by Mandy Green, SFC Team Development Specialist
Is persuasion a gift? Are some coaches born with the ability to speak well and ‘sell’ their ideas successfully?
It sure seems that way when some coaches always get the recruits that they want, and year after year have successful seasons.
In your role as a coach, you need to be able to motivate, inspire, and persuade others. To be successful in this profession as a recruiter, you need to need to know how to move recruits to action to further the recruiting process. You need to start by getting that first response and end with a commitment. How do you do that though?
Here are five steps I wanted to suggest that you can take in an effort to progress through the recruiting process from start (identification) to finish (getting the commitment).
Step One: Get Their Attention
In your first few emails or letters, get the attention of your recruit. Use storytelling, humor, a shocking statistic, or a rhetorical question – anything that will get the recruit to sit up and take notice. Be different than all of the other coaches out there who are sending out their long boring letters every month. When you get their attention, they will care less that you are from a small school, or that you don’t have a winning tradition, or that you don’t have the best facilities. They will notice that you are different from the rest and they will respond.
Step Two: Establish the Need
Every recruit will have wants and needs for their college experience. It is your job to figure out what those are. Convince your recruit that you care what their wants and need are. When they know you care, they will stick around to hear what you have to say.
Step Three: Satisfy the Need
Introduce your solution. How will you show the recruit that you can meet the wants and needs that they have? This happens a few months into the process after you have gotten their attention and established a need for your program. It will vary significantly, depending on each recruit and their needs. Now is the time to discuss the facts of your school and program. Elaborate and give details to make sure the recruit understands that your school has everything that they want and need for their college experience. Clearly state what you want the recruit to do or believe. Use examples, testimonials from your current team to prove the effectiveness of your solution. Be prepared with counter-arguments to anticipated objections.
Step Four: Visualize the Future
Describe what the situation will look like for the recruit when they come to your school. The more realistic and detailed the vision, the better it will create the desire to do what you recommend. Your goal is to motivate the recruit to agree with you and adopt similar attitudes, and beliefs about how your vision of the future for them matches what they want. Help them see what the results could be if they act the way you want them to. Make sure your vision is believable and realistic.
Step Five: Action/Actualization
Your final job is to leave your recruits with specific things they can do to solve their wants and needs. You want them to take action (commit) now. Don’t overwhelm them with too much information or too many expectations in each letter or email you send, and be sure to give them options to increase their sense of ownership of the solution.
Get the attention of your recruit, create a convincing need, satisfy the need, describe a detailed picture of success (or failure), and ask the recruit to do something right away: It’s a straightforward formula for recruiting success that we use for our Total Recruiting Solution clients. Try it for your next set of recruiting letters or emails, and you’ll no doubt be impressed with the results!
