Overview of the Advise Call

During our semester-long role play, students play Business Development Representatives at Impact, a Connecticut-based marketing agency.  The "advise" call is the final call in a multiple-call sales process, where the students will be presenting their proposal for a contract with you.

You will be working in pairs.  One of you will role-play as Mia, the Director of the UConn MBA program, and the other person will role-play Bill, who is the Director of Marketing and Communications for UConn School of Business. If there is another person in your group, they can observe and provide additional coaching to the students after the role play.  Feel free to trade off these tasks as you role-play with 4-5 students.

The students have scheduled a 15-minute video meeting with you to present their findings on how your digital marketing presence compares with other MBA programs, and a proposal for a contract to help you close gaps they found, and increase student enrollment.

• 6:15-6:30: Technical Checks, Q&A with Professor Shannon: If this is your first time role playing with us, please feel free to join the partners' pre-meeting early to meet Prof. Shannon, check your connection and get any questions answered. Otherwise use this time on your own to review the content on this page, download the feedback form and be ready to join us at 6:30 pm.
• 6:30: Partners' Pre-Meeting: Use the "Partners Pre-Meeting Link" button below to check in with Rick Shannon, the course instructor, who can answer questions or help resolve any technical issues.  You will then leave this pre-meeting and join your assigned breakout meeting where you will stay for the rest of the roleplay.  We are using Microsoft Teams for these meetings. If this is your first time using Teams, you do NOT need to download anything- see this 40 second video for a quick preview of joining a Microsoft Teams meeting as a guest
• 6:45: First Student Team Joins:  You will greet "out of role", then the students will work as a team to present their proposal to you and earn your commitment to a contract.  They are targeting a 15-minute call, after which you will have 15 minutes to give the team feedback and coaching.
• 7:15: Second Student Team Joins: Repeat.
• 7:45: Finalize feedback to instructor: Submit your GROUP feedback for the teams that you met with using the form at the bottom of this page. Students will earn points towards their final exam for each buyer who awards them a meeting.  Once you have submitted your feedback you are finished, we will not be regrouping.  So thank you in advance for your time and coaching, it has a huge impact on the students.

About UConn's MBA recruiting goals and challenges

Reveal this information as appropriate to respond to student questions. 

1. UConn, like all MBA programs, is always battling to get higher rankings. Key to this is attracting quality students into the program, and delivering high quality programming that helps students win quality positions post graduation to generate satisfied alumni who support the program.  To support this, you are
2. Your current key goal is to increase quality enrollments in the MBA program. You enrolled 300 new students last year, and would like to enroll 350 students next year;  Longer team you would like to get to 500 students annually, ideally while reducing your admissions ratio from 40% to 30%.
3. You are specifically looking for help at the top of your recruiting funnel: attracting visitors to your website, capturing their contact information so you can interact with them more personally, and convincing qualified applicants to complete the online application.  Once you have applications, you have a strong admissions process that yields good conversions to quality admits. But competition is fierce, and you both suspect you need to be doing something different to attract and engage with prospective students earlier in their decision making process.
4. Keeping digital marketing content fresh is an ongoing challenge.  You suspect you should be ramping up new web content and video  much faster than you are right now, as well as spending more time nurturing social media.  But you are not clear the right mix. In the short term are particularly wondering about social media-- how are other schools using it as part of their recruiting process?  How important is it relative to other tools for recruiting MBA students?
5. You have six months to recruit the next entering class.  This makes getting going quickly very important, but also means that you may need to put off longer term activities until you have made good progress on this year's goal.  

About Your Concerns

Try to raise at least one of these concerns during the role play.

Strong responses should acknowledge your concern, provide a way it can be addressed, and check for your agreement.

1. How can Impact maintain high applicant quality as you invest in attracting and engaging with more potential students? You don't want to waste money attracting a lot of students who ultimately aren't a good fit for the program.
2. How much time will be required from people on your teams?  Mia, from the little you have learned about inbound marketing, it sounds like Impact will need to spend time with your MBA program team to develop good content. Tora and Bill, you have similar concerns about the graduate marketing team. Everyone is very stretched right now.
3. Can you afford to hire external help for this? Marketing budgets are always the first things cut in a shortfall. Your small team, while stretched right now, is pretty efficient with a small budget. You have a little bit of potential budget right now due to your missing team member, but you have found in general that agencies cost much more than you allocate for in-house talent.  Are there things they can cut to lower the price?
4. How sure is Impact that this will work? No one currently on your marketing team is very familiar with inbound marketing. So it's hard for you to judge the projections that Impact is making. How will they stand by them? Will they guarantee them?

Evaluation criteria

1. "Connect": builds good rapport: Students should start the call by spending time effectively building rapport: reconnecting with Mia and getting to know Bill.
2. "Explore": probes for understanding and agreement: An in-depth explore meeting has already occurred, so students should be checking for agreement, and probing for anything that may have changed or they may have missed. 
3. "Advise": makes clear connections between proposed activities and business outcomes: The majority of the students' time/efforts should be spent in this stage of the sales call process. Students should be walking you through the results of their research, recommended strategies, and the metrics that makes their proposal advantageous to UConn.
4. "Earn Commitment": asks for the order: Students should ask for your agreement to move forward on their proposed next steps, starting with signing a six-month contract. They should persist when you defer, earning your commitment by responding and adapting to your concerns and making it clear why moving forward is in your best interest.
5. "Overall": in control, professional: Students should take responsibility for the flow of the conversation, with confident and professional interactions that balance listening and talking. There should be a clear division of responsibility, where most of the team has a speaking role.

Providing feedback to the instructor

Your last task is to provide feedback to Professor Shannon so that he can award course points.   Please download this form to share your GROUP feedback. Email your completed form, or a photo of a paper version, to pslgen.business@uconn.edu

Thank you in advance for your part in helping our students learn.  As an added thank you, below the feedback form link is a link to a page with profiles of all the students in the course, and their LinkedIn contact information.