It's the privilege of the Admissions Director to introduce the uninitiated into the wonderful world of martial arts. When the Admissions Director does a good job, people's lives change for the better as a result. When the Admissions Director does a poor job, people miss the opportunity to grow through the martial arts.
When the Admissions Director does a poor job, he fails the prospective student, he fails the school, and the martial arts world suffers by not adding to its ranks. The responsibilities of the Admissions Director are very serious. In many ways, he will determine the success of the school.
Many argue that it’s up to a good teacher to make a school. If this is true, why do we see great martial artists leading small schools of 60 or 80 students for ten years? A school cannot grow without new students. It’s the Admissions Director’s job to create students.
Key Responsibilities: Prospecting, Presenting, and Following Up
If you were to sum up the Admissions Director’s role, it would be very simple. His job is to create students. In order to create new students, he must focus on prospecting, presenting, and following up. As long as he is prospecting, presenting, and following up, he will create new students.
How many students he creates will be a function of how well you train him to execute in these areas.
Retention in the first 90 days is also an important responsibility of the Admissions Director but not the primary focus. Eighty percent of his time must be spent prospecting and presenting, while 20 percent will be spent on retention. Following up is split between calling missed appointments (creating students) and ensuring that the students he recently enrolled are enjoying their classes (retention).
The Funnel Illustration
One of the most important visual tools you can use to illustrate the importance of this area of the school is the funnel. At the top of the funnel is where you pour in advertising and marketing dollars. Out of the bottom comes new students. How narrow the funnel gets will be a result of how well the Admissions Director is managing his time.
The funnel can be used to illustrate a number of areas of the school. For instance, for an instructor’s job, you could imagine pouring white belts in the top and having black belts fall out the bottom, and the funnel gets narrower with each belt. How narrow it gets is a reflection of your retention.
Prospecting: The Top of the Funnel
For the Admissions Director, the top of the funnel represents calls to set appointments. In the sales world, this is called prospecting. Prospecting is the process of making phone calls to prospective students with the goal of setting or resetting an appointment to come into the school for your introductory course or intro-tour.
Here, we’re working our leads from all sources: inquiries, missed appointments, referrals, lead boxes, demos, advertising, walk-bys, and so on. This is the top of the responsibility list. We like to see at least 50 prospecting calls made per week.
There is a ratio that you will establish between the number of calls made and the number of appointments set and then the number of new students. Regardless of the ratio, it holds true that if you call more, you set more appointments. If you set more appointments, you enroll more students.
Improving Conversion Ratios
As your Admissions Director’s skills improve, the ratio will improve. For instance, in the beginning, you may find that it takes 20 calls to set an appointment. This will result in two or three appointments per week, out of which you should gain one or two new students each week.
Since each student is worth about $1,000 per year to the school, then each of the 20 calls it took to earn one student is worth $50 or 1/20th of the $1,000. As the Admissions Director’s skills improve, the ratio will improve.
As the number of calls it takes to set an appointment decreases to just 10 calls to set an appointment, the value of each call doubles to $100. This is the attitude you must take towards making phone calls. The goal is to decrease the number of calls it takes to set an appointment and gain a new student.
Presentation: The Heart of the Funnel
The next area of the funnel is presentation. Presentation encompasses setting the appointment, teaching the intro, and then conducting the enrollment conference, which is the ultimate presentation to get involved in the school.
This is the pay dirt activity. This is really where the rubber meets the pavement. Truly, this is the only time your Admissions Director is really working. This is the work that an Admissions Director is on the payroll for.
All other activities are simply designed to create a situation where he is belly to belly with a qualified prospective student. Everything else just leads up to or follows the presentation. Much like a fighter measures their success by winning fights, an Admissions Director measures success largely by enrolling qualified students.
Retention: Ensuring Continued Success
The final area of the funnel is retention. For the Admissions Director, this is the process of making 2-4-6 calls, absence calls, writing notes, and communicating with the students he has enrolled.
This is where their compensation is based. We don’t compensate based on enrollments because of the temptation to write bad paper and then forget about a student once they are enrolled.
Writing bad paper is when you enroll someone you feel is not qualified to pay for the tuition or to follow through and attend classes. This is not really a student, yet an Admissions Director whose pay is based on enrollments may be tempted to push an enrollment through that isn’t qualified.
Compensation Strategy
We prefer to base compensation for the Admissions Director on the first two exams. Rather than paying a commission on each enrollee, we pay a commission on the number of students graduating to their first exam and then another commission on the second exam.
This ensures that the Admissions Director is going to focus on the areas of retention listed above. Obviously, he has to enroll students in order for this to happen. This is just our insurance that they are qualified students.
Prioritizing Time for Maximum Impact
During the evening, we want 80% of the admission director’s time spent on prospecting and presenting. Twenty percent of the time should be spent on retention. That means we must focus our staff on the activities that create the highest results or income of the school.
Filing, paperwork, straightening up the office, gossiping with the parents are all low-pay-off activities. Admissions Directors must be focused on prospecting, presenting, and following up.
High Priority Tasks
The most important activities for an Admissions Director are prospecting, presenting, and following up. If there was one activity that you could have your Admissions Director engaged in all evening long, it would be presenting.
We would all love to see our Admissions Director making presentation after presentation, hour after hour. That’s not to say retention is not important. It’s very important, but during prime time hours, we like to see 80% of the time devoted to prospecting and presenting.
In other words, 80% of the time should be spent creating new students. If the Admissions Director were to spend 80% of the time on retention, then it wouldn’t be long before there simply wouldn’t be any new students to work on retention with.
We must train our staff and keep them focused on the areas that matter. If you were to surprise your Admissions Director with a phone call in the middle of the night and ask them, “What are your high priority tasks?” They should be able to answer without hesitation, “Prospecting, presenting, and following up Sir (or Ma’am)!”