Ever felt that hollow pang of panic when it suddenly dawns on you that it slipped your mind to follow up that lead from last week? Or, even worse, Mrs Smith the Head Teacher has dropped a shoulder-prodding prompt into your inbox this morning asking where on earth that quote is that you promised her!

Let’s face it, dealing with schools and teachers can be testing at the best of times; there are those long silences and stalling tactics, and the avoidance of any commitment until their budgets land or until they’ve spoken with the governors next month. Streuth, it’s no wonder you lose track of everything! There can seem no rhyme or reason to the way schools make purchasing decisions, leaving you feeling as though you’re tossing leads and enquiries around the office like a street entertainer juggling with fire.

Over the years, I’ve often heard this same issue echo from many clients; and a limit on the ability to manage an upturn in leads can really stifle a business and its ability to build momentum in the education sector. Well, it’s time to harmonise your funnel!

Campus, our new software, will allow you to do just that. We’ve been using Campus at Sprint for over a year now and life without it seems like a distant memory.

As Client Success Manager, my role is centred around communicating with past, present, and potential clients, overseeing campaigns, creating strategies and generally managing the unique requirements of our clients throughout their marketing to schools journey with Sprint. As my client base grows, it’s crucial that I can still offer the same attention to detail to each of them.

Previously we’d been using a generic off-the-shelf CRM, but it was too rigid for what we were aiming for. It gave us no background information on each client and his or her journey with us, which made it almost impossible for different people to jump in and deal with my clients efficiently if I was unavailable for any reason.

Notifications in Campus has revolutionised the way in which we manage our clients. It gives the whole team visibility of all those crucial points of contact we’ve had with our clients throughout their journey from prospect to customer (from emails and calls through to quotes, web visits, and much more).

Usually a prospect enters our funnel via a handful of routes: they may have downloaded a free whitepaper, enquired online, or called to ask for more information. Once a prospect becomes a client, information on their entry point is helpful as it identifies methods of marketing which have worked well. In the past, monitoring a client’s entry point had been extremely difficult – what was it that we did to win them as a client? Now we understand what is working we know where to focus our energies in future.

Previously, a prospect would enquire and we’d have prepared a detailed quote and sent it to the client via email. Rather than sit back with our fingers crossed in the hope that we hear something back, Touchpoints will notify us whether that client has opened the email, if they click a particular link in that email, even if they revisit it over the next couple of days.

From a campaign management point of view this allows me to gain an instant understanding of a client’s personality and manage their needs accordingly. For instance, if a client is showing a trend of revisiting our website and their quote but we haven’t yet heard back from them, it may be that they’re interested in our service but are just feeling a little nervous about committing to it, in which case I can deal with this accordingly. Through Touchpoints, this information is transferable across the whole team, so everyone understands the prospect's behaviour should they interact with them in future.

In order for us to provide our clients with a delightful experience every time they connect with us it was absolutely essential that every member of the team was able to access key information about our clients and their campaigns so that they could speak to them on a very personal level. This ability to manage clients on such a personal level instantly makes them feel valued and enables us to build better, stronger relationships with them. The key to this is detail.

Supporting our team with client context data such as their purchasing and quote history is undoubtedly powerful. But the real dynamite comes from the agile, intricate data, such as how they’ve engaged, what whitepapers they may have downloaded from the website, even when they’re on your website in real time! Campus also gives every member of the team access to the client’s profiling data so at the click of a button they can see the value of that customer to the company (for example their average sale, total sales value, and the date they last purchased).

It’s important information right?

Here’s a quick scenario: you’ve hired a new employee and they’ve answered a call from Client Numero Uno. Gasp! That call needs handling with absolute perfection. Well, the good news is that Campus would allow your new employee to access all the key information instantly, deal with them accordingly, and allow everyone in the office to breathe again. Heck, there’s even a function to allow you to identify clients who are on the naughty step for the time being (maybe they failed to pay an invoice on time)!

Over the last year Campus has empowered me with the ability, and confidence, to work with my clients on a more personable level. I can see a whole festoon of information about each of them lickety-split. The result of using Campus in-house has transformed my role. I now spend less time on administrative work and can dedicate more time to my clients and their exact needs and requirements, what they want to achieve and above all, I have time to make that happen for them.

Inevitably, since using Campus we’ve seen a huge upturn in client retention and increased our ability to manage more marketing strategies with our current team, making us more efficient and our client campaigns even more effective - the dream combination for any business!

Would you like to visit Campus HQ for a Live User Experience and see how Campus can transform your everyday processes? Simply give me a call on 01684 297374 or book your free 2 hour seminar via our website.

Tags
Marketing to Schools Selling to Schools Emailing Teachers Email Teachers Selling to Teachers How to Sell to Schools

Similar Articles

Six Takeaways for Success from the Festival of Education

How to build connections with educators and exhibitors at your next education conference based on Ben's Festival of Education experience.

Read Post

Become an Education Marketing Expert

Introducing Resources on Campus: Your one-stop shop for everything you need to know about being an education marketing expert.

Read Post