Is Your On-Campus Visit as Good as It Could Be?

Hi Coach,

Oftentimes coaches will do an on-campus visit and say, “It didn’t go as well as I wanted to. I know something is missing, but I don’t have time to fix it, so it is what it is.”

The next visit is run EXACTLY the same as the one before with the exact same result.

No, no, no.

To me that is a HUGE waste of time and a big mistake.

What about that visit didn’t work? Stopping to ask yourself that question could be time well spent because it’s not always that the visit didn’t work. It could be a breakdown somewhere in the process.

After you have completed a visit, I believe this is where the perfection process begins to take place and where the real work begins.

This is when you take a visit and start deconstructing it. And there are at least three things that I will suggest you focus on in this article.

What Are Your Conversion Points?

If you want to dial in your visit and make it the absolute most perfect on-campus visits for a recruit, then you’ve got to look at your conversion points.

There are 3 simple conversion points to consider:

1. Before a visit.
2. During the visit.
3. After the visit.

If you aren’t getting enough recruits to even come to visit, then you’re going to have to consider that the message you are communicating isn’t working.

Maybe there’s not enough urgency for recruits to commit right after a visit, so you’re going to have to fix your messaging after they have come to visit. Or if recruits show up, but don’t commit, then you also have to look at your offer.

The key to all of this is to document your process.

Until you document how you run an on-campus visit, you don’t have any baseline data to be able to understand where in that whole process things are going well or not going well.

Always Tweak Your Messaging

The second thing is you need to look at your messaging. I wish I could just give you a magic wand that you could wave and have the perfect messaging the first time out of the gate. But when it comes to messaging, it takes time. You saying the same thing over and over again, or tweaking it, dialing it in and listening to what recruits are saying, listening to where there’s a disconnect, looking at the questions and the comments that are coming through during and after the visit.

Look to Improve Your Offer

Number three is the offer. There’s always room to improve the offer. As a college coach, the offer you are presenting could be a scholarship or roster spot. Where most coaches fall short on the offer is when they describe the experience and opportunity you can provide to the recruit.  You can improve your offer by doing a better job of explaining the value you are offering for the money they will be spending.

Don’t Give Up and Keep Learning

If you don’t feel like your campus visit is working as well as it should, you need to break it down.

When it is documented and you work through it, you will learn and make adjustments to your documented procedure. Do another one, you learn again, and that visit gets better and better every single time you deliver it.

When it comes to creating the perfect on-campus visit, you have to realize you’re never going to have a perfect visit the first time you do it, but you have to keep doing it so that you can continue to refine it.

Your welcome to come to our Recruiting Made Simple meeting tomorrow to dig deeper into this topic.  We will get your on-campus process documented and you will see the templates, checklists, and emails I would send out.

To Your Success,
Mandy Green