OIEG ANNUAL GROUP RECRUITMENT CONFERENCE
Our annual Group Recruitment Conference (GRC) has been taking place over this week in London and at a beautiful centre just outside London. A couple of days in Goldsmiths University in South London and 3 days near Woburn, an hour or so north of London. 35 people from all over the world coming together for a lot of serious work – and also a bit of fun. Following previous years in Vancouver, Dubai and San Diego, this year in London to coincide with the company’s 25th anniversary. Oxford International was established in 1991 as ISIS Educational Services and has gone from a small English Language summer school operation and UK student tour operator to a significant player in the international education market. The company has combined sales in the region of £60 million and in 2015 served around 50,000 customers. We continue to grow and the sales conference has become an invaluable part of the process of making sure this is happening as we want. The global situation is not exactly straightforward at the moment with various economies in difficulties, terrorism worrying people and visas getting less easy in some countries. However, it’s certainly not all doom and gloom, some of our markets are doing better than ever and the size of the international student market continues to grow at a spectacular rate.
Oxford International has a really wide and diverse portfolio of products and without this kind of intense focus on a regular basis it’s quite difficult for the sales team to properly understand everything we have in the company. By getting together in this way there is the opportunity to both learn and to share different ways of promoting the schools and colleges, courses and tours. It’s quite a different proposition selling embedded university pathway courses in India to selling A level courses in Korea to language courses for groups of teenagers in Brazil – and yet what came out clearly in the early part of the conference was that although the detail of the product (the centre or the course) may differ, the processes of effectively promoting and selling these things can be quite similar.
We have a sales team of 35 people – about 20 of who are based outside the UK. In some cases these staff members are working alone much of the time so we also have been considering how to keep the team together, how to motivate and engage our staff. The early sessions in London covered training on working remotely, and on understanding our customers and competitors as well as understanding ourselves! Very interesting stuff; this was followed by a series of meetings in smaller groups between the heads of the different centres and the sales teams. A little like speed dating but gave the opportunity for us to meet the sales team and to try and understand what challenges they were facing in their markets while for them creating the opportunity to ask questions and clarify things that may not have been clear.
The second day focussed on marketing – on branding and also on all the different materials available – mainly (but not only) prospectuses and websites. With three divisions (Academic, Language Education and Educational) a total of 27 different brands some 20 websites and as many prospectuses – it can be a complicated business to master. However, with discussion and the opportunity for lots of different views to be expressed there was a clear sense of the process moving forward and the marketing materials that will be produced over the coming months will be better than ever.
Further training followed later in the week on more detailed processes – account planning and management along with sessions on such things as negotiation tactics – before the team heads back to London on Friday for our anniversary party.