By Jeremy Tiers, Senior Director of Admissions Services
2 minute read
As someone who travels almost 40% of the year and often speaks for 6-7 hours at a time, I understand the challenge of making time to complete other important daily tasks.
Put up your hand if you’ve ever heard (or said) the phrase, “If it’s not in Slate, it didn’t happen.” Even if your school doesn’t use Slate, I’m sure you’ve heard something similar when it comes to adding notes and interactions in your CRM.
Similar to other “travel seasons,” I’ve had a good number of admission leaders ask me for advice this fall around getting their staff to consistently, and in a timely fashion, add key pieces of information to a prospective student’s file.
Here are five key reasons why adding those notes and interactions every chance you get is essential:
- It helps to personalize future conversations. Being able to reference a previous conversation or something that you’ve learned about a student allows you to increase the level of personalization and relevance you provide down the line.
- It helps your colleagues pick up the conversation. Building off the first bullet, when a student (or their parent/family member) reaches out about things like their application or scholarships, or they come to campus for a tour and you happen to be traveling or unavailable, having detailed notes and interactions allows your colleagues (including tour guides) to smoothly enter into a conversation, and avoid feelings of confusion and frustration that too often occur during the college search process. Instead, students and their families walk away feeling valued and “wanted” more.
- It allows you to see trends and the need for additional outreach. When you analyze all the notes and interactions in your CRM, you can identify trends and adjust your communication strategy in real time. Are multiple students running into the same issue at a certain point in the process? Are there certain questions that elicit detailed and helpful feedback?
- It helps admissions counselors to prioritize their outreach. Let’s say you want to reach out to all your inquiries who have visited campus but haven’t started their application. Running that query will probably produce a pretty large list of names. You can bring that number down by identifying which inquiries have interacted with you the most. As an example, how many have responded to one of your emails? How about multiple emails?
- It helps leadership with their enrollment planning goals. Notes and interactions in the CRM are key data points that can be used for predictive modeling and forecasting enrollment. Along those same lines, they can also help leadership (or you) when it comes to advocating for additional resources.
If you want to be the best advocate and resource for students, a better teammate, or a better territory manager, it’s imperative you have a clearly defined strategy when it comes to adding notes or interactions into your CRM.
Want to talk more about something I said in this article? I’m happy to connect. Simply reply back, or email me here.
And if you found this article helpful, forward it to someone else on your campus who could also benefit from reading it.