10 Lessons Businesses Can Learn From Greek Recruitment
Anyone who has ever said that Greek Life doesn’t prepare you for the real world either isn’t Greek or never got involved in
recruitment for their chapter. The following are 10 things that the best Greek organizations across the country do to recruit high quality members to their chapter and are great lessons for any business to follow when selling to consumers, regardless of industry or what product/service is they sell.
1. Cold Calling Isn’t Effective - Your chances at closing a sale are significantly lower if you cold call someone, as opposed to if you were referred to them by someone that they know/like/trust. In addition to being ineffective, cold calling is also a huge waste of time because it takes so many calls to actually generate a sale. This is why effective Greek organizations recruit people they already know or were referred to by someone they know – it is more effective, takes much less time and there is a much better chance that it is a high quality individual.
2. Have Great Referral Sources – You will save yourself a lot of time in business by simply building up relationships with key people who can introduce you to the right people. Fraternities that have good relationships with sororities often get many of their best referrals from those women. If you are a business, you need to have relationships with people that can make your life easier and feed you referrals, and vice versa.
3. Utilize Cross Promotion – If a sorority wants to reach a new group of people on campus that aren’t away of their organization, they will form a partnership with a service organization, sports team, academic club or another group that is outside of Greek Life. Businesses should also find complementing organizations that they can do cross promotions with; examples could include a mini golf course and ice cream shop, or a gym and a healthy restaurant. Think about businesses that provide a complimentary service and partner with them… its a win-win!
4. Have a Specific Target Market - The very best Greek organizations have a specific target in mind and focus on recruiting those types of people. If you sell a product, you should never say that “everyone” is a good prospect or referral for you. That is too vague and makes it difficult for someone to refer business to you. A better answer could involve the age, profession, sex, interests and characteristics of your ideal client. Having a specific target market makes it much easier to refer business your way.
5. Don’t Accept Everyone – If you want to position your product/service as being something special, then you can’t allow anyone and everyone to have access to it. Strong Greek organizations have a screening process in place and won’t just let anyone join. You need to be selective as to who you allow to be a client of yours and purchase your product/service. You may think this will limit your sales, but it actually will increase them because it makes what you offer appear exclusive… we all want what we can’t easily have.
6. Market a Variety of Ways – The best fraternities and sororities will market themselves using banners, t-shirts, websites, social media, flyers, events, word of mouth, press releases, advertisements and many other ways. The more ways you can effectively market your business, the more people you can reach and more impressions you can have on them. We all like to be marketed to in different ways, so just focusing on one way will exclude a significant amount of people.
7. Have a Strong Brand – You must have a strong brand that is consistent across all methods you use to market yourself. The colors, font, logos, taglines and other ways you brand your product/service must have consistency and be the same everywhere. The best Greek organizations have the same branding on all of the different marketing materials they utilize and it makes it much more recognizable to the consumer.
8. Let Quality Drive Quantity – The Greek organizations that focus on recruiting only high-quality individuals are the ones that ultimately end up with a high-quantity of members as well. By surrounding yourself with the best of the best and building an elite organization, you will have an increasing number of people that want to be part of it. This benefits a business because they will have more of the right people who want to work for their organization, as well as more people who want to do business with their organization. Quality drives Quantity!
9. Everyone Has a Significant Role – To be successful at Greek recruitment, each chapter member needs to have a specific responsibility. If every one in an organization has a role and is working towards a common goal, they will be more likely to be successful than an organization that has a few people at the top trying to do all the heavy lifting while the rest of the organization sits around and does nothing. A successful business works towards a common goal and engages everyone in the organization with specific responsibilities that they must execute.
10. Bigger Pipeline = More Success – Greek chapters that are most successful at recruitment generally have a list of prospects that is at least 3-4 times the size of their chapter size. Would a business have a great chance at successful if they had a sales pipeline of 3-4 times the size of their client base? Absolutely they would! The more active leads you have and the bigger your sales pipeline, the more chances you have at being successful.
Is there anything missing on this list?