If your RTO is spending money on marketing but sending prospects into a weak sales process, you’re throwing cash down the drain. CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce often promise the world but fail to deliver the streamlined results you need because they are complicated to set up and use.
Today, I’ll walk you through the top 3 common mistakes we see RTOs making that are costing you enrolments—and how to fix them without investing more time or hiring additional staff.
Mistake #1: Failing to Follow Up with Leads
You’re losing enrolments to your competitors because you’re not following up enough with your leads.
Studies show that it takes at least 8 points of contact to engage a lead, yet 97% of business owners stop after just 3 attempts.
Want to outperform your competition? It’s actually really easy…
Here’s the simple truth: speed matters. Over 50% of businesses wait up to a week before reaching out to leads. But if you contact prospects within minutes of receiving their inquiry, your chances of closing that sale skyrocket.
Here’s the harsh reality, if you’re not willing to follow up consistently, you’re better off not acquiring leads at all. It’s that important.
If you follow up your leads within a minute of them opting in and you have a good sales system in place you’ll NEVER have to worry about a prospective student going to another RTO.
(Pro Tip: Chris Smith’s ‘Conversion Code’ dives deeper into this topic with some compelling stats that apply across various industries.) This is a great book that I highly recommend reading.
How to Fix it: Put your nurturing process for inbound leads into automations. Use email, text messages and voicemail drops in. Create the relationship with your new prospect within 1 min of them coming into your business. Increase the number of attempts to contact them to at least 20 points of contact over a period of two weeks. Don’t stop trying to reach them (unless they tell you they’ve purchased their course somewhere else).
Mistake #2: Not Tracking Your Results
One of the biggest pitfalls I see in RTOs is the lack of proper tracking.
You’ve probably heard the phrase, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This couldn’t be more true for your enrolment process. Many teams rely on outdated spreadsheets or are stuck with confusing CRMs that no one actually uses.
Without solid tracking and pipelines in place, how will you know what’s working and what’s not? Are your ads bringing in profitable leads, are your team following a sales process that increases enrolments, or are you using the hope and pray method for growing your business?
It’s time to get clear. Without proper automated business systems and data tracking, you’re essentially flying blind, and it’s costing you enrolments.
How to Fix it: Create a dashboard that you can easily view to see everything you need to measure. Work with your team on the things they need to be doing to help grow the revenue of your business.
Not only do you need to measure your advertising spend and conversions you need to measure what your team is doing. Do you have a repeatable system for sales that your team can follow? Have your team been trained in some basic sales principles? Are they following the system? Are they using the correct languaging to create conversations? Are they calling the leads the number of times you want them to call them?
We’ve seen our clients businesses double and triple in enrolments by putting KPI’s and systems in place for their teams. We’ve even had to turn their advertising off because their Face to Face classes are full.
Mistake #3: Doing Everything Manually
This one’s a killer: You and your team manually managing tasks that should be automated.
Many marketing managers and RTO teams are drowning in manual tasks. What they don’t realise is that automation can transform their entire process without having to sign their life away on expensive platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce.
Every day, thousands of leads slip through the cracks because systems aren’t optimised and the worst part of this is many RTOs don’t even realise how many enrolments they are losing.
Maybe you’ve tried a CRM or two, only to find them complicated, under-supported, or overpriced.
Meanwhile, important lead follow-ups are being missed, and deadlines are slipping. Enrolments forms are sent out never to be returned (this part can be automated too).
But here’s the good news: you don’t need to hire more staff or break the bank on a fancy CRM that promises the world but delivers an atlas.
What if you could have an entire sales and marketing system that works for you, at the fraction of the cost of traditional solutions? What if you could have a team of specialists in the background creating and maintaining automations that will save you and your team hours of work every week?
What would it mean for you if you had a team in the background looking for opportunities to automate areas of your business saving you hours every week.
Let’s do the maths… What if through the use of automations you could be chasing leads (with no human involvement) and freeing up 5 to 10 hours of a team member’s time each week. I’m not sure what you pay your team but lets say it’s $30 an hour x 10 hours a week is $300 a week. Times that by a year = $15,600 (saved).
520 hours a year (time saved) for a human so they can be using their time for the other things they are responsible for that they never seem to get time to do.
It’s not just the lead follow up that can be automated either, there are so many things in your business that humans are doing that can be replaced OR supported through the use of automations.
How to Fix it: I’m going to be cheeky here but unless you’ve got a systems and automations specialist in house, find a team like ours who can build and maintain this for you.
If you’re ready to save time and money and want to start enrolling more students, Student Convert can help.
We specialise in automating your sales, marketing and business processes, giving you the power of a full team, without the risks or costs.
In fact, the Student Convert Business Optimisation system systematically increases enrolments from an average of 2 enrolments for every 100 leads to 5-13 new enrolments for every 100 leads.
Click here to schedule a call and see how Student Convert can help you grow: