In this industry you will find many people who say, “If a lead doesn’t convert within a certain window of time,” it is not a quality lead. They might also allude to the phone number being wrong or email being bad as a sign of a lead not worth working. I would say that this view as it pertains to quality is narrow and unrealistic.

We work in an industry where the student is non-traditional, many times not immediately ready for school and frankly a bit unsure if they want to commit to a life change at all. So the phone might be their cousin’s, and the email their friends. What does this; or rather what are they as students, saying to us? They are saying that we need to rethink our definition of quality and change the methodology that we use in working with our leads. We need to meet the student where they are and be willing to take them with us to where they, deep down, want to go.
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This year launched a new product that could potentially replace non-residential toll 411 calls. Google’s new telephone based information service is fast, user-friendly, and best of all, free. It can be accessed by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411. The service lets you search for businesses by voice and will connect you automatically if you so choose. Another convenient option is to get the number sent to you via text message, which includes a map of the business you’ve selected. You can also choose “details” to get the phone number and address, which can also be sent to you via text message.
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My girlfriend and I get calls constantly; not because we’re popular but because we own credit cards, we applied for the super savers card at the local grocery store, we subscribe to magazines, we’ve ordered something online, etc. Our information has been distributed and sold to the highest bidding corporation whose aim is to sell us a product or service we don’t necessarily need, or more importantly something we don’t necessarily want. As a society we have dealt with this for years and now we don’t answer the phone if we don’t recognize the name on the caller ID, we hang up the minute we hear someone introduce themselves as “Jim from ABC company…,” we ignore anyone who sounds like they’re trying to sell us something. It’s become ingrained in our behavior as an automatic response to just say “not interested” or to simply hang up the phone. Even when they get us to hear them out, do we really listen? As admissions counselors, this is the cultural environment in which we have to work and the stigma we’re trying to overcome.
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