Telephone Skills can Make or Break 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 Appointments.”
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.
Over the next few blogs we will discuss what to do at each level, but for now, we are concerned with the telephone skills required to get 80% of the people who call to show up at the school.
The resource files in the “I Need More Appointments” are like a crash course in telephone sales. There is an article explaining the importance of telephone skills to your business, different ways to use telephone technology to your advantage, and the arsenal of tools you have to increase your enrollment.
The next group of files goes into the details of how to organize your staff (even if you don’t have one) to answer the phone effectively. Whether you are a one-man show or you have a staff of full-time and part-time supporters, these files will help you train them to the appropriate level, and help them set goals to move up to the next.
In addition to answering information calls, these files also help train your staff on handling objections, making set calls, confirmation calls, and follow-up calls.
If your dashboard is telling you that you are not getting enough appointments for trial lessons based on the number of calls you are getting, then check out the Advisor files called “I Need More Appointments” 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.
