5 Enrolment Myths Keeping You from Full Enrolment

At Kindyhub we pride ourselves on designing software that helps influence children’s learning outcomes, after all, they are our future.  At Kindyhub we’ve focused on helping to streamline your documentation and enhance communication with your children’s families. This was our primary focus as it was one of the biggest challenges Centre’s faced and was stopping educators from spending quality time with children.  Another challenge Centre’s face is managing enrolments. Luckily for our customers we have partnerships in place with other Early Learning Software providers who share our passion.

One such partnership is ChildCareCRM.  ChildCareCRM is a powerful sales and marketing platform that will integrate seamlessly with Kindyhub.

We spoke with ChildCareCRM about the 5 myths they identified which could be keeping you from full enrolment –

1. Most Centres believe the just need more enquiries.

While more enquiries can help, most of the time centre managers seeking more enquiries are failing to nurture the leads they already have. Often, there are just so many leads available.  An average ChildCareCRM client receives approximately 20 leads a month.

According to ChildCareCRM, If you are relying only on families that “float to the top” and enrol without any effort, you are missing a tremendous opportunity. Through timely and effective follow-up, along with proper tour techniques and asking for the enrolment, centre managers can convert a much larger percentage of the leads they are already getting.

Generating more leads costs more money than taking care of the leads you already have… and often those additional leads are less qualified.

2. Centres are waiting too long before they follow up enquiries

Today’s child care consumers are not unlike any other consumer. They want what they want, and they want it now. Leaving them waiting too long and they will be calling your competitors.

How long are you willing to wait to hear back from someone when you are the consumer? Chances are that after a few hours or certainly a single day, you are on to the next company that will respond to you. By not getting back to your enquiries within the first few hours, if not immediately, you have the potential to lose a lot of business.

Yes, centre managers are all busy and things come up at the centre, but if you wait a day or two to respond to parents, they may already be taking a tour of your competition and enrolling elsewhere before you have had a chance to engage them.

93% of parents start their search online and prospective parents fill out an average of 3.5 enquiry forms when researching early childhood education.
Geary PMG

Centre’s that compete for enrolments know that speed to contact matters. We have seen the data from our clients, and time to engagement and tour is a significant indicator of enrolment success.

“Those contacted within the first few minutes of their enquiry are four times more likely than average to enrol.

Remember that these parents are engaged in searching for care at the moment that lead comes in and are usually available to be contacted at that time. This advantage plummets as the time stretches on and after a couple hours, the advantage is minimal. Speed matters!

3. Centre Managers are Sales People

Everyone knows that the greatest single factor a Centre can hope to control is the conversation between his team and potential parents. The reality is that the vast majority of Centre Managers are educators and not “sales people” and there is typically a lack of sales ability.

Centre managers and their staff need to build a connection through understanding the parent’s needs and then focusing on those needs. Using great questioning techniques and then incorporating the information gathered into building a relationship with the parent that focuses on those needs will end up building more trust with those parents than those who don’t. And… people buy from those they trust most.

4. There’s never going to be an easy way to know exactly what’s working.

No two enrolments ever look the same. Some can be a long and complicated process of relationship building and earning trust while others seem to happen in the first few minutes of the potential family walking through the door. For those that don’t enrol, there may be a specific point in the cycle where things go wrong and the potential family walks away. At every step in the enrolment cycle, you want to be able to keep track of information so that you can use it to improve your results. Some key metrics that you should have quick and accurate access to are:

• Who your current opportunities are
• Where your leads are coming from
• What your enquiry and tour conversion rates look like
• Why you are losing business, to who and where in the sales cycle they fall out
• What your enrolment trends are saying over time

5. Paper, card systems and spreadsheets work as effectively as anything and I don’t know of anything affordable that’s better.

While many business owners believe that all their enquiries are being followed up timely and “worked” by their staff, ChildCareCRM found quite the opposite for the majority of centres. Simply sending an email or leaving a voice mail and hoping a prospect calls back is not doing the job. You are leaving a tremendous amount of opportunity on the table that your competitors are grabbing. It’s virtually impossible to do a great job following up with parents in a timely manner and providing the experience they would expect with a manual system… and there is no easy way to monitor activity, hold people accountable and obtain the timely feedback you need to be as successful as you can.

Invest more quality time where it matters… with the children at your centre!

If you want to find out more about ChildCareCRM you can schedule a demo here.  With ChildCareCRM managing your leads from enquiry to final enrolment and Kindyhub looking after documentation and communications, you have more time to focus on what you love.

Schedule a ChildCareCRM demo here.

Schedule a Kindyhub demo here or a 4-week Free Trial here.