by Mandy Green, Busy Coach
Last week I did a webinar for coaches called Recruiting Coordinators: Organize Your Recruiting Content.
I showed this simple picture and suggested that you create a mind map of your recruiting process.
Just in case you don’t know, a mind map is a graphical way to represent ideas and concepts. It is a visual thinking tool that helps structure information, helping you to better analyze, comprehend, synthesize, recall and generate new ideas.
Project managers can use mind maps to present their ideas clearly to their team.
Consultants and advisors can use mind maps to visualize their clients’ situations.
Marketers can use mind maps to create campaigns and editorial calendars.
Kids use mind maps to learn and memorize things better.
I believe college coaches would get a heck of a lot better results with their recruiting if they had more of a step-by-step process mapped out.
Have you ever mapped out or organized your recruiting process in this way?
I am a big believer in that you can’t achieve what you don’t see.
Hustle used to be my strategy. I had everything in my head or in my email and so nothing was repeatable or scalable. It is hard to replicate with success over time when everything was random or just a knee-jerk reaction.
I learned the hard way that I needed to have a clear set of steps that I worked through as I moved deeper into the recruiting cycle, and each one of those steps needed to have a desired outcome associated with it.
Once I got my recruiting process organized, I saw my conversations with prospects get more clear and more productive. And as a staff we multiplied our efforts and saved a lot of time because will knew who what doing what and when.
Through this process map, you can:
Identify problems,
Simplify what is too complicated to execute,
Eliminate unnecessary steps,
Figure out where you are missing content or need content created,
You can figure out where we are losing kids or what is taking too long,
You can more clearly delegate tasks,
Put timeframes to things.
Decide and assign who is in charge of accomplishing each step?
I always looked at it as well by asking the question: How can I get a recruit from identification to commitment in the fewest steps possible? It got me thinking differently and made me come up with new and better ways once I figured out where I could trim some fat.
Me being the efficiency nerd that I am also tries to get a kid from commitment to becoming a freshman on campus in the fewest amount of emails possible 😊 Just takes a little upfront organization.
If you haven’t caught on yet based on the content I provide in this newsletter and what I talk about on my webinars, I am a true believer in systems. Whether you are aware of it or not, you currently have a system for how you walk a recruit through each of the steps in the recruiting process.
The systems (system = your process for accomplishing a task) you have are set up perfectly for the results you are getting. If you don’t like your results, you need to upgrade and optimize your systems.
Mandy Green is the founder of the Busy Coach program for college athletics staff, and a trusted advisor for the coaches who work with us at Tudor Collegiate Strategies. To ask Coach Green a question, email her at mandy@dantudor.com.