SALES TECHNIQUES
If You Can’t Close the Sale,
You Will Close Your School
ATLAS provides a wide range of staff training resources, but one that is not used often enough is the section of the Advisor Files called “I Need More Enrollments.”
On your ATLAS dashboard you have your Enrollment Pipeline, which gives you real-time information on your enrollments for the past month. You can see how many prospects you have as potential new students, how many trial lessons you have scheduled, how many new students have enrolled (or signed-up), and how many upgrades you have made into bigger/better programs.
We believe a good school with a well-trained staff should be about 80% successful on each step up to enrollment. That means that 80% of the people who call should make an appointment, 80% of the appointments should show up, and 80% of those who show up should enroll in one of your courses.
If you do the math, that means that you should enroll about one new student for every two phone calls you get, so the more phone calls you can generate, the more new students you will enroll. Of course, if you or your staff are not getting that 80% success rate, we have lots of materials to help you improve your numbers.
In recent blogs we have been discussing what to do at each level, but for now, we are concerned with the sales skills required to get 80% of the people who walk into your school to enroll. Look at it this way: if someone took the time to go to your school, they are obviously interested in taking classes. Unless you do something to discourage them, they should fulfill the goal of visiting your school by enrolling in one of your programs.
The resource files in the “I Need More Enrollments” are like a crash course in sales. There are articles on every step of the process, including Hosting and Gathering Information, The School Tour, Mental and Physical Trial Lessons, The Sales Presentation, and Closing the Sale. If you do not have a business or sales background, you will find a treasure trove of information the educate yourself and your staff about things you may never have considered. If you do have a business or sales background, you will find the information helpful in refining your general knowledge to the needs of a martial arts business.
As you may already know, not everyone will enroll when you first make your sales presentation. A professional enrollment director should know many ways of pre-empting and overcoming the most common objections, and then closing the sale in a different way. The articles cover simple ways of overcoming objections and easy closing techniques.
You can also double your enrollment with a minimum of effort by getting referrals from each new student. This packet includes an article on getting referrals.
In addition, getting someone to sign on the dotted line isn’t the end of the sale. You have a responsibility to begin the relationship on a positive note and show enough care and concern that they don’t regret making the decision. You must have a solid Welcome Process.
If your dashboard is telling you that you are not getting enough enrollments based on the number of Trial Lessons you are getting, then check out the Advisor files called “I Need More Enrollments” to form a plan to improve your success rate. As always, you can call any member of our AMS team at 1-800-275-1600 for more detailed help and advice on how to train your staff in this or any other skill in your school.
