Speakers:
- Douglas Carlson – Head of Business Development & Partnerships LeadSquared – North America
- Allen Garber – Vice President & General Manager Diamond SIS
Key Takeaways:
- The webinar helps the audience grasp the concept of CRM and SIS.
- The webinar touches on how LeadSquared and Diamond have joined hands in using automation to improve a school’s enrollment process.
- The concept of how a modern CRM and SIS can help improve rep efficiency, thereby increasing business. [Read the piece to know more]
‘Business has only two functions — Marketing and Innovation.’
This is something that stands true to the date and probably always will.
What really is a business without marketing? And what is modern marketing without automation?
The answer to these questions was immaculately put forth by Douglas Carlson, who explained the importance of integrating school CRM and utilizing tools to drive top-of-the-funnel performance.
‘Why in the world would you want a CRM? Why wouldn’t you just have an LMS or an SIS?’ he asked the audience.
To answer his own question, he explained how, today, there are ‘Omni channels’ from which a lead can come through. These include
- social media
- landing pages
- email campaigns
- marketing agency on SEO, SEM
With so many options, it is only understandable if it becomes challenging to optimize these channels.
Spreadsheets, although powerful, can break down and be slow and inefficient.
This is where CRMs come into play, helping to successfully capture every channel or every single way someone is coming into a business, Douglas elucidated.
What Has Changed Over The Years?
Speaker Allen Garber takes the audience through the ‘many moons’ he has been in the education marketing industry.
Back in the day, lead cards, response cards from magazine ads, trade journals, and radio campaigns dominated the lead flow into the telephone calls, along with yellow page ads.
Today, it is all just popular social media influence groups that seem to do most of the work.
All these channels have made it easy to target a marketing campaign toward the desired audience.
However, for people who don’t use CRM, the question remains: Which half of the money spent on all this actually works?
“50% of my marketing dollars work, I just don’t know what 50% that is.” explained Allen.
People who have used education CRM know that today, it can take this kind of information and dissect it to really show which ad and format are affecting a business.
How Does Lead Distribution Affect Enrollment?
“It really depends on the size of your school,” explained Douglas.
A small school with only a couple of 100 enrollments per year may only have an admission rep or counselor. Schools that are scaled up with 20 or 30 campuses, each with 15 or 20 admission reps, make lead distribution incredibly important.
Also, taking into account a little something called COVID that came into the picture and dynamically changed things.
“We can make sure that we’re getting the right lead to the right rep who’s available now,” said Douglas, and by doing so, increase lead efficiency.
He continued by explaining how important it is to ‘know’ when to send and when not to send a lead to a sales rep.
The automated flow of CRMs follows up with a lead via a text message or email who might have missed a call from the rep. Doing so keeps the lead engaged while also saving the rep a ton of time and effort.
For lead engagement, it is essential for campaigns to be straightforward and engage people where they are and in what they do.
Douglas outlined, “that’s where you want to make sure that your system is up to date and really able to utilize mobile technology.”
In terms of reaching students, Allen showed the audience how communicating with them in their way could significantly enhance the enrollment process.
Many current CRM systems make the sales rep do most of the work.
LeadSquared plays a vital role here, as it automatically generates the next step saving the rep valuable time and making space for a couple more enrollments within the same timeframe.
What makes LeadSquared unique is
- It combines both an education CRM and a marketing platform
- Incorporates all the people the user already works with
- Lets the user easily build their marketing, email templates, and landing pages
It helps a bigger organization understand how things work at a granular level.
Sharing a small example, Allen said how they were able to stratify the leads from where they were coming from to who was handling them.
It is not just about the speed to lead and the effectiveness of the campaign.
It’s really about identifying and understanding who’s being productive in what group.
Being able to drill down to that granular level can improve an enrollment process.
He shared how from LeadSquared, he was able to take away these ‘little tidbits’ that show the power of an efficient CRM.
Connection and automation comprised a big chunk of the conversation.
Deploying The Full Potential Of CRM
This part was about deploying and maximizing the value of CRM.
A few things a CRM should be able to do include
- Outsource to education call centers
- Work seamlessly with straightforward products
- Call Tracking Metrics (CTM) should be an easy integration.
A modern CRM should conform to the user, not the other way around.
LeadSquared does all that and has a concept of lapse, which relieves squaring apps that ultimately allow them to customize just about everything.
Its integration does 80% of everything the user wants to do out of the box, and then, as part of LeadSquared’s partnership, it customizes the last 20%
Going back to the concept of a school’s uniqueness, its CRM application portal should be able to track the first moment of engaging with the student all the way to their graduation and placement.
Allen puts forth the benefits of an SIS
- It makes school administration more manageable
- It helps students, teachers, and the institution alike
- It makes learning easier
- It’s an essential step towards digitization in education.
An SIS system that is student-focused, as opposed to being focused on the school operations, includes
- Curriculum details
- Syllabuses
- Assignments
- Results
- Homework
Talking about Diamond SIS, Allen expressed, “Diamond was key with us in the student portal, is being able to connect with that student, making sure that experience is what meets the students’ expectations.”
One Record Throughout Each Student’s Journey
“There’s no such no such thing as not being mobile friendly.”
“Today’s SIS systems have to be, it’s a requirement, they have to be mobile friendly,” explained Allen.
A big issue when the user re-enters data is the risk of a typo that results in information being lost or a duplicate record.
An advanced SIS system provides this type of functionality, which ultimately increases the productivity of the students.
It should be able to connect with potential students from the very first moment they interact with one of the advertisements.
“So, to start and be a student today is not simple.”
Douglas shared an example of how Diamond helps students in this area, “If a student doesn’t have their transcript in or doesn’t is missing some of those boxes, we can politely or as aggressively connect them through automation.”
LeadSquared and Diamond show how admissions automation and lead flow can smoothen enrollment for all parties concerned with the process.
“From the very first moment you’re engaging with a leader or a student all the way out through graduation, and ultimately placement depending on how your school setup, we have that unbroken chain of connectivity.”
This allows reps to focus on the ‘high-value’ activities and not on following up with the students, as automation already takes care of that.
How CRM And SIS Help In Student Retention
Allen mentioned how by correctly engaging with the student, they not only enroll but also develop a personal relationship with someone at the school.
“When that student struggles, and there’s some notification coming back from the instructor that hey, Johnny wasn’t in school today.” he added.
This can significantly increase retention rates by re-engaging, communicating with that student, and getting to the bottom of the issues.
EdTech CRM and SIS communicate not only with a school’s students but with their staff, instructors, and, ultimately, their alumni.
“Hey, we’re worried about you,” a text message even as simple as this shows that the school rep cares about a student who has been missing from their classes.
Concluding on this, Allen perfectly explained how a successful process extends beyond just admissions.
It all comes down to the quality of information the user has.
The better the information, from leads to graduation, the better a school will be.
Making Interdepartmental Communication Easy And Seamless
Concluding the webinar with another massive benefit of a training institute CRM, Douglas discusses easy and seamless interdepartmental communication.
Unconnected systems can be very frustrating.
Often one-off integrations don’t get what the users want.
LeadSquared and Diamond SIS have joined hands to provide information that is just right.
“It’s a much more powerful system than somebody trying to make two systems themselves,” plugs in Allen lightheartedly.
The system creates custom reports that meet the user’s needs and are structured to help them with reporting to their agencies and insurance certifications.
To answer Allen Garber’s probe, “What’s a modern system look like?”
—LeadSquared and Diamond perfectly capture the power of automation and help schools and other institutions improve their enrollment process right from lead to the student’s graduation.
To know more about how you, too, can get started in the journey to success, call us, book us, and ask us for a demo today.
Speakers
Allen G. Garber
Vice President & General Manager, Diamond SIS
Douglas A.J. Carlson
Head of Business Development & Partnerships, LeadSquared
