In early November, I received the following email from an MBA hopeful. This person had participated in a free consultation with one of our expert MBA Admissions coaches, Jenifer Raver, and I was astonished and gratified to read the thoughtful, incisive remarks about the positive impact of his experience.
While we very often receive feedback that our free consultations are the best a candidate’s ever had, it’s uplifting to get this level of precision in terms of why. Because no one says it better than someone who’s walked in your shoes, I’m publishing the letter below in its entirety, with permission of the sender.
Read on for five things that made the difference for this candidate after a free consultation with a member of our Fortuna team.
Hi Caroline,
Thank you so much for taking the time to send this email. Of all the free consultations I had, the only one where I hung up with a positive decision already made in my mind was the one with Jenifer Raver. Since you mentioned that I could send feedback to you, I would like to call out some specific points about my call that influenced my decision,
1. Jenifer was the only consultant who joined with video on, which encouraged me to turn on my video as well. I was actually taken aback by this since consultants from other firms had specifically had audio-only calls (or in one case, outright said they don’t want a video call), which I assumed was a norm. It might not sound like a big deal, but it made a huge difference to how I felt — I understand that it may be a bit of a privacy concern to do a video call with an unknown person somewhere in the world, but the fact that she took a chance and chose to trust me right off the bat made a huge difference. To put it quite bluntly, I felt like Jenifer treated me like a normal person and not as an internet criminal 🙂
2. Right before I received Jenifer’s first email, she connected with me on LinkedIn. This made a difference to me since I knew she’d be able to gather a substantial amount of information about me before our call which we wouldn’t need to waste time discussing.
3. The call was focused heavily on my profile and not on a pitch about Fortuna’s services, which built the trust in me that we’d be applying Fortuna’s expertise around the different parts of my application rather than force-fitting my application onto a template (some of the other firms seemed to indicate that I would be guided to follow their proven model for an MBA application, which didn’t sit well with me).
4. As a consequence to point 3, by the end of the call, Jenifer had made it clear that it would be in my best interest (given my age/experience being on the higher side) to take a director’s help despite the higher cost. Her explanation made a lot of sense and made the decision quite easy for me.
5. There was no talk of billing during the call. In fact, Jenifer explained that she’d first schedule further free fit-calls with coaches she would suggest, and only then proceed to discuss business.
I feel these 5 things that happened in that first 30-min touchpoint were the reason for my decision to work with Fortuna and I wanted to emphasize them specifically. In subsequent interactions, the flexibility I was provided was really helpful. Fast-forward to present-day — I’ve already had a strategy discussion with Bill and have a lot of homework to do. I’m very excited to see how my application will turn out this year and I’m glad to have Fortuna as a partner in this process.
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