Letters | Dan Tudor

Six Surprising Ways YOU Can Be More Interesting to Your RecruitsMonday, September 12th, 2011

The majority of college coaches have now embraced social media, creating better messages for their recruits, and a host of other writing challenges.

The biggest challenge in the process? Coming up with something interesting to say.

Furthermore, there’s the challenge of writing things in a way that actually connects with this generation of teenage prospect. Both hurdles are extremely challenging for today’s college recruiter, who is being asked to do more – with less time and less money - than ever before.

So today, we are going to pass along some proven ideas on how to actually be interesting to your prospects, specifically with what you write about in letters, your emails, your blog or social media site:

Don’t be afraid to be wrong (within reason, of course): This is part of an overall strategy of being transparent, which is essential if you are going to write anything on your social media or a blog website. Being wrong means you’re human, and that’s a quality that our research says today’s recruits are looking for in a coach. Write about something that could have done differently, or something that went wrong, in your program. The honesty will be refreshing to your recruits. Of course, exercise reason…I’m talking about showing that you’re human, not opening yourself up for an NCAA investigation.
Don’t be afraid to be right. Build yourself as an expert, and give away your knowledge to your prospects. We’re all drawn to people we believe can get us to where we want to be, and your prospects are no different. Write about your expertise as a coach in your sport, and use it to build your credibility as a college coach and recruiter. When your prospect accepts you as an expert in your sport, it goes a long way towards erasing other doubts that may exist about your program in their mind.
Surprise your prospects. Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the classic business book “Made to Stick”, say that one of the best ways to set yourself apart is to break people’s “guessing machines.” Take a surprising position, making outlandish analogy, or otherwise do the opposite of what you normally do. As long as it’s unexpected, people – including your prospects – will stop and pay attention. And in a marketplace overflowing with programs that look and act the same, setting yourself apart from the competition is a key factor in winning a recruit.
Make your prospects laugh. Coaches get so busy trying to coach and teach that they forget to entertain. As a result, large portions of your prospects might fall asleep. And what’s the best way to wake your prospects up? Humor. Successful communicators have been using it for ages, and as long as it’s appropriate for your recruit, humor can wake your prospects up and get them paying attention to your recruiting message again. Easier said than done, of course, but look for ways to get your recruit to smile and laugh.
Make a prediction about the future. Every once in awhile, use your expertise to make a bizarre or risky claim about the future. Your program’s future, the future of your sport…remember, you’re doing all of this to set yourself apart and differentiate yourself from your competition. If you have any authority at all, people will take notice. When experts make a surprising prediction, it gets talked about. As a coach, you aren’t looking for media attention…just for your prospect to take notice and pay attention to your message.
Make sure you are ALWAYS telling a great story. I’ve talked about this over and over again, and use it as a foundation for creating our Total Recruiting Solution plans for our list of college coach clients. At their core, stories support your key recruiting points, make solid openers, and teach your prospects while entertaining them. And, a good story can make you a legend in recruiting. I’m not talking about the little anecdotes that pepper Facebook and Twitter and the occasional recruiting letter. I’m talking about the story that haunts you on your deathbed or gets told over and over again at parties. Forget about all the others…tell me that one. As a coach, tell me great stories about you and your team and your program, and how I fit into that story as a prospect.

Being interesting isn’t easy if you’re a coach, and converting that interest to your writing is even more challenging. But for those coaches who master the art, there is almost nothing that they won’t accomplish in the competition for the best recruits.

Strive to be interesting creatively, and watch what happens to your recruiting results!

Need help developing your story? From our customized On-Campus Workshops for athletic departments, to one-on-one personalized recruiting message creation as a part of our Total Recruiting Solution plan for coaches, we have a lot of resources that can help coaches become more effective recruiters. To visit our website, click here. Or, email Dan Tudor directly at dan@dantudor.com.

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7 Ways to Restructure Your Game Recap MessagesMonday, September 5th, 2011

You are probably sending your recruits some information about you and your program that you are really proud of.

And you’re missing a golden opportunity.

Why?

Because they aren’t reading the way you’re hoping (or assuming) they are reading it.

I’m talking about your game and season updates that you send your prospects: You win a big game, and out goes the email with the game summary and recap written by your sports information director, linked to your college website. Your star Senior wins Player of the Week honors, and you link to the story on Facebook. Local T.V. has highlights of your team’s winning play, and you send out the video to your entire prospect list.

And on the other end, your prospects rarely read it. And if they do, they are probably more than a little bored by them.

Here’s why:

According to the feedback and research we’ve done over the years, one of the biggest non-factors in the decision making process for your typical recruit is the regular season update email updates that you send them, primarily because most teenagers aren’t avid readers of news. Especially when it’s written. Studies show that teenagers don’t typically read newspapers, or even any long text articles online.

The bottom line – as sad as it is for me to say as the only person on my block who still stumbles out in his robe every morning to pick-up the morning newspaper – is that today’s generation just doesn’t care that much about your game results, and they certainly don’t want to read articles about something they don’t care that much about.

Which brings us back to those updates that you send your recruits: Are there ways to actually get them engaged with those updates, and get them to care about how your season is going?

We think so. Here are seven ways that we’ve seen coaches improve the way they update their prospects on a regular basis:

Always…ALWAYS…give your summary ahead of the actual article. If you’re going to forward your prospect an article about your team, make sure you give them your take on the outcome before the actual article. One big reason why: First, it’s unlikely they’ll read the actual article. They’ll just rely on your summary, and see the link to the article as proof that you’re view is accurate.
Instead of the article, send a video. After the win (or even a loss) send them a short video from either yourself or a couple of players on your team. Your prospect cares much more about hearing directly from you or their future teammates for a few seconds instead of an article that was in the newspaper.
Print it out and mail it. Would you believe that most prospects read printed articles you send them instead of a link that you send them? It’s true. By the way, when you send them that article, I’d recommend that you highlight a key paragraph that you’d want them to focus on, and add a quick personal note to it.
Limit it to once every two weeks (at the most). The one sure way to wear-out your prospect is to send them your game and season updates every week. Don’t subject them to that. Try to limit updates (even the improved versions we’re suggesting here) to once every two weeks, at the most. It might seem like you’ll be missing a lot, but not to worry…they don’t care that much about your day-to-day operation all that much yet, and they certainly don’t want to have to try to keep up with you on a weekly basis.
Ask a question. In every communication plan we create for our clients, we work hard to make sure that regular communication creates a reaction from the prospect receiving those messages. The same should hold true for your season updates. Try to work in questions with your game updates. Seriously, coach…how cool would it be to get actual reaction from your prospects after they read your updates? (Trust us, it’s a good feeling).
Make your updates shorter rather than longer. If you don’t want to make any of these more in-depth changes, try to drastically shorten the game updates you send your prospects. No more than three paragraphs. Please. And, one of those paragraphs should be a quote from you or one of your players about the game.
Give them a preview of what’s coming next. I’m not talking about your next game. I’m talking about what they need to look for in their mailbox or Inbox from you in the coming days. The worst thing a coach can do is to send out a game update as a stand-alone message. Try to tie it in to your upcoming messages, which is hopefully a part of a complete compelling story that you’re telling them.

There is a better way to send out your game updates, Coach. In fact, you can turn your run-of-the-mill game updates into lead-generating messages that can get your prospects more focused on what you have to offer them.

Need more tools to help you design a more on-target recruiting strategy? There are lots of great resources that college coaches have relied upon for years, and you can get access to them, too. Just click here to take a look at our best selling training DVDs, recruiting guides for coaches, and in-depth research studies.

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How to Use Headlines to Keep Your Prospect’s AttentionSunday, June 12th, 2011

In the give-it-to-me-quick-just-the-facts world that we (and your prospects) live in, what and how you communicate is crucial.

Think about it: How easy it to tune something out that isn’t worded just the way we want it? Or skip reading something that isn’t easy to read visually?

Most recruiting letters and emails we see when we begin working with a new client ignore this common sense rule. And the price to those who send letters that look and sound the same as they did in 1983 is heavy: This generation of athlete will tune out a coach quickly if the message doesn’t match their need for fast, accurate, interesting information.

The fix?

Something they did really well back in the 1930′s: Creative, bold headlines.

No, you don’t want to make your recruiting letters look like an old fashioned newspaper…that’s not what I’m getting at. What I mean is that your text needs some guideposts to keep your reader (the 17 year old impatient kid that you’re trying to recruit) engaged in what you’re saying, and not bailing on your message ten seconds into it.

The best way to do that is to insert a headline every once in a while. A statement, in bold type, to give your reader and idea of where you’re going and what’s in it for them if they stick with you. Something like this:

There are some AMAZING benefits to coaches who write with headlines:

Does that make you want to read more? Does it give you a little taste of what’s to come? Does it create a little bit of curiosity?

That’s the power of a well placed headline.

So, if you think you’d want to start to use these powerful, easy-to-use weapons in the war of attention you’re fighting with your recruits, here are some tips that we see working for the coaches who are beginning to use them:

Try a “How To” Headline. They work. We all want to know how to do something, and if there is one group of people who are looking for how to do something (namely, play college sports) it’s your recruits. Whenever you want to highlight an action you want your prospect to take, start with “how to” to do it.
Give them a promised result. If you are tempting them with a “how to”, don’t stop short…finish it off with a result they can expect once they follow your recommended action. Let them know what will happen next, what they’ll get from it, and why they should follow your direction. It’s critical that you give them an idea of what’s in it for them when you if they stick with you.
Visually, they help guide your readers’ eyes. Headlines in the middle of text will cause your reader to jump down the page and stay engaged with what you’re saying to them. For this generation of teenager, they need all the visual cues they can get to tell them what to do.
We remember headlines. They are a short summary of what we want the reader to know about our topic. If they don’t happen to read your entire message, the headlines have a powerful way of helping them to remember your take-away from that message. That’s really crucial as you fight to get your prospects to remember your message instead of your competition’s.
They break up your message into logical sections. Not only does that help your prospect “digest” your message more easily, we find that it helps coaches stay on topic and keep their message simple and on point. So, if you’re a coach that struggles with what to write, this trick should help you to stay on topic.

So, what should you do next? Simple…

Take a current recruiting message and break it up into sections. Then, add a quick ”headline” to each of those sections. If you find that it’s too long of a message, or jumps around from topic to topic, break it up into shorter, multiple messages.

Take a fresh look at your overall recruiting message using this proven, easy-to-use strategy. The result should be a more engaged, interested recruit reading – and understanding – your letter or email.

Are you one of the growing number of college coaches that use Twitter to promote you and your program? We have a bonus article to give you…it’s all about writing the right headlines when you tweet on Twitter. All you have to do is click here, “Like” our Facebook fan page, and get these great tips for carving out your place in the Twitterverse.

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4 Easy Ways to Get Your Recruiting Message ReadMonday, May 2nd, 2011

Over the years, we’ve focused a lot on the negative aspects of recruiting.

What not to do.

Today, we’re staying positive. We’re focusing on your recruiting letters and emails, and how to get your prospects to pay more attention to them. Because the more effective you are in your writing, the better you’ll be able to tell your unique story to your recruits.

Why? Like it or not, the first step in the entire recruiting process usually starts with a written message from a coach. So, it’s important for coaches to take the subject seriously.

Even more compelling? Our studies show that a recruit will most often draw their initial picture of a coach and program that starts to recruit them through the letters and email messages that they receive.

So, see if you can apply these proven tips to your recruiting messages to get more meaningful response from your recruits:

Write your letter and email copy like a website. How do you look at a website? If you’re like nearly 80% of the country, according to a recent study, you ‘scan’ websites for information. Do your letters and emails have the same look and feel of a website? If not, you’re not taking advantage of our society’s new way of looking for (and finding) information. Your recruiting letters need to look, sound and “feel” different than they probably do now.
Ask a lot of questions. What we find in our research is that this generation of student-athlete is that they need you to ask them questions. Even if they don’t answer every one of them, they will actively engage with you in their mind. Eventually, they stand a better chance of replying to you and taking the next step in the recruiting process. Make sure you ask them questions. Lots and lots of really good questions.
Use bullets. Bullet points break up ideas into easy-to-read chunks that let your prospect ‘scan’ your message more effectively. It’s easier on our eyes, and is one of the ways we like to drive home the main points we want our client’s prospects to understand. That’s what we’re doing here with this numbered list…see how it helps you take in the information we’re presenting?
Be bold and use bold. Bold type is another way to set your ideas in motion with your recruits. We see a lot of coaching letters that coaches write with bold type in a traditional place…usually at the beginning of a sentence or main idea. Nothing wrong with that. It’s better than nothing. But if you really want to interrupt your prospect’s train of thought, try bold face type at the end of a main idea. That way, they’ll have to re-read what you were talking about before the bold face type, which further engages your reader.

Those are four very easy, very effective ways to re-capture the attention of your recruits when they get one of your envelopes or open one of your emails. Your homework: Take just one of your tired, old messages and apply these four techniques. See if it looks and sounds more like something one of your recruits might want to read and (more importantly) want to respond to.

Getting your recruiting messages read should be Goal #1 of any serious college recruiter. Make sure you re-tool your approach as soon as possible, Coach!

One month and counting to our biggest and best conference ever, the 2011 National Collegiate Recruiting Conference in Nashville, Tennessee on June 3rd through 5th. If you haven’t made your plans to be there, hurry! Our block of heavily discounted on-site hotel rooms are almost gone, and the deadline for registration is approaching fast. Just click here for all the information and to register for this Summer’s NCRC!

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More Ideas on Incorporating Headlines Into Your Recruiting MessageMonday, November 15th, 2010

If you believe that the principle of using headlines in your recruiting message makes sense, but you don’t know how exactly you’d incorporate those concepts into your letters and emails, I wanted to pass along some ideas to help you get started:

Make your headline ask a question or promise something.
Use your email subject line as your headline to readers…and be creative. Don’t type a subject line that blandly says “State University Baseball”. Make the reader curious about what’s waiting inside your message to them if they click on it.
It’s o.k. to use multiple headlines throughout your message. Try using them to headline key thoughts every paragraph or two.
Make your headline bold face, and have the font size just a little bit bigger than the main body of your text.
Ask a question.
Promise something.
Make them curious.
Make a bold claim, and then work on proving it to them.

Headlines are an effective tool to inspire and direct your reader – your prospects – to follow your story and engage in your line of conversation. Make sure they’re creative, engaging and focused on the athlete.

If you need help, just email me at dan@dantudor.com. We’re here to help.

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Using Headlines to Captivate Your ProspectMonday, November 15th, 2010

Is it possible to get a prospect to read a LOT of information about your program and school?

Maybe…if you have a headline like the one I found while tumbing through a magazine on an airplane earlier this week.

Here it is:

The headline is brilliant: “It is against international law to force prisoners of war to read this entire ad”.

The rest of the text? It’s more than 1,000 words talking about how a virus software works, and why I needed to buy it. Why did I read it all? Mainly because I was trying to figure out how they were going to tie-in the whole prisoner of war thing with the oh-so-exciting world of software utilities.

They never did. The headline stood on it’s own, and achieved it’s desired purpose: I can now tell you more than most other human beings can about software virus protection. I read the whole thing.

Here’s why this great advertising principle – and the 10 minutes of my life I sacrificed reading this two-page ad for our loyal readers – can offer some important recruiting lessons for your next series of emails or prospect letters:

We love headlines. Headlines tell us whether or not we should read something or not. Whether it’s a newspaper article or a post on the internet, we look for headlines to answer some immediate questions for us.

We like to be puzzled. The thing about the headline in the advertisement I showed you above is that it hits you out of the blue. The phrase isn’t something we read everyday, but we know enough about the subject (forcing prisoners of war to do something that’s against international law) to wonder what the rest of the small-print text says. In a world of ordinary, something out of left field really catches our attention.

The visual layout matters. Look at the two-page ad again. Notice how all the print is taking up literally the entire page? Most of the time, I’d advise against that. But the designers of this ad take “too much text” to the ridiculous extreme. It stands out because visually it breaks too many rules to ignore.

Asking the reader to take action helps it to all pay off. If the headline grabs their attention, and the layout puzzles your prospect and draws them in, you need to take advantage of their attention and ask them to take action. A call to you, and email giving you a piece of informaiton…something. “Static information”, as I refer to letters that only give a reader information and no way to get involved and take action, does very little to further the recruiting process. Ask your prospect to take action. A good headline is a start, but it’s only a small part of an effective message that resonates with your prospect.

Take a look at your letters and emails that you’ve been sending out lately. Can you find a way to add an effective headline to draw your reader in and tell your story effectively by giving them some headlines to help guide them into your message?

Knowing how to communicate with your prospect is key to effectively recruiting them. Our special research study, “Inside the Mind of Your College Prospect”, unlocks the secrets of what today’s high school prospect really want from the coach who is recruiting them – including what they want to read in letters or emails that you send them. It’s information you need to know, coach. Click here for more information.

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New Findings: Paper Beats Digital for Recruiting Message ImpactMonday, October 4th, 2010

The thinking over the past few years has been this:

“I’m a college coach who wants to make the biggest impact with the best prospects. And that means I need to focus on technology to communicate with them.”

Sure, there’s some truth to that. Technology, such as email, Dartfish, Twitter, Front Rush, NCSA and Facebook make interacting with recruits a lot easier and very effective.

However, a recent study will give coaches who still love the look and feel of the good ‘ol fashioned recruiting letter some good news:

Mail outranks electronic media when it comes to some important areas.

Physical media, such as recruiting letters and other creative materials, caused more emotional processing in the brains of those tested.
The same physical media left a deeper footprint in the minds of the receipients.

The bottom line of the study, which you can read in full here, is that physical mail and media seems more “real” to the reader. That’s an important fact to pay attention to, Coach, because the areas of the brain that are engaged during this processing are some of the places that make the deepest impact when it comes to our emotional connection with the sender.

There are some really effective ideas that are NCAA compliant that we recommend you focus on when it comes to making the most out of your physical mail recruiting:

Pay attention to the stock and quality of the paper you use. The study seems to indicate that the weight, brightness, and other quality factors are noticed by the reader. For example, what if you wrote about wanting to talk to your recruit about an offer, and did so on a heavier card stock? The look and feel of the paper you use helps to underscore the message you’re talking to them about.
Since paper registers deeper with our emotions, save your more emotional messages for the printed page. Things like your vision for your program, an official invitation to campus…those kinds of messages.
Paper is a great place to emphasize your logo and your program’s mission statement. And, recruits are looking for those kinds ideas from you. Go into as much detail as possible, and try to make your emotional appeals to recruits on the printed page.

Does this mean you should ditch electronic recruiting altogether and start licking stamps all day? Of course not, Coach.

Electronic communication with your recruits, when done consistently and correctly, can be a primary way to communicate with them. There are ways that you can interact with a recruit electronically that you just can’t with written letters.

However, what I am suggesting is that you put a stop to the growing trend I see when we consult with coaching staffs…the trend of moving totally away from written mail in favor of all-electronic recruiting campaigns.

It’s an easy lesson: Balance your more modern communication with some physical mail, as well.

Want some ideas on what to include in a great mail piece? We’ve put together a list of great elements of an effective recruiting message for free on our Facebook fan page. Click here to read it, and while you’re at it stop by our Facebook page to become a fan of Tudor Collegiate Strategies so you can get regular updates and exclusive tips we feature on our page.

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5 Reasons Why Inciting Your Prospects is a Great IdeaMonday, December 14th, 2009

Indiana Jones Any good movie that you’ve ever seen has had one key element. And, its something that you need to add in to all of your recruiting messages.

I’m going to teach you how to do it today.

I’m talking about inciting your prospects when they’re reading one of your letters or emails. If you’ve ever seen a really good movie, one that keeps your attention from start to finish, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

The Indiana Jones movie series is a great example of "inciting" moviegoers. If you’ve seen the start to any of them, you know it’s action and an important event that kicks off the story. Whether he’s being chased by a giant ball down a cave, stealing an ancient artifact, or hiding in a refrigerator to survive a nuclear explosion, you’ve been hooked to watch the rest of the movie.

Some of the best movie writers use this technique to write blockbuster stories that we just can’t resist: The ask the question, "What is the big event, or the big moment, that really gets this story rolling?"

That usually comes at the beginning of a film (a good one, anyway), and it keeps you glued to the screen from that point forward.

So, how does all this apply to your recruiting message? What techniques can you use from this tried-and-true screenwriting trick to construct better recruiting letters and emails?

Glad you asked…

First things first: Take a look at the text of one of your recruiting letters.

Now, divide it into thirds.

Next, eliminate your first third of the letter. Why? Because if the typical recruiting letter were a movie script, you would unnessarily delay the main plot line – and the event that would "incite" your viewer – with needless text. It’s extra fluff that doesn’t hook your reader, and that’s bad.

Coaches write wonderfully worded messages most of the time, but it’s mostly dull background stuff that our research shows isn’t important to this generation of recruits. By chopping off that first third of your initial draft, you’ll be cutting straight to the point and giving yourself a better chance of capturing your reader’s attention.

How else can you make sure you incite your prospects from the start? Here are my suggestions:

Make each message about one big idea. Stick with one main theme in each of your messages, and you’ll have a much better chance of keeping the attention of your recruit. For more ideas on what themes work best, and more detail on how to construct those messages, consult our two best-selling advanced recruiting guides for college coaches. It’s better to split up one letter into six separate letters if you look at it and see too many themes or ideas that you’re trying to get across to your prospect.
Paint a picture for your prospect. Once you have that message down, its time to do more than just tell your recruit the facts and figures. Your challenge: To paint and emotionally compelling picture of what awaits your recruit if he or she chooses your program. You have to do that through words, and the more you focus on the feeling of your school and your program, the better your message will connect with your prospect.
Who’s got your back? Will you use one of your athlete’s stories about why they chose your program? Will you tell them about an event in your coaching career that drives how your message? It’s helpful if you can punctuate your recruiting points with real-life examples that will help your prospect feel connected to your program. Plus, its one of the best ways to "incite" your recruit to keep moving forward with you as you continue to recruit them.
Insert some danger. Or trials, or trouble. It’s O.K. to bring up some of the things you’ve had to overcome as a coach, or things that your program has had to deal with during a season. In fact, danger attracts attention. Danger or suspense in a movie almost guarantees that you won’t run out to get more popcorn during those scenes, and that’s the kind of attention you want to maintain with your recruits.
After you’re all done, trim it some more. Take your final work and cross out at least three more sentences. You can never edit too much, and you can never make it shorter than it needs to be. Why make it shorter? Because time after time, as a part of our process of researching data with current college athletes when we’re doing our On-Campus Workshops around the country, your athletes tell us that they want more "to-the-point" messages that cut through the fluff and get straight to the good stuff.

When you do each of those five things, and throw in creative email subject lines and catchy headlines in the body of your recruiting letters, and you’ll see an increased liklihood that you’ll keep your recruit around for the whole entire recruiting cycle.

So, Coach…what can you do today to incite your prospects?

The strategies we’ve outlined above are just a few of the components we use to build winning recruiting plans and messages for our Total Recruiting Solution clients. If you like what you’ve read, but want a team of experts to come alongside you and help your program create more effective recruiting campaigns, email Dan at dan@sellingforcoaches.com. Or, visit www.sellingforcoaches.com for all the details about the TRS plan.

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Three Simple Ways This Coach Made Her Recruiting Letters More PowerfulSunday, April 26th, 2009

When we teach coaches to adjust their recruiting strategies, some of the advice we give goes against what they’ve been doing for years and years.

It’s not natural…it doesn’t feel "right"…it’s opposite what they’ve been doing for years and years. Even though their current recruiting methods lack the results they know they should be getting.

There’s a great example of what I’m talking about, and it comes from a coach who we had the chance to work with recently at one of our special Selling for Coaches recruiting conferences. Wendy, a college volleyball coach, was looking for a new way to communicate with her prospects. When we taught her a new way to write shorter, more effective letters, she was (as many coaches are) somewhat skeptical. Could shorter letters with specific language that elicits better responses result in measureable improvements in the responses she would get from recruits?

One week later, Wendy emailed us with the results of her new, re-written recruiting letters that she had started sending recruits:

I sent our brand new recruiting letter to a new 2010 recruit. She received it yesterday and responded by email immediately!!!!!!

I was hesitant about the letter because I was so used to my highly informative letter! With the response I received from the three sentence letter, I’m confident none of my recruits will ever receive the old letter again!!!!!

This was the recruits response:

Dear Coach,

I received your letter in today’s mail. Thank you so much for taking the time to write to me. I am overjoyed to hear the news. I am definately interested in becoming a part of your team! I have inquired about the volleyball program through your website, and pleased and impressed with what the program has to offer. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future. Thank you once again for your interest.

Sincerely,

Samantha

This coach followed three very simple principles that we recommend. We teach it in our recruiting workbooks for college coaches, and we teach it at our recruiting conferences like the one Wendy attended. Briefly, here are the principles we recommend coaches follow:

Keep it short. Especially the initial letters that they receive. Shorter is better.
Leave questions unanswered. Don’t try to answer everything in one letter. Leave some details and answers out, so that they have a reason to listen to you the next time.
Give them a call to action. With this generation, you need to tell them specifically what they need to do next for you.

Simple changes can yield big results. Just ask Wendy!

Learn more proven recruiting strategies at our Recruiting Kick-Off Conference coming up in August 2009. It’s our biggest conference of the year, and one of the most valuable two day recruiting conferences we offer. Click here for details, and for information on how to save $50 when you register.

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One Word That Gets Your Prospect to ActMonday, February 9th, 2009

Words are powerful.

When you create great recruiting messages, the right words – at the right time – can make the difference between a great response and a lackluster response from your prospect list.

This much we know: A truly persuasive coach can be a recruiting force that’s tough to beat.

So, what’s one copywriting secret that can help make any coach more persuasive? Actually, its not a “secret”. It’s a word. A little psychological trick that can make all the difference when you are trying to get someone to do what you want: Just say “because.”

Here’s a quick story behind the theory…one that I usually explain when we conduct one of our On-Campus Workshops for an athletic department or coaching staff: Robert Cialdini, in his book “The Art of Influence”, describes an experiment he conducted where a student with a stack of papers approaches a line of other students all waiting to use the copy machine at a large university and asks them if they would not mind letting him cut in line.

In one variation of the experiment, the student approaches the people waiting in line and says, “Excuse me, I’ve got five pages. May I jump in and use the machine?”

In another variation, the student does the same exact thing, except this time he says, “May I jump in and use the machine, because I’m in a rush…”

Seems like such a subtle difference, doesn’t it? However, the differences between results were anything but subtle.

* Only 30% of the students waiting in line agreed to let the student cut in front of them in the first variation of the experiment.

* However, a whopping 96% of the students, however, let the student cut ahead of them in the second variation when they were given a short “because” reason.

What Cialdini’s experiment sought to prove, coach, is something psychologists call a “trigger effect.” Certain actions, certain gestures, certain words – for whatever reason – have a profound persuasive effect on us. Often, we do not even know we are responding to the trigger. As soon as it registers, we react. Cialdini calls this a “click & whirr” response, and compares it to the way some animals react instinctively to the markings of predators in the wild.

In this particular experiment, though, the trigger being tested was the word “because.” Think about it: “Because” is a word we use all the time to justify our actions or reasons to other people. What the Cialdini experiment succeeded in revealing, however, is that the reasons we give are really not as important as the word itself.

Cialdini repeated the second variation of the experiment with the student using different reasons for cutting in line. Some of them were simply ridiculous, such as “Because I need to make copies.” In all cases, the people waiting in line responded with the same degree of compliance.

Why? Because of “because.”

So, coach, how does this apply to your recruiting efforts? Simple. There comes a time with every athlete that you want more information, or want them to see things your way. The next time that situation arises, make sure you add a “because” to your request.

It works, and could give you exactly the information that you need to win over the recruit.

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Dan Tudor

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Dan Tudor

Six Surprising Ways YOU Can Be More Interesting to Your RecruitsMonday, September 12th, 2011

7 Ways to Restructure Your Game Recap MessagesMonday, September 5th, 2011

How to Use Headlines to Keep Your Prospect’s AttentionSunday, June 12th, 2011

4 Easy Ways to Get Your Recruiting Message ReadMonday, May 2nd, 2011

More Ideas on Incorporating Headlines Into Your Recruiting MessageMonday, November 15th, 2010

Using Headlines to Captivate Your ProspectMonday, November 15th, 2010

New Findings: Paper Beats Digital for Recruiting Message ImpactMonday, October 4th, 2010

5 Reasons Why Inciting Your Prospects is a Great IdeaMonday, December 14th, 2009

Three Simple Ways This Coach Made Her Recruiting Letters More PowerfulSunday, April 26th, 2009

One Word That Gets Your Prospect to ActMonday, February 9th, 2009

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