Pull the Last Thirty Enquiries

Roughly seven in ten enquiries to an education provider never become an application. That figure surprises people the first time they hear it and stops surprising them once they check their own.

A healthy inquiry-to-enrollment rate sits somewhere around 25 to 40 percent. Below 20 percent points at a follow-up or a tour problem rather than a demand problem, and the distinction matters enormously, because the two have opposite remedies.

The diagnostic

Pull the last thirty enquiries. For each one, answer two questions:

1. How long between the enquiry arriving and a human responding?
2. What happened after that — specifically, not approximately?

That is the whole exercise. It needs no new software, no consultant and no budget, and it is usually decisive within an hour.

What it tends to show

The biggest leak is almost always the first stage, and almost always response speed. Not messaging, not the website, not the brochure. The gap between somebody raising their hand and somebody answering.

The second thing it shows is that the record stops. There is a first response, and then the trail goes cold — not because nothing happened, but because whatever happened next was a phone call nobody logged.

The line worth keeping

Software automates whatever process you already have, including the broken one.

This is the most useful sentence in the sector's own literature and it is the argument against buying a CRM as a first move. If enquiries currently go unanswered for two days, a CRM produces enquiries that go unanswered for two days with better reporting.

Fix the response rule first. Then automate it, at which point the automation is worth having, because it is enforcing something that works.