Swiss International Scientific School Dubai manages inbound inquiries with Salesforce.

The Swiss International Scientific School in Dubai opened for business in September 2015 in their new facility in Dubai Healthcare City. Prior to the opening, the school’s Head of Sales & Marketing, Mr. Erik Bernsten undertook a process of implementing a CRM platform for his team, and began speaking to Salesforce consultants in Dubai. The primary purpose of the CRM system was to help the school to attract new pupils in the short time available prior to the school opening.

Tenacre was awarded the contract to develop the CRM, and worked with the sales & marketing team throughout the school launch period to help optimise all marketing and sales systems.

Creating and managing demand for a new school

SISD face one major challenge from a sales and marketing perspective; 

How to attract enough new pupils in the short time between launching the project and opening the school? Time was an issue.

The marketing activities were planned, and marketing agencies were hired to execute the campaigns, and the sales team were in position to deal with the inquiries that all this activity would generate. What was missing was a system to link everything together so that the sales and marketing activities would be joined up.

Evaluating marketing effectiveness is a challenge for companies the world over, but more so for a brand new business that doesn’t have the experience and banks of data from previous years to rely on. Measurement of marketing activities would need to be almost in real time so that adjustments could be made to the campaigns to ensure that the lead generation activity was optimised.

Key requirements

Tenacre started the process with a series of workshops with the sales and marketing team so that we could fully understand how the marketing campaigns would be executed and evaluated. It was quickly identified that the CRM solution would need to incorporate some key elements;

Linking marketing to Sales A real time link between each website / landing page and Salesforce. This means that each new lead is routed from the landing page directly into Salesforce as a new record. Using standard Salesforce marketing automation, an email would sent back to the parent or guardian that made the inquiry, and the new ‘lead’ would be automatically assigned to one of the sales team.  Speed to response, as always, is critical.

Lead Source Management Each lead that would be created would have a ‘tag’ attached, indicating the source of the lead. With this information, we could report on the volume and quality of leads that were created from each campaign or media.

Reporting

With the capability to capture information on both the quality and quality of leads being generated, it was important that a set of standard reports and performance dashboards be created to reflect the key performance criteria for each marketing campaign. The reports that were created initially were continuously updated as campaign criteria changed or new landing pages were created.

Ongoing Account Management 

As with all of Tenacres clients, SISD were supported and helped after the initial CRM system was completed.

In the case of SISD, this was particularly important due to the frequency of changes to campaigns and insight into what activity was converting into sales.

Tenacre was involved and in communication with the external marketing agencies, internal marketing managers and of course the head of sales & marketing throughout this period.