to push submit, it’s going to come across. All your notes are going to come here, and then it’s going to spit out a number. I was 60% productive today, or in this case, this person, Haley, who the fake person was 120% productive. This one’s yellow, 80% and above is yellow between 80 90, right? And actually it’s 80 95. Do you see how this works? So this tells you, Hey, look, it was I productive. Again, if you’re using this to micromanage, not helpful, don’t do it. If you’re doing it to say, I want to get better, I want to make sure I’m doing those big five, this is how you do it.

(14:06):
You start to measure it. If you treasure it, you should measure it. And so what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to spend the time to start tracking yourself and figuring out how often am I doing the big five? And if I’m not doing the big five, what is it that’s pulling me away from that? And then which one of those things can I eliminate or have someone else help me with? Okay, so this is a form we created. Actually, as embarrassing as it is, because I don’t know how to use Excel on this level, I had to hire an expert. It cost me a ticket to Rome, let’s say. But I’ll tell you what, man, it’s fantastic. And again, I can’t stress enough. I know my time is essentially up. If you’re going to use this and we’ll talk about anybody that sends us an email, we’ll meet and we’ll get you access to the form.

(14:59):
We’ll talk through it and see if it is going to help you. And if it is, I’m not even charge for it, but what I am going to tell you is if you’re going to use this to micromanage, please don’t do it. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, admissions people get really frustrated at that. If you can sit down and say, Hey, Jill is my admissions person, Jill, I’ve noticed you’re getting pulled away. You’re doing amazing things, but you get pulled away a lot. And she’ll go, yeah, I know I’m getting pulled away a lot and I don’t know what to do about it. Well, maybe those pull aways are good, maybe they’re not. I got to tell you one story before my time’s up. I did a training once and I got on with this woman and she was awesome. She’s fabulous.

(15:38):
And I trained with her a couple times. This third or fourth time we get on and we’re on Zoom like this, and her background changed. I’m like, where are you, Michelle? Where are you? And she goes, I’m in the closet. And I go, what do you mean you’re in the closet? She goes, yeah, I’m in the closet. And I said, the next obvious question, Michelle, is what the devil are you doing in the closet? Thinking like, dude, get out of the closet. She goes, no, no, no, I’m in here. The director has told me I’m doing inventory today. I said, well, how long does inventory take? She goes, it’s about three hours, something like that. It’s between two and four hours. And I was like, so who’s making phone calls? Who’s doing tours? She goes, well, nobody. I kind of emptied my day. And I said, Michelle, where are you as far as target? And she goes, what do you mean? I go, well, are you hitting goal? And she goes, no, no, no. We’re really struggling.

(16:31):
It has anything to do with sitting in the closet. And she’s like, oh, well I dunno, but at this point, that is the director’s fault. You should shield the admissions people from anything that pulls them away from the big five. You should not be inviting them to. So those are kinds of things. And Chris, if you could pop back on, I am looking here. I guess there’s a lot of chat going on here and I love it and I haven’t been able to look at it. It is such a limited time, but hopefully that was helpful. I dunno, Chris, is that, what do you think

Speaker 1 (17:02):
The thing is, if whatever you’re not measuring, you can’t improve and it’s just a level of accountability. And I liked how you talked about like, Hey, don’t use this to micromanage. Use this as a tool for, hey, this is how we improve and get better. And it’s a positive thing. And so that’s good. I like that approach. There were some questions in there, some general admissions questions, but I say, let’s take ’em, let’s do it. So we had some questions about how we can’t get ahold of people. That’s why we text them. And I know you spoke on this last year during the summit, but any insight there? How would you answer that question?

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Yeah, so texting has its place and there’s a lot of people who I think misread what I say when I talk about text. First of all, text has its place and its place is a great way to get ahold of people, but it shouldn’t take the place of an actual conversation. I always make a phone call, hang up, leave a message, hang up, send a text. And so if they start to text with me, I’ll try to get ’em on the phone. If they won’t get on the phone and just want to make an appointment, fine. But most of the time I’ve found, I’ll look at the text people like, well, they won’t make appointments. And I’m like, I can read. You never asked. They won’t get on the phone with me. And they’re like, well, I’m looking The text, you never ask them to ask them to. A lot of people actually do want to chat with you. They don’t even know that they do. But once they start to like you and they chat, they want to speak to you on the phone. So text is great. I would always mix it with phone calls, phone first, then text.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
Yeah, and that’s really great advice. Something that we’re hearing from schools that we’re working with a lot of bigger schools, multiple campuses, they’re finding it just harder and harder to like, yeah, you can get somebody on the phone that’s getting harder, getting them to show up for a tour is getting harder, enrolling students is just getting harder. I don’t know. And that’s so generic. It’s like what do you do? But you have 50 million things that you can say. You’re probably finding that too. How do you handle that objection? If somebody in admissions is like, gosh, this is what’s happening. How would you handle that?

Speaker 2 (19:20):
Do you know? What I’m find is it’s kind of the sheep and the goats. What separates the sheep from the goats? And one of the things that the goats do, the people and usually goat kind of used to be bad. So I’m still going to pretend it’s bad and it’s not the greatest of all time. The folks who didn’t work great at admissions, they would invite people in, they would tour ’em and rush out of the tour. And so they’d say, well, my tours are only half an hour. And I’d sit and go, okay, well did you ask them to buy? And I’m like, yeah. They’d be like, well, I mean, yeah, they know. Or did you ask them? Did you actually say let’s get you an application to be accepted into the program? Did you say that? Well, no, but they know. Okay, well I’m trying to figure out how you did an introduction, did a walk around and then did any sort of closing in 30 minutes.

(20:07):
I just dunno how that’s possible. And so one is don’t rush yourself through a tour. You don’t need to be three hours of course. But what I’m saying is as far as long as people will go, signatures everything. If I do 10 tours in a day, which that’s a lot, but if I do five tours in a day, which is pretty common when I fly out to school and I do tours with their admissions people, if I do five in a day, I’ll get four signatures or money from three to five of them. I will get signatures or money from in the first tour. That does not mean full enrollment because maybe they don’t have their high school diploma with them. Maybe they still need to moms to connect the FAFSA to moms fine, but I’m going to get some commitment for them. The biggest mistake people make and they go, reason they people, oh, I can’t get ahold of people. Well, you didn’t get any commitments before you left. Why? I’m trying to figure out why you tore people and then you don’t try to commit them. So that’s one of the big things. Spend the time, get the commitments, don’t rush it. If they want help filling out the fafsa, help ’em fill out the fafsa, get in, get it done. Get as much as you can in the first appointment.

Chris (21:10):
Okay, this is awesome, Rob. If somebody wants to get ahold of you, maybe they just have questions like how you can help them and their school, their admissions team, what’s the best way to reach you?

Rob (21:20):
In fact, what I can do, because I really, people are think I’m crazy for doing this, but if I teach customer service and sales for a living, I think this is the best way to do it. I am going to put my cell phone number in the chat. You’re welcome to text me. That’s my cell phone. It’s like I have a separate number. Literally text me if as soon as I can, I’ll respond to you and we’ll set a time to chat and you can pick my brain for a minute. Here’s an email too, in case it wasn’t put on because I want, look, I really want this industry to succeed. We’re not going to succeed if we don’t take it to the next level and take the next steps. So people are still trying to operate a business. It was 20 years ago, we can’t do that anymore. We have to take it to the next level while staying compliant. And that means that we have to step out of our comfort zone. We got to do the big five, and I’ll teach, you’ll help you how to do it if you’d like the help. So anyway, that’s the best way right there.

Chris  (22:21):
That’s awesome. And you work with big schools, small schools, medium sized schools, one in admissions reps, the owner who might be doing admissions two or who do you work with?

Rob (22:34):
Yep. So we do all of that. The other thing that we do, and we can do all of that. The other thing we do, and I kind of want everybody to hear me on this, if your admission staff is going to go on vacation, or maybe you’ve had some turnover and you don’t have people to make calls, I actually have four people that make phone calls for schools that actually know how to use most CRMs and will actually sit and make phone calls for schools. If you need that help, emergency temporary calls, let us know. We found that that’s something big. Because what happens is people go on vacation or someone quits or moves away or whatever. Let’s hope no one gets fired, but someone moves away or whatever and they just, no one’s making phone calls for three weeks. That will sink your next start date. Do not let that happen. Give us a call, let us know if we have some space and we can fit you in to make calls for a week or five days or whatever. Let me know and we’ll let you know. We’ll try to figure out and see how to help you. So that’s something we’ve offered and if helps, it’d be great. Give us a call, let us know.

Chris (23:34):
Okay? That’s awesome. Rob, thank you so much. Everybody in the chat, please show rob some love. Don’t make fun of him. Just praise him. He deserves it. How.