How are college visits like account based marketing?

We drove back not so long ago from almost a week of what my brother and sister-in-law tell me are too-early college visits.

We crossed a big triangle of our great state of Texas introducing our 15 year-old boy/girl twins to five colleges.

Call me helicopter. Call me a ‘junior careerist’ mom. But, if you’re kinder, you might call me an early bird who hopes to catch the college worm – namely, figuring out the scary puzzle of how to pay for two college educations in stereo in this day and age of breathtakingly high tuitions. With these early visits, might we get closer to finding a magical pot of scholarship gold at the end of a unicorn rainbow?

Back in my day, my parents sent me to Texas A&M University for $12 per class. Today, it’s $26,000 per year. Five colleges in four days and we didn’t find that pot of gold or a yellow brick road to lead to it. The unicorn must have been grazing in another pasture.

But, even if it is early, I’ve taken little snippets of wisdom away from each of these visits that won’t only help with the college search but I believe will help me in my job as an account based marketer.

As a parent, you go on these visits and you look for different criteria. Your kids might look at the campus and wonder, “Will I make friends? I wonder if I’d like this dorm? Do these school colors look good on me? Do they have a good football team?” We, as parents, might look for small class sizes or be impressed with the fact that you don’t have to declare a major right away, or that it has a serious environment.

It’s like this in my job as an account based marketer. I have to know what motivates each of my customer decision makers and shift my focus individually to each of them, after really learning how they’d like to use technology services to get them closer to their consumers. I have to identify their customer persona, in inbound marketing terminology.

1. White glove customer service

Because account based marketing (aka “ABM” for short) is the opposite of marketing to a big group of prospective customers, I really hone in on an individual or a few accounts to really understand who my customers are and their objectives. I then map my activities to help them achieve their objectives. I see the college visit as the ultimate manifestation of 1:1 marketing we deploy in account based marketing. My boss’ boss likes to use the expression “white glove customer service” to capture how best to treat our customers – as in “Make sure we are showing them white glove [extreme VIP-type] treatment in all our events and campaigns we produce for and with them.”

One of our college visits brought new meaning to “white glove customer service.”

Trinity University is a small liberal arts college in San Antonio, Texas with a great national reputation. They did not disappoint with the physical visit. They took time to learn our kids’ names ahead of time, gave us coffee, scones, t-shirts for them as soon as we arrived and was the only college to provide us with a golf cart and a personalized tour due to my knee injury I told them about in advance.   They seemed like they were genuinely glad to see us.

They also have a very engaging web site homepage with video to draw you in. They sent us an email that outlined the itinerary (with free parking permit – the only college we visited to do so) and included the name of the adviser who’d be our sole point of contact.   It was great to meet him face to face and we felt like we knew him already. And, they used digital communication tools to form a positive impression with prospective students and their parents once they’re at the campus. In their lobby, they had one of the coolest marketing devices I’ve ever seen. It was an interactive table where you’d select 1-2 playing card-sized quotes that you think represented you, then placed them on the table and then the table would interact and display back content including your suggested major, a short video of a student in that major, statistics about that department at the college, etc. A table like this would steal the show at any trade show and I was all over it:   

My ABM takeaway: Take the time to know who’s meeting with you and what their unique needs are – then meet them. Clever and engaging interactive marketing tools can help – if you have the depth of content or services to offer as a follow up.

2. Walk backwards to face your customer

At Rice University – sometimes called the “Harvard of Texas” – we had a first-time tour guide. She was a college freshman and a former high school cheerleader now studying cognitive neuroscience. She immediately faced us at the start of the tour and, over the next 1.5 hours, walked backwards in front of us during the tour – facing us the entire way – and never losing eye contact with us.

She explained how Rice, in a pastoral enclave in the heart of urban Houston, has a special environment. She explained that each student is assigned to one of thirteen residential colleges they stay in all four years where adult resident advisors (and sometime their kids) live with them as a family unit -- where they’d be welcomed Day 1 by name and with posters and cheers. We saw this in the beehive of 1:1 sessions between individual professors and students in an airy museum-like café in the center of campus.

We got the feeling that this university would take our kids in (should they be fortunate enough to be accepted) and nurture them and never turn their back on them.  

Before this, the actual director of admissions who looks at each prospective student’s application and recommends whether they’re in or out, met with all of us. She prompted a student to remind her when she was forgetting the student perspective during her talk – asking him to say, “Sheila what about us?” She totally knew the customer base and the demographics.  She knew the schools the students in the audience told her they were from: “Phillips? Oh did you know so and so … ?”  She also knew the fears: “By this month in your senior year, Parents you’ll be stressing about this …. and kids you’ll be pulling away for independence. And, even if you don’t get in, you’ll find a school that’s a match for you. Do not worry.”  

My ABM takeaway:  I find this no different from a customer decision maker who’s about to undergo a huge implementation – and venturing into new technology territory they may have never tried. She nailed it by connecting to that fear up front and saying “IT’S OK. Walk with me through this process.”  She was authentic and real -- acknowledging our fears and concerns about college. She aligned with our fears.  I took from her and from the walking-backwards tour guide to keep facing my customer and calmly show compassion and understanding of the stress they face to walk them through the process.

3. Scrappiness and resourcefulness

At the University of Texas at Austin, we had another freshman tour guide. We, of course, at first felt like a number because of the mammoth size of this university (forever in my mind as “that small secular school in Austin with the initials t.u. due to my being an Aggie – our sworn enemy).

But soon our college freshman tour guide made us feel welcome. She explained under a shade tree at a stop during the tour that she was one of only 13 kids and among the first generation to attend college. Her parents had emigrated here from Africa. Her brothers were all athletes and attending college on athletic scholarship. She had brains and, from her introduction to us, demonstrated incredible drive and resourcefulness. She knew she was a face in a crowd in her college freshman business classes of 300. But, she didn’t let that deter her.

She would go to every professor’s office hours and became more than a name to them. Soon, they were recommending her for scholarship opportunities and study abroad (she’s going to Cape Town, South Africa this summer with a UT program). She has cobbled together so far 1.5 years of a free ride for herself by researching, applying for and winning scholarships. I was thankful for our kids to hear her example.

My ABM takeaway: Meeting her and hearing her story reinforced for me the importance of standing out from the crowd in marketing 1:1 to customers, too. Researching and going the extra mile to develop relationships with your customers. I saw that one of my customers had a grandfather who fought in the Battle of the Bulge in WWII. My customer is also a historian and whip-smart television commentator. I had gone back to the Ardennes forest with WWII veterans – to their foxholes – when I was a producer for ABC News. I sent my customer the documentary we produced – highlighting the battle his grandfather had fought. As an Account Based Marketer, you’re developing relationships with your customers as human beings first – not dollar signs for your next deal. Be resourceful and get to know them and their interests to stand out from the crowd.   

4. The importance of tradition and being involved

And last but not least, my alma mater: Texas A&M University. It, with its deeply-rooted tradition and family atmosphere of students smiling and telling us “Howdy!,” made me feel right at home. What impressed me all these years later was our tour guide. She was a senior Landscape Architect major. Initially, my cynical mind jumped to thoughts of “Oh – wow – she might have a hard time finding an immediate job with that one.” So, imagine my surprise and delight to learn – upon taking her aside to get her story – that she was not only surviving with this major already in the work force but THRIVING. She had done internships for a forward thinking company who had already offered her a job on graduation and was happily waiting for her, due to a prospective Rhodes Scholarship in Stuttgart, Germany for which she had applied and was awaiting a decision. She was impressive, driven, bubbly and extremely positive. She told our kids “Get involved in at least one outside class activity during your college days and you won’t be sorry.” She was involved in at least three extracurricular activities.

My ABM takeaway: Get involved. Go beyond just your “studies” (or your job) only – beyond just your immediate job description. Take inspiration for the things your customers are tweeting about. Last week, I saw that one of my customers tweeted about influencer marketing and content marketing – something I care about. I connected with him on this and suggested an agile marketing workshop our organization had recently completed that he’d now like to learn more about. Take on a stretch assignment or learn things in new areas (for example, based on lunch last week with another customer who manages social media for a large healthcare org – I now know I need to learn more about Radian 6 and analyzing data).  I’m extraordinarily lucky to have super smart customers who help me stretch to learn new things. One of the best things about this job.  

Our college tour was an unexpected chance for me to further my education in marketing, seeing real-world techniques applied in real-world business scenarios. Walking the hallowed halls and strolling the learning pathways of these fine institutions left an indelible impression. We didn’t find a pot of gold or a unicorn, but I got an honorary degree. I didn’t have a cap and gown, but I moved my tassel to the right as a newly graduated student of an accidental university, and gained four more alma maters.