Creating the right feelings in the mind - and heart - of your prospect.

Important?

You bet it is.  Our national study of how recruits make their final decision revealed one solid fact that every coach should be aware of when it comes to what's important in developing a recruiting strategy: Your prospects are trusting their feelings.

That's the feelings you create while you recruit them, how effective your letters and emails are at creating the right feelings, and the feelings they get when they visit you and your team during a campus visit.

Psychologists have identified three main emotions that center around your prospect's emotions and their motivation for making their final decision:

Approach

When approach motivation kicks in, your prospect wants to experience or discover more of something. Approach motivation involves positive desire, and the perceived value of what you move toward always increases.

Approach motivation makes recruiting athletes easier if a quality offer exists, whether it be a full ride D1 offer or the chance to attend a prestigious private college. But it can also be used to sell desirable outcomes, ranging from the Obama campaign for "empowered change", to get rich quick and get skinny now products that promise a desired result.

Avoid

You want to focus on "avoid motivation" when your prospect wants to get away from something. Avoid motivation deems something unworthy of attention, and an inconvenience or annoyance that should be ignored or eliminated.

In the real world, people want to avoid paying too much on their electric bill more than any desire for features of the juice coming through the wires, unless you’re using alternative energy sources, in which case many will do business with you to avoid adverse environmental impact. Most charities play on avoidance emotions to lessen the impact of poverty, disease, and natural disasters. Rather than taking a beauty approach, Clearasil plays on motivations to avoid the stigma of acne.

In recruiting, you may help your prospect avoid a bad homelife situation.  Or, you may help them avoid a lesser competitor and their sub-par facilities.  Get the idea? 

Attack

With attack motivation, people want to devalue, insult, criticize, or destroy something. When someone is emotionally motivated to eliminate something (rather than simply avoid it), attack motivation is the way to go.

Think about ad campaigns for weed killer and bug spray (Raid kills bugs dead!). Likewise, we’ve seen more than our share of large-scale campaigns designed to eradicate various complicated problems by waging war against them – the war on crime, drugs, terror, etc.

In a recruiting situation, you might wade into dangerous territory here by being tempted to use negative recruiting.  I advise against it.  And, that's not what we're talking about here.  A good example of "attack motivation" would be signing early to avoid the stress and unknowns of waiting until the last minute to make a decision.  Or, it might be used to prompt and athlete who is dragging their feet at making a final decision by letting them know that your other top prospect is wanting to come to campus and you'll need to go ahead and offer them the scholarship if they aren't interested.

Those three motivating factors - approach, avoid, attack - need to be an essential part of your recruiting message.  That's one of the central approaches we use in helping our clients through our unique Total Recruiting Solution program, and it can be for you as well.

Just remember, these feelings and motivations are present in every single recruiting situation.  The key for good recruiters is to figure out which motivation your prospect is most likely to respond to, and then build your recruiting message around it.

Want additional help in developing modern recruiting strategies based on psychological studies, real-life recruiting situations, and the best techniques plucked from the world of sales and marketing?  Get our two recruiting guides for college coaches.  They are quickly becoming a mainstay of college coaching bookshelves around the country.  Click here to order!