What Not to Do: A Lesson from College Football March 11, 2009
Lane Kiffin, head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers, is taking some heat this week for reportedly telling highly recruited wide reciever Alshon Jeffrey that if he went to South Carolina he would end up pumping gas for the rest of his life. This threat came at the end of a long and heated recruiting battle between South Carolina, Southern California and Tennessee.
Jeffrey had orally committed to Southern Cal, but later backed out to stay close to home (he’s a South Carolina native). Early in the recruiting, Southern Cal had actually threatened to pull the kid’s scholarship offer if he even visited another school… a threat they didn’t make good on after he took official visits to South Carolina and Tennessee.
A couple lessons from this story:
First, your recruiting (or marketing) should focus on what makes you better – not what makes the other guy worse. Kiffin’s pitch should have been based on his own (albeit short-lived) head coaching career in the NFL and the fact that Tennessee has 37 players currently on NFL rosters. Who cares what the other guy? Your potential clients need to know why they should come to you, not why they should avoid someone else. And do you think Coach Kiffin is going to have credibility with players he calls next year to promise an NFL career to?
Same goes for Southern California. If I’m Pete Carroll (USC’s head coach), I want you to go visit other schools. I know the LA Collisseum is a great stadium, our players date movie stars, and Will Ferrell comes to our games… think you’re gonna find that in Tennessee? Carolina? Nope.
The more important lesson is that you’ve got to focus on what the prospect wants and tailor your marketing to that thing. For Jeffrey, it was the desire to stay close to home, something neither Southern Cal nor Tennessee could provide. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how big the TVs in your locker rooms are. If you can’t provide that one thing the client is looking for, he’s going somewhere else.
