Convincing Them They're Wrong About Your College Program
Do they have the wrong perception of you, your program, or your college? Do this:
The fact is, we don’t like admitting we’re wrong.
About anything: Who we voted for, why we bought Under Armour instead of Nike, what kind of car we decided to buy. If you question us, we get defensive immediately.
Your prospect is the same. In most cases, they come into the recruiting process with you with with a bias against you: Where you’re located, the cost, your division level, the color of your uniforms, the fact that you’re an Under Armour school instead of a Nike school…they won’t usually tell you, but they’re there. And those biases will hamper your ability to get them to the point where they feel ready to commit to you.
5 Simple Steps to Follow If You Want to Change Their Mind
This part isn’t up for debate. In most cases, when it comes to the college recruiting process, here are the steps you’ll need to take as you work to change the direction of their view of you and your program:
Ask them, as early in the process as possible, what two or three things they’d see as the big obstacles to actually coming to your campus and competing for you. (You’ll probably be tempted to change that wording. Don’t.)
After they tell you, ask, “and what else?” They’ll tell you something else, to which you respond, “and what else?”. Keep doing that until they can’t think of anything else. Now you have your master list of what objections and issues you have to overcome during the process moving forward. Why is this so critical? Because if we want to change their mind, we need to understand what’s on their mind. If you complete these first two steps, you’ll already be beating 85% of other college coaches heading into the next steps I’m going to outline.
Tell your prospect that you understand how they feel, and know exactly why they have the perceptions that they have, but that they’re wrong. This is where you draw your line in the sand: You’re not blaming them for feeling the way they do, but they need to understand that they’re not looking at it correctly.
Tell them you’re going to take time to explain how they should see things, why you’re going to be hard to say no to in the end, and why you want them with you and your program. This isn’t about winning a competition against them, where you win and they lose because they were ‘wrong’ and you were right. This is about showing them consistent passion through personal, relevant messaging.
Every two months, circle back and find out what they’re thinking now. “I know when we first talked, you weren’t that excited about the fact that we were located in a small college town. I’m just wondering, based on what I’ve been telling you, has anything changed in the way you’re seeing us now?” Always assess, and always be leading them through the next steps in the process.
Hopefully you’re seeing that changing your prospect’s mind about something isn’t so much about finding the perfect argument as it is about leading them through a proven process. We’ve laid that out for you, Coach.
Execute this, always circling back to go through the steps again to look for new objections, and your prospect will slowly find that you’re the coach who’s made sense all along.