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Education aBc
164 Old Road,
Oxford OX3 8SY, U.K.

Tel: Int + 44 (0)7779 021464
Hello@EducationABC.co.uk

Education aBc Agent Pages

Model 2: Selling the Course

First Steps:

  • Contact Education aBc and ask us for a Model 2 agency agreement. This model can work with several people in one town or area, but it can make life more complicated, so it is best to know first.

How to do it:

  • Contact Education aBc and ask us to send you an agency pack.
    This will include an Agent’s Manual, some posters and some brochures.
  • Read the Agent’s Manual in detail. Most of the details about the courses will be fairly obvious to you, but please note that we have made some changes from 2004 (included more excursions, all students doing afternoon classes, included free transfers on arrival at Heathrow, starting and finishing on a Wednesday, etc, plus we hope to have more integration with the native speaker courses on site).
  • Make a plan.
    • How many students are you going to try to recruit? Education aBc would be happy to have up to 15% (or at a squeeze 20%) of any one nationality, so with 200 students, that means up to 30 (or 40) students of any nationality on each course. Can you recruit that many?
    • How are you going to recruit the students? Are you just going to talk to the students in your classes? Are you going to talk to all the students in your school, or to all the schools in your area – or even go into state schools, or after school clubs, or sports or social clubs? There is no right answer here – except the answer which is right for your circumstances, the amount of time and effort you want to put into it all, and the options you have (your school may not like you selling to their students without including them in the deal, for example – but you should at least check what will be acceptable, and think about what will realistically be possible for you, before leaping ahead).
    • Will you be travelling with the students? Even though you are not a full group leader, this can make the parents more comfortable with sending their children – particularly the younger ones. You could travel to Heathrow with the first group on Wednesday 6th, and that’s fairly straightforward, but you could also do a round trip to return with the first group and come back with the second group on Wednesday 20th, for example. At EasyJet prices, this is not as jetset as it might sound at first! If you are planning to do this, it is worth checking out the flight times and prices straight away, and even thinking about booking your flights early on, while you can still get them for £9.99!
    • Think about how you are going to handle the money.
      • You don’t necessarily need a business bank account, but it would be sensible to have a separate account which you use just for this. Then it is easier to track where you are with things. You can get the students to pay you direct into your account, and then transfer the money all in one lump sum direct to Education aBc. Remember to watch out for exchange rate fluctuations, though. Work out what a reasonable price is in Euros (or your local currency), and get students to pay you at that rate – or, better still, get a Sterling bank account (this is possible even though you are not in the UK, and would make it easier to ensure that you don’t lose out on any exchange rate changes). A separate bank account would also make it easier to demonstrate that you had simply been collecting the money on our behalf, and then transferring it all to us. We can, for example, pay you your commission in the UK, once we receive the money from you, so that you don’t have to worry about large sums being left in Spain, or wherever, in case you don’t return the following year.
      • Alternatively, you could arrange for all the students to pay Education aBc direct, or to pay by credit card, so that you don’t have to deal with the money at all (you could just send us a sheaf of application forms all with the credit card details filled in, and then receive your commission later on in the UK)
  • Now send us a copy of your plan, with your estimate on how many students you are going to recruit, your plan for handling the money and the application forms, and we will agree a commission rate with you.
  • Mark the brochures (and particularly the application forms) with your name, so that we know to attribute any bookings we get to you.
  • Talk about our courses, put the posters up, make some brochures available.
  • Don’t relax! Now is the time to start doing some work.
  • Arrange a presentation evening, and invite people (parents!) to come along to hear about the courses. You might do this in your school, you might do it in many schools. If you would like us to send you a CDrom with a PowerPoint presentation about the school on it, just let us know.
  • Think of other ways that you can promote the courses, and get students to register with you (or direct with us – it is important that the students have the confidence to know that you are not making money out of them, that they will get the same price whether they deal with you or direct with us, so don’t discourage students from talking to us. If we have agreed that you will be our local agent, we will still allocate commission to you for students we can identify as coming to us from you.

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Remember that two things are important in selling.

First, confidence.
It is important that you believe in what you are selling. If you genuinely believe that the courses are good, then you won’t have any difficulty in selling them.
Equally, remember that you are partly selling yourself. You are selling the fact that you will be part of the delivery of the course, that you will be there, and so you need to ensure that students – and their parents – have confidence in you.

Second, identifying what it is that people are actually buying.
They are not actually buying a holiday course – they are buying an educational and developmental experience for their child (or in some cases, they are buying themselves some time away from their child!).
They are not buying a language course – they are buying their child a head start in their English classes in September. Work out why it is that each parent actually is interested in even talking about a summer language course, and that will help you to tell them the right things.

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I hope this has provided you with some useful ideas. This is not the only way of doing things, though. Each agent, worldwide, has a slightly different approach to things. We are people, dealing with people, in a people business, and it is important to make space for successful ways of doing things, not to require that everyone fits exactly the same mould.

Get in touch with us to talk about how you see things working for you.

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