I’m often asked what separates the good from the great when it comes to student recruitment, territory management, marketing, or leadership. After reflecting on 30 years of friendships and conversations with other CEO’s, Fortune 500 executives, college and professional coaches, a few professional athletes, and a number of other high performers across multiple industries including Higher Ed, I can tell you that being elite requires mastering the mental game. Mental skill

I’ve explained in previous articles that casual questions lead to better responses. Here’s another piece of advice that will help you increase the amount of early engagement you receive from this next class of students. It’s also a strategy that I continue to see very few admissions counselors and enrollment communication teams utilize. Ask your students what they don’t want, what they don’t like, and what kinds of colleges they think are wrong for them. Negative questions ar

A lot of college admissions and marketing professionals continue to tell me some version of the following: Gen Z has a low attention span and that’s a big reason why they don’t read all the emails we send. Whenever I hear that – including this past week – I push back. I would argue that a young person's attention span has actually evolved to be more selective because of the amount of information being delivered to them on a daily basis. Psychologists and cognitive researchers

Last Friday I was talking with an Assistant Director who had just returned from attending a NACAC affiliate conference. One of the things we ended up talking about was the concept of networking. As I shared with him, I believe there’s a difference between networking and building great relationships. It’s important to understand the difference. Networking is meeting new people at a conference, an event or another social outing, or on the road during travel season. Your convers

Yes, May 1 is an important date on the calendar for some colleges and universities. But at the end of the day, a lot of schools will still be working hard over the next couple of months to successfully bring in their next class. As your school receives new applications and you admit new students who are interested in starting this fall, let me provide some quick words of caution. Do not try to rush those students through their decision-making process. Do that and you risk ove

It’s inevitable. Even if you do everything to the best of your ability you’re still going to get some “no’s” from students each year. Today we’re going to talk about how to handle that common situation. To find opportunities for growth you need to determine if students are choosing another college because of things that you can control (i.e. your customer service, your campus visit experience, and the way you communicate), or for reasons out of your control like the location

Territory management is definitely a balancing act. In addition to focusing on conversion and yield with this current class of students, a lot of admissions counselors are also navigating some spring travel. What’s the primary goal of a college fair or a high school visit? I would argue it’s not to give students information and get them to fill out an inquiry card. When you word vomit, ask them what questions they have, and you ask them to fill something out, their experience

Words are powerful and how you say what you say matters. Slight tweaks in language can be the difference between getting a response or getting a student to take action, and getting ghosted. During a yield workshop last month I encouraged the group of admissions counselors to start incorporating one persuasive word in their conversations with admitted students who were still undecided. That word is “because.” Using it has been proven to help increase response rates because it

Over the past few weeks I’ve had multiple admissions counselors who are part of my newsletter community message me for advice about handling two fairly common situations this time of year. I thought I’d share their questions along with some of the advice I gave each: Question: What should I say if an admitted student tells me we’re one of their top choices but they aren’t ready to make a decision? Start by thanking the student for sharing, then follow that with “What do you s

Stop me if you’ve heard (or said) this one before… “If it’s not in Slate, it didn’t happen.” Whatever CRM your school utilizes, the ability for it to store and help you search through notes from conversations as well as interactions with students and families is invaluable. The key is being consistent, no matter how busy you get. If your notes (or the notes and interactions from other campus partners) don’t get inputted in a timely manner, it can cause confusion, frustration,

Dealing with unresponsive students who previously showed interest in your school is a common problem every single year. As you might imagine, radio silence can mean different things depending on a student’s individual situation. Besides the obvious factors of cost, your school’s location, and/or its size, here are a few additional indicators that usually mean a high school senior or transfer inquiry is no longer interested. If they visited campus more than 30 days ago and st

Over the past few years prospective students have become more comfortable receiving text messages from colleges and universities during their search. While that isn’t exactly breaking news, here are two things you need to be extremely mindful of as you continue to use this tool with traditional students. First, I think we can both agree that the overwhelming majority of Gen Z has email fatigue. If Higher Ed is going to avoid text message fatigue it’s essential to listen to yo

Raise your hand if you don’t enjoy making phone calls to prospective students. When I ask that question during a workshop or conference session I’m leading, 70-75% of the audience reaches for the sky. The most common reason? Hardly anyone answers their phone so it feels like a waste of time for the person making calls. Good news! That particular problem is easily fixable, just keep reading. Let’s start by discussing the latest data. According to my Top Tier Higher Ed research

It continues to be one of the biggest mistakes that many admissions offices and counselors make each year that negatively impacts their yield: Not communicating with parents in a way that feels personal and makes them feel like the important partner they are in the college search process. According to my latest Top Tier Higher Ed data, only 11.7% of students said their parent(s) or guardian(s) didn’t help them with one or more things during their college search. If you’re wo

A lot of admissions counselors like to email, text, or call and just “check in” with their students. On the surface that may seem helpful, but please understand that it’s a bad habit that needs to be broken. Here’s the problem with that kind of outreach. When you use those two words students know what it’s code for – You want them to tell you something. But because you haven’t asked a direct question, they’re not really sure what they’re supposed to say, so most times they

Yesterday I had a quick Zoom chat with an Admissions Counselor who recently completed his first high school visits of the year. He reached out to get my advice on how to handle a couple of different situations that he experienced. One of those involved what to do when you have a group of students who despite being encouraged to engage, still don’t say more than a couple of words. The first thing I reminded him was that most students have no idea what questions they’re suppose

High school visits and college fairs have been popular topics these past few weeks during the 1-on-1 meetings I do with admissions counselors as part of the training workshops I lead. One of the most common questions has been, “How do I start the conversation?” I know it can be tempting to hand students some of your materials and dive right into the “spiel” – aka share a bunch of information about your school. Don’t do it! That would be a big mistake. Considering that mos

We all have bad days. This past Friday night I was sitting on board my first flight home from Madison to Detroit when the captain came...

“Stop sounding like you just memorized a script. It’s annoying! Just talk like a normal human.” Dozens of student quotes similar to that...

As you start communicating with this next class of students I thought it would be helpful to highlight two common mistakes I continue to...