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.

So what is a quality lead? A quality lead is one where the person’s door is open to the idea of enrolling in school and completing a goal of obtaining a college degree. This does not mean that every lead that comes through our system, quality or otherwise, is going to convert into an enrollment and then to a start. It does mean that at some point in their day a person thought about going to school enough to go out on the web and look for something specific. Whether that be a school, program, or general area of interest they spent some time in that place.

If that is the definition of a quality lead then we need to be willing to look past the one-call close and look to the quality of how we are working with that person’s dream. We should be willing to attempt contact more than 3 times and not just forget them. We should be willing to be upfront about all the details prior to the enrollment. And more importantly we should be willing to work with that student through their fear of commitment and not leave them because they aren’t an easy start.

In my experiences there is no pigeon hole in which we can place a potential student. The student who takes two or maybe three appointments to enroll, takes a moment to count the actual financial cost of their decision and begins their first set of classes with thoughts about their ability to keep up with the demands makes just as good, and at times a better, online student. It comes down to mindset, we need to be willing to constantly change.

If we go forward looking at each lead as a dream we are working to help fulfill and not just a number we might better see their quality and in return our quality of service as institutions will follow.