Seven Must-Haves to Perfect Your School’s Sales Process

To run a successful and influential school in your community you will need to grow. Growth means that you will need to sell new students and selling well requires a process. Creating a sales process for your school that delivers every month is a big project. You will evolve it over time, but it helps to start with an outline. From there, you will build your winning formula.

The list below contains seven items that you will need or need to know to perfect your sales process and grow your school:

1. Documentation. Don’t just think about your sales process. Write it down. Writing it down and documenting the steps will help you identify gaps, train staff members and make improvements over time.
2. An owner. One owner. Someone needs to responsible for sales at your school. If you spread responsibility around, you will lose track of key metrics, your process will lose its consistency and direction and your staff will become confused. If one person owns the sales process end-to-end, and can serve as the expert for your staff, then you will be more likely to succeed over time.
3. Immediacy. You and your staff need to have a plan to contact your leads the moment they come in and wherever they come in from. Immediately following up on leads has a tremendous impact on your ability to make contact with your prospects. As you know, simply making contact with someone who is interested in your business can be the hardest part of the sales cycle.
4. A sales funnel.
   Whether you offer free trials, paid trials, consultations or simply capture leads off of your Facebook page or website, you need to be able to follow each of those leads in their journey to becoming a student. To do this, document your sales funnel and use Zen Planner to track your prospects as they travel through the different steps in your funnel. If you’ve got a website built by us, this process is easy. Leads from your contact us form will go straight into your student software, with automated emails and documentation happening automatically.
5. Automations. Because the sales process can be time consuming and can require many follow ups with prospects to create conversions, you need to find ways to automate your sales process. Use Zen Planner’s email and text automations or task setting system to create predictable and consistent experiences for each of your prospects while also minimizing your workload.
6. A training plan for your staff. This is critical. You want your school to have a specific voice and project a specific brand in your community. Make sure your staff is clear on how they should communicate with prospects, when they should follow up and what your goals are. Training doesn’t happen in one session either. Make sure you train consistently, week in and week out.
7. One size does not fit all. Not everyone wants to or can be sold in the same way. Phone sales require a different approach than drop-ins so your in-school sales training and process should differ from your phone sales training and process. Take time to break these out and set clear expectations with your team for they how they should approach different sales situations.

School growth and a documented selling process go hand in hand. Have you implemented a sales process at your school? Be sure to share your tips and learnings below!

56% of leading schools surveyed state that they offer commissions to their instructors for recruiting new students. Interested in seeing which tactics leading schools are implementing to create success for themselves? Get your copy of our Martial Arts Benchmark Report today!