One of our Premium Members had a quandry: They were pretty sure that a soccer recruit she had been recruiting for several months had finally made up her mind to sign with our Member’s school. But she didn’t want to ”push” the athlete. She didn’t want to make her prospect think she was “desperate” to sign her (which she was, by the way!). Still, our coach really wanted to know.
What we trained her to do was to start asking effective trial close questions. Specifically, questions that would give her insight into what her prospect was thinking, making it easier for her to know when it was time to ask for that final commitment. “Trial close” questions are part of the arsenal of every business sales professional in today’s world, and in our book, “Selling for Coaches”, we train college coaches to use the same effective strategy to better guage their recruit’s frame of mind.
Here’s a sample of the strategy we outline in the book that you can use to interact more effectively with prospects that you are talking to:
“Once you handle objections that are raised by your prospect and the family, you are a step closer to gaining their acceptance of you and your program as their college choice. But you can’t stop there. There are two more important steps in the selling process that need to take place. One of those steps is to use a few effective “trial close” techniques with your prospect, or his or her parents. What is a trial close? Simply put, it’s a question that gauges the athlete’s interest level in your offer and your program by assuming the athlete has made a commitment by the type of question that you ask.
An example of how that kind of a question may sound would be, “When you move on
campus next fall, do you think you want to room with another athlete or with a regular student?” Or, another one might be, “Mr. and Mrs. Johnson, have you talked about how often you might be able to come see Jenny play at our school?”
Do you hear the tone of the question? It already assumes that the athlete is coming to your school in the way that you ask the question. The key to an effective trial close question is in the answer that’s given by your prospect or their parents. Do they answer in such a way that tells you they’re assuming that they will be committed to your program next year? Have they already pictured themselves at your college and on your team? If the answer in your mind, as you’re listening to them, is “yes” then you’ve probably sold them on your offer. Way to go! If they answer your question with, “I don’t know…I’ve never really thought about that before” or “Man, I don’t know…that’s a tough one” or “we haven’t talked about that”, then you know that you have more work to do.
The value of trial close questions, as we go on to outline in this special recruiting guide for college coaches, is that it gives recruiters good indicators of what their prospect is thinking. That allows smart coaches to do a few key things:
- Know when to ask for their commitment without the risk of appearing to be “pushy”.
- Better understand the mindset of their prospect.
- Uncover what objections remain unresolved in the mind of their prospect.
- Keep control over the entire recruiting process.
Develop a list of effective trial close questions that you think you can incorporate on a regular basis during your closing recruiting conversations. Doing so will give you an added degree of confidence in your recruiting efforts.
