How CIOs in Higher Education Organizations Can Optimize the Handling of Contact Data Around Salesforce Throughout its Lifecycle
SalesWings provides lead website tracking and predictive lead scoring services for marketing and sales teams seeking to understand when leads are reaching buying readiness to increase their deal closing rate.
We all have heard the saying, “Data is the Gold of the Digital Age!” But what does that really mean?
With customer data, it is often tightly linked to an organization’s commercial and operational success. But data isn’t just “gold”, that would be too easy. Poor handling throughout the lifecycle of the data can hurt your organization’s success. But luckily, there are several solutions that can help manage your data wherever it is in its lifecycle.
The Importance of looking at Contact Data throughout its Life Cycle
Today’s CIOs at universities or executive education companies are challenged by various aspects of managing contact data.
- Collection of Data
- Data Storage & Security
- Contact Analytics / Prioritization
- Access to Data
- Data Integrity
To name, well, just a few.
Data is dynamic as it arrives, evolves, and gets accessed throughout an organization. Read on to find a selection of interesting solutions from the Salesforce.com eco-system that will complement your CRM and data effectively.
It Starts With a Form – A Selection of Highly Effective Add-ons for Your Salesforce.com CRM
1. Data Collection
Higher education organizations receive a lot of contact data following various inbound marketing activities. Whether it is from prospective students, companies, or job candidates, you need to ensure that data gets collected efficiently and securely. FormAssembly provides a comprehensive solution for numerous use cases starting with simple contact forms to complex application processes. FormAssembly ensures a seamless data flow by sending all information directly into the Salesforce.com Sales Cloud. Furthermore, it brings powerful features to optimize the data collection such as Save & Resume for long application forms, integration of eSignature functionality, and the ability to personalize the form’s design for your corporate identity.
2. Data Storage & Security
The time where higher education services developed their own CRM systems should be over by now, making way for cloud based solutions. Salesforce.com provides an agile and safe environment for the storage of your contact data in its Sales Cloud CRM. Hosting all sorts of data for millions of organizations, Salesforce offers a comprehensive platform that serves as a “landing and starting point” for your contact data. Salesforce not only adapts to your internal workflows, but also provides software in various other domains such as support. Furthermore, Salesforce is king when it comes to analyzing and reporting on your contact data and allows you to create useful customer segments for marketing. One of its other great advantages over other CRM systems is its large ecosystem of third-party solutions catering to the various needs your IT system and processes may have.
3. Contact Analytics
Analytics is a vast term and you may want to analyze your contact base for various reasons. When contact data comes in through your forms (such as the ones you create with FormAssembly), one of the first questions to answer is “How much of a priority is the contact to my sales team or call center?” SalesWings is a smart lead website tracking and predictive lead scoring solution that measures your contact’s activity on your website in real-time and assigns every new contact filling in a web form with a prioritization score – also known as “Lead Score”. This allows sales teams to prioritize the most engaged contacts first and leads to a very efficient sales process. Its predictive algorithm compares how contacts interact with your website, and simply puts them in three buckets: hot, warm, or cold. SalesWings is seamlessly integrated with FormAssembly and Salesforce.
4. Access to Data
Contact data in Salesforce.com needs to be accessible to your staff wherever their work happens. A lot of work today revolves around your staff’s email inbox, with Gmail and Outlook being market leaders in the space. Cirrus Insight provides a fantastic window into a contact’s Salesforce.com data, right inside Gmail or Outlook. It allows your staff to view and modify almost any contact data field right inside their inbox,which is a huge productivity gain. Furthermore, it makes sure that your staff’s email communication is automatically logged around your contact data. Lastly, a user can directly capture lead data from emails and log activities or calls, without the need to jump back and forth to Salesforce.
5. Data Integrity
Data integrity is a growing problem for higher education organizations. Contacts are created twice, three times and more in Salesforce, creating useless duplicates. Contacts change their addresses, jobs, and even names, which hurts the accuracy of your database. While good quality data is gold, poor data quality can lead to inefficiencies for your university or executive education institution and can actually harm you. RingLead offers a perfectly integrated solution for Salesforce with priceless tools that clean up your data and ensure its integrity over time. One simple function ensures that duplicates are not created at all. This solution merges contacts that were entered twice in the past and completes contact data with updated information from various external data sources.
In Conclusion
Today’s CIOs in higher education organizations are confronted with a large number of challenges around their contact data. Luckily, tools like FormAssembly, SalesWings, or Cirrus Insight provide excellent tools to complement your Salesforce.com CRM to help you become a pro at handling contact data throughout its lifecycle.
About the Author
The author Philip Schweizer is Partner and CEO at SalesWings, a web based solution for instant inbound lead qualification and lead scoring. He has vast know-how of the sales and marketing technology landscape and proven expertise in how organizations of all sizes can leverage technology to facilitate all aspects of sales and marketing.
