Sales Training for Student Recruitment: 5 Simple Steps to Boost Your College Admission Team’s Productivity Starting Now

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Sales Training for Student Recruitment 5 Simple
Steps to Boost Your College Admission Teams
Productivity Starting Now

• Dont pour thousands of dollars into student
  recruitment staff training. Check out these five
  simple steps to take your higher ed admissions
  team to the next level.

For some higher ed institutions, problems with
inexperienced staff have plagued recruitment
efforts for years. Now, as students become more
and more selective about where they attend
school, a lack of experience in student
recruitment is a problem that must be solved.
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While many higher education businesses can afford
to pour tens of thousands of dollars into
training their 8, most universities simply lack
the resources and knowledge to do the same. And
the cycle of want can be vicious. In an
equation? Less resources to train sales staff
equals less trained staff, less students
recruited, and, consequently less resources to
train sales staff.  (After all, a mere 37 of
colleges met their recruitment goals in
2019.) As they battle shrinking budgets and
declining enrollment rates, many private colleges
and universities simply dont know how to break
this cycle. So, if youre the Head of Enrollment
at a higher ed organization, how can you
establish an effective sales training strategy
and transform an inexperienced admissions
workforce into top-level sales agents, without
going bankrupt along the way? There are many
wrong answers, but fortunately, theres also a
right one Stop wasting money on training sales
staff, and create a repeatable system that
produces top performing recruiters out of new
hires on autopilot.
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Its not an easy ride, but with the right tools
and consistent approach, you can methodically
build A student recruitment system that
works. Heres how to do it.

• How to recruit more students in 2020
• Create a Student Recruitment Plan
• Train Your Staff The Right Way
• Upgrade Your Student Recruitment Outreach
  Templates
• Automate Your Recruitment Bottlenecks
• Merge All The Student Recruitment Workflows into
  a Cohesive System

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• Step 1 Create a Student Recruitment Plan
• If you want a high-performing student recruitment
  team, first get clear on what you really need
  from them.
• This is where a student recruitment plan comes
  in. This can be a simple 1-5 page document that
  includes your enrollment goals and ideally, a set
  of specific actions that help you achieve these
  goals.
• A good plan helps you understand in detail what
  currently works for you and your staff, and where
  your resources are best spent. In fact, just the
  mere act of preparing this plan might reveal
  enrollment opportunities you didnt notice
  before. Lets dive in.
• Heres what you need to know to prepare a
  successful student recruitment plan
• What already works. Who are your best students?
  Where do they live, what are their demographics,
  and how did you recruit them? Its important to
  learn what works for you now so that you can
  scale these strategies later.
• Enrollment trends. Has the 2020 crisis affected
  student demography? Whats the latest app every
  student is using? Any information that impacts
  your current student profile goes here.
• Your goals. Is sheer number of applicants your
  top priority? Would you like to recruit a certain
  demographic? This information will help your
  recruiters focus their efforts.

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• After covering these questions, you can form two
  very specific documents that will become a part
  of your student recruitment plan and greatly
  increase the efficiency of your sales personnel
• Target student persona. A target student persona
  is a highly-specific description of your perfect
  students. If your university or trade school
  generally attracts men in their 30s, youll have
  more success if your recruiters focus on this
  specific demographic.
• Recruiter goals. Recruiters are much more
  efficient when they know theres a particular
  objective they need to achieve. Sales quotas have
  been a driving force for businesses for years, so
  theres no reason you shouldnt use them as well.
• Pro Tip Regularly update your student
  recruitment plan based on the data your
  recruiters gather about engaged prospects and
  profitable lead sources so that you can adapt
  your recruitment policies and tactics based on
  the latest market changes. 

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Shape allows recruiters to analyze lead sources
over time and get actionable insights on the
types of students they recruit most effectively
and where they can find these prospects.
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• Step 2 Train Your Staff The Right Way
• With a plan in place, its time to start training
  your recruiters. Of course, there is a small
  problem with the traditional way of doing this
  professional sales training can cost thousands of
  dollars. While some institutions provide their
  staff with superficial training and others
  neglect training altogether (usually due to the
  cost barrier), there are ways to effectively and
  affordably train your college recruiting team.
• Heres how you can train your recruiters without
  spending a fortune
• eLearning. You dont have to spend thousands of
  dollars on inviting the latest sales superstars
  to educate your workforce. With the current
  advancement of online learning platforms, you can
  get access to top industry minds at an affordable
  price.
• Re-use critical information. If you end up
  inviting consultants or participating in
  expensive masterclasses, make sure to share the
  knowledge with your sales agents record
  webinars, create guides and ebooks. Strive to
  create an inner knowledge platform that can
  continue to serve your staff for years to come.
• Create a strategic onboarding policy. Its
  important to set the right expectations between
  your institution and recruiters from the start,
  and to detail each team members goals and clear
  expectations about the ways in which they achieve
  them. The onboarding period is also a great time
  to educate people in your sales processes.

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Remember, you are not training sales stars on
your team, so dont pour thousands of dollars
into training individual salespeople. As business
often goes, your stars are usually the ones that
will be off to new positions before you know it
anyway. Instead, focus on proper onboarding and
creating inner knowledge systems. This way,  even
newly hired recruiters will get instant access to
your most efficient workflows and be able to
operate on a high level shortly after their
start.
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• Step 3 Upgrade Your Student Recruitment Outreach
  Templates
• Theres a good reason the sales industry has been
  using templates and scripts for decades they
  work.
• Highly-converting templates and scripts are a
  direct continuation of your inner knowledge
  system. They let your new hires quickly get on
  par with more experienced colleagues. Plus,
  theres no better way of transforming
  inexperienced recruiters into top industry
  performers than by leveraging templated
  strategies that already work.
• But lets face it not every script or template
  will do. Youll find plenty of sales scripts for
  real estate agents and talent recruiters, but
  those just arent relevant to the kinds of
  conversations your staff needs to be having with
  future students.
• Heres how to ensure your templates will work
  wonders for your higher ed recruitment process
• Make sure they are specifically developed for
  education. Simply taking the usual sales scripts
  and replacing every client with student wont
  work. The best templates should be those
  extensively tested in the education recruitment
  field.
• Make sure there are templates for every channel
  of communication. Although the sales process is
  similar everywhere, the most effective words for
  every channel (email, SMS, phone) will be
  different. Make sure you have templates for each.

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• Improve your templates regularly. Theres no
  template that works forever, so youll need to
  adjust what your recruiters say based on current
  enrollment trends, your programs, and changes in
  student demographics. Schedule an automated
  reminder to adjust your templates and scripts on
  a regular basis.
• Having relevant and up-to-date templates will
  help keep your recruiters ahead of the
  competition, but how do you make sure they are
  actually using them?
• Heres where CRM software can play a crucial
  role. The right higher ed CRM ensures every
  member of your staff always has the appropriate
  script or template in front of them, exactly when
  they need it. Of course, there are also several
  other advantages of using a CRM
• Get the right template for the right
  medium. Whenever recruiters contact their
  prospects using a CRM, the most relevant
  templates can pop up automatically depending on
  the medium of communication and stage of the
  recruiting process.
• Centrally manage your templates and scripts.
  Updating sales scripts is a tough task, and
  eventually all recruiters might be using
  different templates or worse, some random
  combination. A CRM allows you to easily update
  all your templates at once or add new ones.
• Access the best student recruitment
  templates. Shape is the only CRM that partners
  with leading education organizations like Woz U
  and SCI to offer institutions the best-performing
  templates for engaging prospects and converting
  them into students.

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• Step 4 Automate Your Recruitment Bottlenecks
• No matter how well you train your recruitment
  staff, theres always a chance that things wont
  go as intended. A missed email, a misspelled
  name, an unwelcome phone callsometimes even the
  smallest mistakes can lead to lost prospects and
  ruin weeks of marketing efforts.
• Thats why one of the most powerful ways to
  prevent potential students from slipping through
  the cracks is to automate specific parts of your
  sales process.
• Here are some of the ways you can automate your
  student recruitment process and keep prospects
  from slipping through the cracks
• Automated email campaigns. The goal of email
  marketing is to send the right message at the
  right time. A timely automated email with
  information about your programs or school culture
  will effectively keep prospects engaged.
• Personalized messages. A well-designed CRM system
  will allow you to easily send personalized
  marketing messages to your prospects by
  automatically inserting their data into
  designated templates.
• Triggers and events. The right message is half
  the win, but sending the right message at the
  right time is the perfect combo. Send important
  information to your prospects right after they
  perform certain actions on your website or
  campaigns.
• Prioritize your leads. One of the main areas that
  both experienced and new recruiters struggle with
  is how to prioritize their leads. Shape is the
  only higher ed CRM that provides recruiters
  with sorted lists of leads based on a
  comprehensive 28-rule algorithm.

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Step 5 Merge All Student Recruitment Workflows
into a Cohesive System Investing in training a
team of student recruiters will boost your
enrollment rates for one semester, but investing
in recruitment processes and systems is a
surefire way to improve recruitment rates for the
long term. An airtight student recruitment plan
makes sure that no matter how many people leave
or join your team, your staff always knows
exactly which steps to follow to boost student
enrollment. A well thought-out enrollment plan,
proper onboarding policy, proven industry
templates and smart, natural automation can allow
you to quickly transform inexperienced recruiters
into top performers. Additionally, these steps
and systems help you quickly adjust your
enrollment goals however youd like, and
consistently fulfill admissions quota while
staying ahead of your competition. If youre
looking for a system that will supply your
recruiters with the most effective sales
workflows to date, try Shape.
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With our best-of-breed templates, easy-to-use
automation, and full customization, youll start
to see improvements in your student recruitment
process within the first two weeks. Were ready
to back up this claim by giving you a free 14-day
trial so you can experience the power of our
platform for yourself. Ready to recruit more
students and finally hit your student enrollment
goals? Try Shape today!  Article
Source- https//setshape.com/blog/sales-training-
for-student-recruitment-5-simple-steps-to-boost-yo
ur-college-admission-teams-productivity-starting-n
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