831: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Dr. Chris Gilmore, Vice President, Enrollment Management, & Dr. Jodi Ashbrook, Vice President for Enrollment Management Consulting, EducationDynamics

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast, where we make education your business. Of course, this is me Dr. Joe Sallustio. This is my something - I don't know what number podcast this is of the day. But I got to tell you, I have been very excited for this episode. Why? Well, I'll tell you why. First, let me tell you where I am. I'm at InsightsEDU. And we've been podcasting here episodes from people all across the higher ed community in every area - marketing, enrollment specifically. 

The importance of marketing and enrollment cannot be overstated. In fact, this morning in the online student report, which was chock full - and I mean full - of information about today's online student trends, something you should go and download, you should read every word, because the insights in that report are going to help you make better marketing and enrollment decisions. I say that selfishly because I use that report to make my marketing and enrollment decisions, because I in my role, like you would do the same thing that you're doing, which is try to recruit more students.

Marketing is just one way to do that. You got to get the lead. And then when you get the lead in the student who's interested, you have to convert that student into an actual enrollment. So there's a people part of this that we want to talk about. And I don't think out of the 830 something episodes that we have done here on the EdUp Experience, we have really talked about enrollment and training of enrollment advisors and the investment that you have to make in your enrollment infrastructure to do what ultimately you have to do, which is convert that student to an enrollment. We've talked about it, we've said that you need to do it, but I don't think we've gotten into the detail.

So I've been waiting for this episode with these guests and I got to get their intros right because I'm so excited. I'll probably get them wrong. I'm gonna go for it. Here we go: Dr. Chris Gilmore, he's Vice President of Enrollment Management and Dr. Jodi Ashbrook, Vice President of Enrollment Management Consulting and Founder of the U School at Education Dynamics. Welcome guys.

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Thank you.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Thank you. We're happy to be here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know what, I'm happy to have you and I think this is a topic that is first of all, near and dear to my heart as somebody who's worked in enrollment management for 20 something years. I won't get exact, but it's been a really long time. It's the first job I ever had in enrollment management. I truly believe that the difference maker for a lot of students is who you talk to and how prepared they are to give you the information. So Jodi, I'll start with you. First of all, what is the U School and why do we need to know about it related to the work that you do?

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Yes, thank you for asking. Well, the U School is the school created for the school. It is the learning platform powered by Education Dynamics where we come in and we help your enrollment teams, your operations teams, your financial aid teams, develop the skills that they need to have effective conversations with students.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. And I think we take for granted that people know how to have those conversations. So when we take that for granted and we just put them out into the field to have these conversations, it looks a lot like you spend money on marketing and then you see lower conversions and you see high turnover rates with your staff. So I'm sure we'll get into that later, but there's a lot there from how do you develop and coach and train your staff so that they know what to do with all that money that you're spending and all those prospective students that are coming to them. Do you think, Chris, over to you, do you think that institutions are focused on training of enrollment management professionals as they should be? Is there enough investment in that?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Broadly, I think there's definitely some exceptions. There are some institutions that really take student-facing enrollment roles really seriously, put a lot of time and effort into training and development content. But I don't think that's normative. I think the more norm is under-resourced hiring people that we think, you know, they're good at talking to people so they'll figure it out and kind of letting them go there.

I really appreciate the question because I take every advantage to say, you reference the student report that we put out just this morning with the keynote. There were so many good data points in it. So many of them to me reinforced that we are getting fewer and fewer opportunities to interface with our students. And so we really have to shine at every single interaction that we have with them. And to me, you're not very likely to do that unless you're really ramping up the professional development of the people that are doing it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact. Let me ask you guys a question. This is something that I've been trying to answer for over 20 years. And I recently had somebody tell me I was wrong for thinking this way. And I want to know what you guys think. When you get down to brass tacks and what we do, take out the education part. We have a service and people in enrollment - sales, if you will - sell that service.

And if you took out education and you put in a SaaS product or a technology product or whatever, those salespeople would be very highly compensated in the company that they work for because they're driving the revenue. In higher ed, it's not that way. In fact, the pay scale is almost completely flipped where we're hiring people at low dollars. We're expecting them to drive the revenue for the institution. The position itself isn't always as highly valued as it needs to be. It's more like a lower, you just hire another, just go hire another rep. What's the big deal? You just pull them off the street. Why is higher ed like that? That's my question. Anybody got a good answer or am I totally off base?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: I know, I think you're on base. I'll take a swing at it. I think that there are a couple of factors that influence where we are as higher education that you referenced that, you know, any other industry is highly compensating, highly training, highly developing their sales professionals and higher ed, it tends to be kind of the opposite with some exceptions.

I think that one of the factors there is we have some external regulatory realities in higher ed that do have some different restrictions on how we have to operate. To me, that does cut out a few things that in an ideal world, a lot of us would incorporate from the broader sales world. But to me, it also reinforces that when it comes to higher ed, you have to hire a sales professional that is going to be motivated based off of the impact that they're making. You know, and I think a lot of schools do get that part of it right. And it takes a lot of work. You reference, just bring someone off the street. It doesn't work. It really dials up the level of expectations we have to have going into recruiting to work for us, to interview with us, to work with our students.

So I think that's one of the big factors. But I also do see, you know, some light at the end of the tunnel. And that is just the economic realities of, you know, the job market and what perspective enrollment coaches, admissions representatives are able to get in similar industries. I have seen start to influence what they're being compensated in higher education. Because they're getting pulled out of higher ed and getting a higher salary somewhere else. And you know, we're only going to be able to survive for that for so long before we also adapt to the business reality that this is a super professional job. There's an extensive amount of training and development that goes into it. And they play a critical role in student decision-making. And if students don't make that decision to enroll, you know, none of us have jobs for very long. And most importantly, we're not really fulfilling our institutional missions.

So it's a critical role. I think that it's overdue to be compensated appropriately. And I think that economic realities are finally starting to make some progress.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Inches and not yards, right?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Absolutely. Yeah. We're definitely not there. And I don't think it'll ever be the case of, you know, we're going to have typically sales compensated people thriving in admissions. They really have to be intrinsically motivated, I think, to make a long go of it in the role.

And so for me, when working with admissions leaders, that means that day in and day out, you're not just talking about the numbers, you're talking about the why, the people, the impact, the outcome, and you can never get tired of that because that is the entire package of your motivation there.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Joe, two things I would offer to that. I think higher ed from a historical perspective has had this kind of elitist mentality in some cases.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I'm glad to hear somebody else say that. So it's not just me.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about. We have this thought process that, you know, admissions or enrollment, that's not sales. That's - we try to get so far removed from it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Exactly. So far removed from it.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: And in that, we don't compensate the people, but we - they're the first crew that we go to to say, hey, we need us more, more, more, more, and we're not going to train you or compensate you or support you along the way. So that's one thing. And I think in being removed from "we aren't sales," we rely on automated systems to nurture those students and emails and text messages. And while that has a place, I think the second part of where I would go with this conversation is we lose sight that to your point, insert any other product in there, all we're trying to do is connect with that human being that wants to go to school. And if we don't help our teams figure out how to do that in an authentic way, in a human way, then it does have this kind of weird feel to it. And we're going to remove ourselves from the process and insert a technical platform to solve the problem. Now we really are transactional and selling versus, your job is to connect with as many potential students as possible and to support them along their journey in an authentic way and we're gonna teach you how to do that.

So I think the elitist mentality gets us in trouble and then I think we don't wanna look at that prospective student as a human being and figure out, you know, would I answer the 50 emails that you're putting in my email box because the nurturing cadence says I need to send 50 emails in six months? No. No consumer is going to respond to that. So humanizing the student experience.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It's interesting because you're using bad words. Consumer, you just said consumer. This part - this is like - I've been waiting to talk to people like you who are dealing with enrollment professionals all day because this is a conversation that you have to have when you walk in and you tell an enrollment team that you're in sales, people in that enrollment team, if they haven't been properly trained and those outside will go, well, this is not sales. It's just not - it's something else. Well, I don't know what that something else is. So I always find it really unique that we believe somehow administrators or faculty that are well-trained professionals couldn't balance being a salesperson and sell to humans. Like you can't be in sales and do education, you have to be something different. And I don't think that's the case. I think you can be in sales, you could love the sales, but not the hard sell. And love the empathetic consultative sale that higher education can bring you and still be somebody that does well and be compensated with a decent pay range that keeps you in the industry for a long time.

Chris, you know, the number one thing, and this is my opinion, even with lower paid reps, the worst possible thing that can happen to my team, it's not marketing, it's not inefficient marketing, it's turnover, right? I can work through inefficiency. I can work through that. I can't work through somebody that says, I didn't like this and I'm giving you my notice effective immediately. And now my load is loaded onto the five remaining people who start going, this is too much. I don't like my job anymore. And turnover is crushing in enrollment. It's absolutely crushing, isn't it?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Yes. I don't think that's new. But it is perhaps newly elevated in the last few years because we've seen really unprecedented competition, I think, in other sectors.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Good point.

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Being very attractive to enrollment professionals and good for them up there seeking opportunities and they certainly have the professional development skill set to do a lot of things.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: EdTech being one, right? You go find a really good rep that knows higher ed and goes work for EdTech. Now you're selling the job that you came from.

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Absolutely. Yeah, great example. I think for me, it really forces me to think about two things. One, it's a big, big operation and focus internally to professionally develop your team, to keep morale and engagement high, enthusiasm high, and to really be the support. I think that a lot of higher ed professionals outside of enrollment and admissions don't necessarily understand the grind. You know, everybody can be focused on a lot of the great things that are in the role, which there are endless great things in working with prospective students, you know.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is correct.

Dr. Chris Gilmore: But it is a grind. And it is the commitment to repetitive actions that gets the institutions the outcome that we need. And your enrollment teams are the ones that are taking that on. So I think a big part of the solution there is to just constantly educate others within our higher education ecosystem on the realities of the role, on what your enrollment professionals do day in and day out and the work that they do, how valuable it is. And then to your previous point, you know, we are in a position where we can't traditionally incentivize enrollment professionals in the way that a lot of other sales fields do. So what is gonna motivate your team? And really having those individual conversations because that if you have five people on your team, that's five different scenarios of what actually motivates them. So you as the leaders within that team really have to do a good job digging into that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, you're of course talking about the incentive compensation regulation. So if you're in the grind and you're in this cycle, if you're selling something else, there's some big payoff that comes at the end of that cycle - bonus or otherwise, in higher ed there isn't. But what are you doing? One of the things that you can do is you can invest a lot of money into training and professional development to make sure that your team feels like they're being - you're investing in them, right. But higher ed training is very specific, I find it's not like you can go buy some off-the-shelf program in sales training and apply it to those in higher ed, you know, you can - you know, like the Franklin Covey stuff and you can go get sales training, give it to all your higher ed folks. And they're like, well, this isn't really what we do. And I don't feel like this resonates with me. You started the U School, I think for a reason very typical of that, which is this is very specific training in higher education for enrollment professionals. And if it's not exact, they won't find that it resonates, right? And when they don't find it that it resonates, they are back in square one, right? They're frustrated. They're showing up every day to a job where their boss is saying more, more, more, and they're trying, calling, calling, calling, and still not seeing an impact.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: A little side note for you, one of the reasons that drove me to create the U School is when I was an enrollment counselor many, many years ago. Not that many. I came into the job and I was that person. I could not figure out how to have a student conversation to save my life. I couldn't figure out how to authentically connect to the student, learn about what they needed, and then progress that conversation forward in a way that felt authentic to me. So my boss said to me at the time, is this the right fit for you? And I was like, I'm not gonna quit, I'm gonna figure this out. Part of the passion behind the U School is I don't want people to feel that way. There is a pathway to authentically having a conversation with the student and progressing them forward. Tell them like it is. It doesn't have to be an either-or. And I sat in that seat and I don't want anybody else to feel that way.

Nobody wants to come into their job every day and feel like they're not being successful. Nobody, no matter what you do. And I think, again, going back to the very beginning of this conversation, a lot of times within higher ed, we just kind of pull people in, plug them into the role and say, go figure it out, and that's ultimately what we're doing to them. Without sufficient coaching and development and training that is specific to the conversation that they're having in higher ed, we're gonna see that ripple effect in a million different ways. Turnover, the student experience, the impact to your marketing dollar and your conversion rate. It's not just, we can overlook training. Think about probably five different places you can count on your hand right now that you're seeing the impact of you choosing not to invest in training.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So, Education Dynamics through the U School offers basically admissions rep or enrollment rep or whatever you call them training, like to enroll more students, right?

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Correct. Yes. And we usually see anywhere from a three to 10% lift in conversion when our folks go through. We call it optimizing your conversation and conversion.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah. And I'll tell you this and I'll only say it because it's true at Lindenwood University where I work, you have been working with my team on training. And I will tell you that right now our spring numbers where our spring, we have two starts in spring and our spring to start, which is coming up is 50% higher than last year's spring start for new students. So we're seeing a huge lift - 50% is a decent lift.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: I mean, I would like 51.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Right. Tell Nate Watson, it's all right. It's fine. But that training made a huge difference when we were - we took reps who were enrolling in a reactive way. And we said we need to start enrolling in a proactive way. We need to be reaching these students when you get them in front of you. You've got to develop that relationship because you get one chance, right? If you don't take that one chance, you're - we talked about the comparison set of schools, right? They were talking about this morning. Three schools maybe you're looking at. So what's the differentiator between those three schools? Isn't it the person who you talk to, Chris?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Yeah, often. And one of the things that we put out a few weeks ago, the marketing and enrollment management benchmark report, yeah, reinforced that with the data point that I loved, which is how highly prospective students rated the initial interaction that they have with an advisor or representative of the university on their likelihood to enroll and they rate it very highly. And this is of course not news to any of us who work in enrollment management. But I think is a nice data point to help educate the larger higher ed ecosystem on how critical those conversations and interactions are.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I like your style, dude. What else do you guys want to say about enrollment management and the work that Education Dynamics is doing in the space? Jodi, go first.

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: I would offer that for as long as I can remember, we've been looking at things like investing more money in marketing, the latest CRM platform. Now it's AI, the communication cadence. And at the risk of sounding like a broken record, all of that has a place. But what we haven't talked about enough and my hope and my passion is that we lift this up even more is that the development of your staff is the, Joe, to use your word, it's the differentiator. You can have the fanciest systems and all the marketing dollars in the world, but if your people, because they're the first line of communication, aren't ready to connect with that human being in a way that they're going to remember, it's all for naught, right? If you want to test that out, test it out - have one of your reps, with every phone call for the next month, when they make a phone call say, "Why would you want to come to my institution?" and see if that really matters. Right? If you have a rep who's just not really that good, says hello poorly on the phone, has a bad attitude on the phone, it's like saying go somewhere else. And if you're literally giving off that air, I can guarantee you that student will go somewhere else. So all the AI in the world will not convince that student to come to an institution where the first interaction they have with a rep is a negative one. It just won't happen.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Chris, anything else you want to say about enrollment management?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: You know, I think the things that I'm most excited that we're doing at Education Dynamics of late, one, bringing on Jody in the U School, fantastic. Because for us, in terms of working with our partner institutions, some of them have internal resources and they want to optimize those. They want to coach, train, and develop their internal teams, but they need some outside assistance for that. One of the things I love is that whether that's you or you're at another institution where you don't have the internal resources, you don't have the capability of doing this internally, you need to outsource it to optimize your enrollment. We now have solutions for both of those.

And we've always historically operated on a fee-for-service basis. And what I love about that is that that means that we go to our clients, we figure out what package of services is going to get them to their overarching objective. And working with Jody is perfect for me because the combination of internal skills-building consulting and/or outsourced solution management via my area and my teams - we're gonna be able to meet you where you are and we're gonna be able to make progress.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay, right now I'm sitting, I'm listening to this, it's gonna come out probably tomorrow morning. I listened to it and go man, I could use some training for my team. How do - who do I contact? Where - how do we get a hold of you guys? What should I do? How do I get started? It's - I'm nervous. I want to know if I have enough money. What should I do?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Yeah, well, so you can definitely reach out to us through Education Dynamics. If you're hearing this, you found the link on LinkedIn or wherever and reach us up through our corporate LinkedIn, our business team will put you in touch with the business leader unit and you can have an assessment conversation. We will figure out exactly what it is you're looking for. We do that all the time. Once we assess that, we're gonna get you to the right person, whether that's Jody's area, whether that's my area, maybe it's a marketing need with Sarah Russell and our marketing teams, we'll get you there. But the first thing is to reach out and have that intake conversation so we figure out what the need is there.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I believe that and - am I gonna ask the audience if you have an enrollment team and you need to invest more in them, which you probably do, one great way to do it is to get the training that they offer here through Education Dynamics in the U School. This is a profession. This isn't just a job you hire and you can get anybody in there and they're gonna all of a sudden produce for you. This is a profession and I am very passionate about this profession because I did the job and I did it for years.

And at times I wondered like where the value was, you just keep doing this thing over and over again. It's training. That's the way you can make the difference in the value for this profession. If you treat it like a profession, people will stay, they will be loyal, and they will continue to enroll students at your institution and help you hit your goals. But you got to invest and if you don't, they will leave and that turnover, it will crush you. Right, Jodi?

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Absolutely, Joe. Well said.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anything else, Jodi?

Dr. Jodi Ashbrook: Thank you for having us here.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first, you guys. Our guests, Dr. Chris Gilmore, Dr. Jodi Ashbrook, they're the VP of Enrollment Management and VP of Enrollment Management Consulting and Founder of the U School respectively. We hope you guys had a good time. You have a good time?

Dr. Chris Gilmore: Great time. Thanks, Joe.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Ladies and gentlemen, you just EdUped.