Sales: In Schools It’s a Dirty Word

This article is the fourth in a series examining popular business and marketing concepts as they (might) apply to schools. This piece has a particular focus on Admissions.

When you think of ‘sales’ or ‘selling’, what image comes to mind?

Daniel Pink, the New York Times bestselling author of To Sell is Human, posed a similar question. He asked people what word they most associate with sales. The word cloud summarises his results.

Of the 25 most common words, only five had positive connotations. ‘Pushy’ was the most popular adjective, followed by the less polite ‘yuck’, ‘annoying’, ‘slimy’, ’manipulative’ and ‘sleazy’.

Sales, it seems, is a dirty word. To some, sales people are held in worse esteem than traffic wardens. The used car salesman is the archetype of sleaze and shadiness. To accuse someone of ‘selling’ is often a slur.

To make it more palatable, sales often gets sugar-coated. In business, it becomes Business Development, Customer Relations or Accounts Management.

In schools, it’s called Admissions.

It might be quite jarring to think of your Admissions staff as sales people, but, make no mistake, that’s what they are. They may not be going door-to-door, they may not be trying to con people into purchasing a car with the mileage turned back from 100,000 to 10,000 and, hopefully, they are not pushy, manipulative, slimy or sleazy. But, they are in the business of sales.

Let’s consider why.

Sales, but not selling

Selling is part of the marketing toolbox, but is distinct from advertising and from other forms of promotion:

Without advertising, you would not have leads to follow up, but without good ‘sales technique’, your conversion ratios (enquiries-to-enrolments) may be low. Hence, your Admissions staff being in the business of sales. They operate in the part of the sales funnel where awareness and interest are, hopefully, converted into action.

Another way to reflect on the importance of sales is to consider Customer Lifetime Value(CLV).

Customer Lifetime Value is total average earnings over the course of a customer’s relationship with you [1]. For schools, this would be annual fees multiplied by years of enrolment. So, a child joining you in Year 1 and staying through to graduation clearly has a high lifetime value. All things being equal, it would be easy to justify spending more on enrolling these children than those going into more senior years. All things are not, of course, equal, and senior students may bring marketing benefit in terms of examination results and prestigious university entrance, but the point remains — the higher the CLV, the more time, care, attention and expense you should be spending.

In general, the higher your CLV, the more it is worth spending to make a sale and the more personal attention that sale usually requires. An interesting comparison then would be how much you spend on advertising vis-à-vis the amount you spend on Admissions. Every school envies a strong advertising campaign, but you should resist the temptation to compete in the endless contest for eyeballs. More advertising and more glossy brochures do not automatically translate into more enrolments. Advertising works well for reasonably low-priced products that have mass appeal. For high-priced emotional purchases like schooling, advertising, at its best, creates awareness, brand image and desire. It is necessary, but it doesn’t ‘close the sale’.

With that in mind, what type of first impression does your school make? How well trained and how well rewarded for their efforts are your Admissions staff? How much effort and energy do you put into school tours? Regardless of whether they like the school, do parents leave delighted with the care and attention given to them during the admissions process?

These things matter. In a market with very high CLV, they matter a lot. Consider two identical schools. Neither has an advantage in terms of product differentiation but one has a better Admissions process. It is obvious which will be the more successful.

Your admissions staff do not need to become sleazy, pushy and annoying sales people. Hard sales is dubious at best; in education, it is morally abhorrent. However, thinking about your admissions process in terms of sales could generate useful benefits. For example, consider how these common sales tactics can be translated and adjusted into good admissions practice:

FROM BLACKBOARD TO BOARDROOM

The reality of contemporary private schooling is that parents are more demanding and the landscape more competitive than ever. In simple terms though, what every parent is really looking for is help — help making the right choice for their child/children. If you can identify where they need help deciding and if you can address those needs, that is problem-solving, not selling.

In particular, for schools, the idea of ‘closing a sale’ needs reframing. If you have followed the advice above then you have sold without selling. You can then finish the admissions process with a single powerful question:

“Do we offer what you need for your child?”

As well as showing that your priority is the child, how the parent answers will reveal multiple things:

1) Whether you have addressed their concerns. If not, they just gave you the chance to do so.

2) Whether or not their children are suitable for your school.

3) How well your admissions process is filtering suitable applicants. Time saved on unsuitable applicants can be spent, and spent more wisely, on suitable ones.

4) What you might need to do when following up with the parent — providing more information, connecting them with a particular teacher or sending them the latest sports results, for example.

To the last point, imagine how powerful it would be if every time you followed up with a potential parent you were able to mention something specifically relevant to them:

“By the way, the basketball game we saw on the tour finished in a win for us: 74–56. <Child name> seemed interested in the game, so I thought he might want to know the score.”

That’s not selling, that’s caring.

Given the level of fees charged by many private schools, and the CLV, the admissions process requires this kind of close personal attention.

Schools underestimate the importance of sales because of systematic efforts to hide it; schools, and quite rightly so, seek to avoid the stigma of selling. Yet, the business of schooling is secretly driven by sales. The holy grail may be a school so great it ‘sells itself’ but, in competitive markets at least, this is a fallacy. We might prefer to call it ‘Admissions’ but the job is sales.

Critically, for schools, sales doesn’t mean hard selling — it doesn’t mean conforming to the image of the sleazy and slimy sales person. It means understanding how a sales mindset can be used to tweak, improve and enhance your admissions process. You don’t want to be like the used car salesman, but maybe, just maybe, if you think a little different, sales isn’t a dirty word.

References

Levitt, T (1960) ‘Marketing Myopia’, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1960

[1] Technically, CLV is the total average net profit earned over the course of a customer’s relationship with you. However, what net profit is and the challenges of calculating it per enrolment is a topic for another article.