Coffee for Closers | Leads360 Sales & Marketing Blog 

There is a great article in Business Week from March 15, 2010 about how for-profit education companies like ITT and Corinthian Colleges are buying small schools to acquire regional and national accreditation. The article takes a pretty aggressive tack on the damaging effects these corporate behemoths are having on the education system, not to mention the seizing of government financial aid dollars.

There may be another way, albeit perhaps too optimistic, to look at this. This country was founded on capitalism. If not for the ambitious entrepreneurs and companies like GE, Apple, and Walmart, drive to make money, we might not even have the economy we do have. Of course there are whole books dedicated to that debate, but maybe the for-profit education revolution isn’t such a bad thing. Just because your school is a non-profit doesn’t mean that you run it efficiently, nor does it mean that you provide a quality education. I’d put my money on UOP from a business operations standpoint before UCLA any day. That said, I think the bigger question is about education quality. Can a for-profit school that does 90% of its classes online really make a student smarter?

One thing I’ve always believed is that the student is more important than the school – meaning that a student that wants to learn and applies himself will get a better education at a seemingly lower rate school than another student who didn’t do the work but attended a prestigious school.

That aside, for any business to have longevity, it must have a good product and something people want. Education is no different. The for-profit educators that invest in the quality of their product (teachers and curriculum) will be the ones that last. It would seem to me that the most successful educational institutions in this country will be those that blend good operations and revenue focus with quality product; companies like ITT and University of Phoenix have definitely got the former done, let’s see what they can do on the latter.

Recently, LeadCritic posted an article regarding the enormous growth in the For Profit EDU sector, and how although business is good, forward thought and preparation is going to be very important. Like LeadCritic mentioned, with access to internet ever increasing coupled with the fact that the work force is actively looking to get ahead and stand out, growth is moving as fast as a freight train.

From our vantage point at Leads360, we have watched the industries we serve experience the same lifecycle again and again. We know all too well how the Mortgage industry was effected and especially know how quickly things can go from good to bad, and then to worse. Over-saturation is a common fear in growing industries, and smart companies know that even when potential business is booming, they need to prepare to weather the times when it isn’t. Companies should embrace the bountiful period, but never take anything for granted.  The point of this warning is not to scare anyone, but to bring about a call to action. This cyclical nature can be looked at as good thing, de cluttering said space, and allowing for the survival of the fittest.  The separation of the “men from the boys” can allow companies who have prepared and are following best practices to establish themselves as industry players, and can create an environment for them to continue to grow and flourish far down the road. The keys for this preparation are fairly obvious. Make sure your company is not fooled by the tremendous growth by letting standards slide. Be sure to contact leads quickly and concisely, don’t allow for precious leads to be stranded by the wayside, and utilize current technology to stay ahead of the curve. Although you may find some things unnecessary at the moment, teaching your sales force how to embrace new technology before the storm, allows for an easy transition when your company needs it most. Take heed, but enjoy the ever expanding market.

Just as mortgage brokers generate loan modification leads and search engine optimization companies generate marketing leads, education institutes and universities have to generate enrollment leads. Every year schools and universities spend millions of dollars promoting various programs offered throughout the year. The majority of those dollars are spent on lead enrollment forms (students that are interested in a particular program filling out a questionnaire or information request form).

Universities generating leads for brochure mailings or for education enrollment specialists could greatly benefit from having an efficient software that can assist in enrollment marketing and management goals. A lead software can help convert more leads, and in turn increasing the possibility of filling up classes.

Here are some very interesting tasks a proper enrollment management software can do for your school.

•    Sort through leads based on programs selected
•    Assign leads to different representatives
•    Recognize geographic location of your lead
•    Track origination of your leads
•    Create easy forms for potential students to fill
•    Distribute and prioritize leads based on form entries
•    Export/download leads in various formats
•    Automatically reply to potential students
•    Track and analyze leads entries
•    Capture the student lead while they are still interested
•    Identify fake leads and highly valuable leads
•    Receive instant emails as soon as lead is generated
•    Sort, filter and route leads based on demographics
•    Update you on the status of each and every lead

To top it off, you can do all this automatically within 1 software interface provided by Leads360. Try out our enrollment management software for free here.

Please join us on December 9th at 11AM Pacific / 2PM Eastern for a brand new webinar about how to understand and leverage the unique characteristics of your sales process.  You can register here, for free, in about 5 seconds.

————————————————————-

What Planet Are You On? Leverage the Differences between B2C and B2B Sales and Marketing

Applying the 7 universal ground rules of sales and marketing and the 3 keys to lead conversion

Knowing what factors are critical to success in your business is not as obvious as you may think. The most successful sales and marketing organizations understand which planet they are on, and they know which sales and marketing approaches align with their needs.

Understanding the characteristics of your sales and marketing efforts are essential to achieving higher lead conversion and sales success.

Sign up for this free webinar to learn how the 7 universal ground rules of sales and marketing apply differently to B2C and B2B sales. Find out what the unique characteristics of your sales efforts are, and see how to leverage the 3 keys to lead conversion using powerful lead management software from Leads360.

From this webinar, you will learn:
•    Questions for better understanding the rules of your target marketplace and sales process
•    The 7 universal ground rules of sales and marketing
•    The 3 key drivers of sales lead conversion
•    How lead management software can boost your sales and increase ROI
•    Why implementing the wrong technology solution can cripple your business

We’ll see you there.

Here’s what our own Nisheeth Singh had to say about the study:

As you may have read on Lead Critic today, we released our newest research regarding the impact of call frequency on sales lead conversion.

To misquote a famous author: “Elementary, my dear Watson”. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s written works never actually saw this phrase although the first and second parts of the phrase were seen in close association during conversations. But I digress.

As many of you opined above and is the central premise of the paper (found here), sometimes the most obvious and logical actions are never taken by lead buyers. I don’t necessarily understand why they don’t but I do revel in the fact that it means significant upside for those that choose to engage with their leads smartly.

We conducted the study based on several million leads that our clients tried contacting over a period of many months to have as diverse a data set as possible. We studied the effects of multiple call attempts all the way to 20 and I’ve published the entire results of our study below just to whet your intellectual curiosity. Some explanation is in order:

* Column 1 denotes the call attempt

* Column 2 denotes the percentage of ‘Contactable leads’ contacted – this is key to understanding the study and is NOT the same as Contact Rate. This means that the data set excludes any leads that were never contacted. This metric is a percent of the remaining leads in our study which we define as ‘contactable leads’

* Column 3 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the very 1^st call attempt

* Column 4 denotes the percent improvement in the ‘% of Contactable leads contacted’ metric for each successive attempt over the preceding call attempt

Contact    % of Contactable   Improvement       Improvement over

Attempt   leads contacted    over 1st attempt    preceding attempt

——————————————————————————

1                              39%

2                              72%                        87%                        87%

3                              83%                        114%                     15%

4                              88%                        128%                     6.5%

5                              91%                        136%                     3.4%

6                              93%                        141%                     2.1%

7                              95%                        145%                     1.5%

8                              96%                        148%                     1.1%

9                              96%                        150%                     0.8%

10                           97%                        151%                     0.6%

11                           97%                        152%                     0.5%

12                           98%                        153%                     0.3%

13                           98%                        154%                     0.3%

14                           98%                        154%                     0.3%

15                           98%                        155%                     0.2%

16                           99%                        155%                     0.2%

17                           99%                        156%                     0.2%

18                           99%                        156%                     0.1%

19                           99%                        156%                     0.1%

20                           99%                        157%                     0.1%

As you can see, the benefits of calling start trailing off pretty steeply after the 5^th or 6^th attempt, we chose to prescribe 6 attempts as the cut-off. I beg to defer with LeadCritic in that this is a very statistically relevant study with a data set this size and of this heterogeneity, at least at a high level. I do agree though that to get maximum benefit from a study like this, one should conduct the same study but specifically for their own sales team to understand the effect of call attempts on their contact rate.

Cheers!

Nisheeth Singh

Director of Strategic Intelligence, Leads360