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00:00:00
00:00:01
The FAM Framework
10 Plays17 days ago
In this episode, Rustam Irani introduces the FAM framework—Finance, Admissions, and Marketing—and explains how aligning these three departments can dramatically improve enrollment outcomes for higher education institutions. Drawing from his extensive experience in higher ed marketing and leadership, Rustam shares real-world examples, practical tips, and insights on how to dismantle silos, streamline communication, and build cohesive strategies that serve a common goal.
Timestamps:
• 00:00 – The misalignment problem in higher ed despite individual KPIs being met
• 00:28 – Introduction to the FAM Framework: Finance, Admissions, and Marketing
• 01:49 – Rustam's background and experience in higher ed marketing
• 02:36 – Real-world success through alignment at a high-growth institution
• 03:53 – Why shared budgeting and top-down alignment matter
• 05:31 – Understanding lead volume and internal operational needs
• 06:37 – Why treating FAM like a family drives performance
• 07:10 – The power of cross-departmental training and collaboration
• 09:08 – Transparent campaign communication with admissions and finance
• 10:13 – Joint planning for budget, targets, and performance
• 11:47 – Importance of having one integrated system for tracking
• 13:26 – Creating a cohesive message and student experience
• 14:41 – Shared goals, systems, and data across FAM
• 16:01 – Daily dashboard visibility as a unifying tool
• 17:29 – Pushing for better tracking and accountability
• 18:22 – Final takeaway: Don’t start with ads, start with alignment
Recommended
Transcript
Aligning Strategy Across Departments
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
Your team's crushing lead goals, but admissions can't keep up. Finance says the budgets are too tight. Everyone's hitting their own KPIs, and that sounds good, feels good, might even look good.
00:00:15
Rustam Irani
But the institution is still missing targets.
00:00:19
Rustam Irani
What if the real issue isn't strategy, but it's really all about alignment? Today, we're talking about what I call the FAM framework.
00:00:30
Rustam Irani
finance, admissions, and marketing, and why alignment across these three just so critical, and why this can transform your entire enrollment funnel if you can just break down these silos.
Case Study on Enrollment Success
00:00:49
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to ROI University, podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders who want to change the game and themselves. I'm Rister Meirani, your host, a recovering engineer turned marketer, former higher ed CMO, and I've spent some time on the agency side.
00:01:07
Rustam Irani
You could say I've developed a campaign or two of my career.
00:01:11
Rustam Irani
I've been fortunate to work with some incredible schools in my career. I've been in higher ed marketing since 2008. I've seen a thing or two from generating tens of thousands of leads to having tens of thousands of, and even hundreds of thousands of enrollments over the course of many, many years.
00:01:37
Rustam Irani
And one thing that to me continues to be such a huge, huge opportunity and also challenge is silos.
00:01:48
Rustam Irani
You know, one of the institutions where I worked the alignment between the different departments was just so key to our success.
Challenges of Departmental Silos
00:02:00
Rustam Irani
We grew that school from when I had started and within six and a half, seven years from five, 6,000, about 5,500 students to over fifteen thousand students And a lot of that was because of what I call the FAM framework.
00:02:23
Rustam Irani
Basically, incredible alignment between finance, admissions, and marketing. It's one of the biggest opportunities across teams and something I've seen as huge challenge over the years.
00:02:39
Rustam Irani
I also worked, I've worked with probably about 30 plus universities, colleges, schools, and seen a lot of these challenges, lot of these silos that are created because marketing typically will have one goal.
00:02:57
Rustam Irani
Finance has another one based on obviously the investment they're willing to put out and what the return expected And then admissions has another set of goals based on their start targets.
00:03:09
Rustam Irani
But there is absolutely no reason why these three areas can't be aligned or shouldn't be aligned. And I've seen it done successfully many, many times.
00:03:23
Rustam Irani
So to me, this is one of the biggest opportunities.
Unified Budgeting for Alignment
00:03:27
Rustam Irani
And I'll talk a little bit about the FAM framework. and how to get more alignment across these different groups within the organization.
00:03:39
Rustam Irani
Basically, when you're building out a yearly budget, you've got to start by including everyone. That starts typically on the finance side where they say, hey, marketing admissions, we need your budgets.
00:03:53
Rustam Irani
But the worst thing you can do is have separate budgets and then come finance with your own, uh, targets and your own goals. it really starts from the top with having full alignment across the school and across the organization.
00:04:11
Rustam Irani
And lot of that comes back to education. It, a lot of it comes back to understanding what each of the different areas does.
00:04:21
Rustam Irani
Right. Basically, when you go into a school or an organization, what is marketing known for? Well, marketing brings inquiries or leads, right?
00:04:33
Rustam Irani
What's their key metric? Well, a lot of times, finance just says, well, what's your cost per lead? Because that's usually what they look at. They look at that because the operations are built off of that.
00:04:48
Rustam Irani
Let's say you have 2,000, 3,000 leads in month. Well, who's going to be connecting with those folks, right? So you've got to have this internal structure to account for
Operational Inefficiencies from Misalignment
00:04:59
Rustam Irani
that.
00:05:00
Rustam Irani
Let's say you have 50,000 inquiries a month. Your internal structure is going to look much, much different. You're to have a lot more operational investments that are going to need to be put in there.
00:05:12
Rustam Irani
And when you don't have alignment there, then you're not going to know how much operational support you're going to need for the type of marketing you're doing. Admissions tracks yield, right? How many enrollments are we going to get out of this? Well, if we don't have alignment on how these leads are converting and the quality of them and what the expectation is, it's going to be very difficult for enrollment to plan out admissions to plan out the enrollment side.
00:05:46
Rustam Irani
And that's a constant back and forth. But there is no reason why you can't align on that. And at the end of the day, finance knows for every $100,000 I'm going to invest in this.
00:06:02
Rustam Irani
How many students am I anticipating or expecting out of this? So I can understand at the end of the day, the cost per enrollment or cost per start metrics that get us to where we need to be.
00:06:16
Rustam Irani
where we're profitable. Right. And so
Improving Interdepartmental Communication
00:06:20
Rustam Irani
basically the alignment of this fam, I like to call it the fam, right? Because the end of the day, you pretty much are a family, you've got to be completely aligned, you may not agree at all times, like most families, you've got to be completely aligned across all three.
00:06:37
Rustam Irani
And, you know, when you have that alignment is so, so powerful. Again, going back to the big opportunity with educating, I think training is key.
00:06:48
Rustam Irani
One of the things that I used to do is anytime we had a new team member start, and actually I did that in my first few months when I had joined on board with the school, I went and I sat down with the admissions folks.
00:07:02
Rustam Irani
I went and sat with admissions leadership. And not only that, I met and sat with admissions rep. I listened. I spent a day. listening to phone calls, listening to student conversations or prospective student conversations, understanding the challenges, understanding the difficulties, understanding all of these different things that were such huge opportunities.
00:07:27
Rustam Irani
And I was so grateful for that experience that I started to do that with any new team members, especially on our teams that focused on the marketing aspect.
00:07:39
Rustam Irani
I usually had them either listen to calls or if they were enough in the weeds where they were thinking and talking about or communicating or writing even messaging for students, I had them go listen to some phone calls and meet with admissions.
00:07:53
Rustam Irani
It was such a powerful way for them to learn. And guess what? Admissions appreciated that. They really did. Whenever we had a new campaign launch, we would actually tell admissions, you know, hey,
00:08:09
Rustam Irani
We're about to start this campaign for this type of promotion. And we want you to know this is what it's going to look like. Here's the creative. And this is the expectation.
00:08:21
Rustam Irani
How powerful is that? Right. When you have that alignment, they know what's happening. A lot of the biggest, what are some of the biggest frustrations I've heard from admissions teams is we have no idea what marketing is doing.
00:08:34
Rustam Irani
We don't know what campaigns are running. We just know what's good quality, what's bad quality. Usually organic's the best, so they just want more organic. But that doesn't work that way, right?
00:08:45
Rustam Irani
So when you have these teams come together, there's a huge, huge opportunity to train. The other thing we would also do is we would go and we would sit with admissions and we'd do like almost a lunch and learn.
00:09:01
Rustam Irani
every month or every other month where we would talk about here's what we're doing in marketing. Here some of the things that were campaigns we're about to launch. Here's some of the back end of how we look at things.
00:09:16
Rustam Irani
Huge, such an amazing opportunity to kind of educate. And then we would even go as far as to do that with finance, where we would sit down with finance and say, Hey,
00:09:27
Rustam Irani
We know you guys see these incredible expenses
Cohesive Data Tracking
00:09:30
Rustam Irani
from Google. We know you see this from Bing. We know you see it from Meta. But here's what's happening. Here's how we're running these campaigns.
00:09:38
Rustam Irani
Here's how we're setting up some of these ads and so on. That FAM framework, that FAM alignment is just so huge and important. Going back to the budgeting.
00:09:50
Rustam Irani
Every year when we built out the budget, we would make sure all three of our teams were completely aligned and completely building off of the same framework.
00:10:03
Rustam Irani
And so if we had student enrollment targets by school, by program, we would build that completely out together. We would have our marketing piece, but it needed to fit into admissions piece and admissions needed to consider the marketing component by channel, by program, and what we believed we could do in the year.
00:10:27
Rustam Irani
And so it was very, very powerful to have that full alignment. I would absolutely recommend if you're not doing that, have that conversation, open that dialogue and just say, and even reach out to finance. They might be surprised to hear from you, but just say, hey, we'd love to kind of talk to you and let you know kind of what we're doing, how these budgets are built and what the expectation is on our side, right?
00:10:55
Rustam Irani
Because a lot of times marketing, admissions and finance are siloed. And not that it's intentional, not that it's done maliciously.
00:11:06
Rustam Irani
It's just the way it's built. And lot of times the goals may not be completely aligned. The other huge opportunity is, you know, making sure you have one system.
00:11:22
Rustam Irani
Another challenge I've seen over the years is admissions is using one way that they're looking at things, and they might be using an SIS to look at things, a student information system to get an idea of if students are moving down the funnel, whereas marketing could be using a completely different CRM where they're really not communicating well enough And the other thing that happens that I see a lot that we've seen is the campaigns that we're running on marketing, if we're not tracking that all the way in through what admission sees, and we don't know that this Google campaign actually created this enrollment, how can we completely tell whether or not that campaign was successful?
00:12:17
Rustam Irani
It's not just the lead that comes in. We've got to be able to track that all the way down to student starting. So making sure there's alignment in one system, I think that's another huge opportunity that I see a lot of times for schools to make sure they have alignment across those three different departments, right?
00:12:41
Rustam Irani
Marketing, admissions,
Consistent Messaging for Student Experience
00:12:44
Rustam Irani
and finance. And the other thing that we see also is when you have that alignment, you get a more cohesive message to prospective students.
00:12:58
Rustam Irani
You get alignment on what's being messaged out in the world from a marketing perspective when admissions is speaking with a student. I can't tell you the number of times I've heard over the over the years, like missions biggest frustrated, we don't even know what type of marketing is being done right now.
00:13:18
Rustam Irani
I talked to the student about this, they said they heard us on an ad for Spotify. and didn't even know we were running Spotify ads. If your marketing team doesn't know what's happening, how can they speak cohesively?
00:13:33
Rustam Irani
And how can they be aligned with the messaging and create that real great experience for the student that's unified? It's difficult, right?
00:13:44
Rustam Irani
It's very difficult. And so when you build that framework across finance, admissions and marketing, you have that alignment, you have that communication, you kind of understand what's happening.
00:13:58
Rustam Irani
this doesn't have to be every day, like even monthly, if you could just make sure there's some band meeting that's in place or something where you can make sure everybody just has a better clear picture of what's happening.
00:14:10
Rustam Irani
That's huge. Right. And here's why, you know, it's basically the alignment is so key. You're going to have a better clear picture on your marketing spend across it, right?
00:14:25
Rustam Irani
You're going to understand Basically that there's one goal, which is pretty much always student acquisition, right? Not lead acquisition, but student acquisition.
00:14:37
Rustam Irani
You're going have one platform, one system where you're measuring these things. Finance is looking at the same data as admissions and marketing, right?
00:14:50
Rustam Irani
You have one single source of truth. And then you have one vision. but how your budgets targets, your performance, everything and how they all intersect.
00:15:01
Rustam Irani
That's such a huge, huge opportunity. And so basically in the real world, finance would see the direct ROI of the marketing spend.
00:15:13
Rustam Irani
There's no reason why they shouldn't. Admissions is going know exactly what to expect from marketing, even what campaigns are being run. Marketing will understand the full conversion path all the way down to the student.
00:15:29
Rustam Irani
And everybody's tracking this progress across the same dashboard. I've worked with some schools and been a part of some, fortunately, some schools that have done this incredibly well, where there is a dashboard where you can dig into the marketing, admissions, and then even the finance side of it.
00:15:49
Rustam Irani
And you can see literally daily, the number of leads, the number of phone conversations, the number of enrollments, what terms those enrollments are for, all of that built in where everybody can see that because we're all aligned as a fam to one goal.
00:16:09
Rustam Irani
And that's at the end of the day, going to create a smarter, more efficient enrollment funnel, more aligned team, And it's really just going to drive enrollment growth.
00:16:24
Rustam Irani
That's such a huge opportunity for a lot of schools to just chip away. If you do have a silo and you're basically working and you're saying, I don't have a connection through the CRM,
00:16:38
Rustam Irani
We just haven't been able to crack the code with IT and been able to do that.
Pre-Advertising Alignment Strategy
00:16:42
Rustam Irani
We have 100 other projects going on. We're too busy to do this. Right now, all we're focused is on the leads because that's the most important thing right now. We just have to keep the funnel full.
00:16:56
Rustam Irani
I would challenge you to pause and Make a stink about it. Raise your hand. Start to push some pressure on the executive team or your leadership team and just saying, hey, this is not right. I want to be as effective as possible with our investment.
00:17:19
Rustam Irani
And I need to know what's happening. And we need alignment here. The fact that we cannot track a UTM parameter from a Google campaign into enrollment, that's a problem.
00:17:30
Rustam Irani
Let's start to figure that out so we can make sure every dollar we're investing turns into a basically trackable metric for us across the entire organization. That's huge.
00:17:46
Rustam Irani
That's the FAM framework. Try it. Get your FAM together if you can. One meeting. Just start with one meeting. Call it the FAM meeting and see where it goes.
00:17:59
Rustam Irani
So if your school is struggling to grow, don't start with the ads, start with the alignment. That's such a huge opportunity. One system, one goal, one vision. One of the
Conclusion: 'One Team, One Goal'
00:18:13
Rustam Irani
schools where I worked at, we called it OTOG.
00:18:16
Rustam Irani
One team, one goal. That's the fam shift. That's all for ROI University in class today, where the biggest ROI is personal.