Recently we unveiled Campus as the future in selling to schools (watch video here). Yet there is an underlying theory behind this powerful software which you need to have on your radar if you want to enhance your 2015 education marketing and beyond.

To understand how your selling to schools’ future is about to change forever it’s probably best I start at the beginning and take you back to the winter of 2012.

Guy (my fellow Co-Founder and Brother) and I were sat in a well-known coffee house in Tewkesbury ‘fizzing’ about our clients’ strategies, when the conversation lead us to the worrying reality that many businesses we speak with did little to no in-house nurturing of the leads that we had generated for them from their managed education marketing strategies.

They were leaving qualified sales leads to slowly fizzle into oblivion. It was a frightening thought, yet businesses were doing just that! Generating lots of leads, and visitors to their website, but then not bothering to implement a follow-up plan to capitalise on them.

Our clients were essentially walking away leaving their potential customers ‘money on the table’.

So armed with a sketchy concept in our minds we drained the last of the coffee in our mugs and began devising a master plan.

Firstly, we had to familiarise ourselves with our clients’ situations and understand why they were missing these huge sales opportunities. This may sound familiar, but we discovered many of them were investing in a range of separate business tools/software…

1. Education Database / List of schools

2. CRM (Customer Relations Management) System

3. Email Marketing Software

The problem was clear! This fragmented set-up means you are always restricted in the understanding of your leads interactions with your business, and importantly the state of your sales funnel at an exact point in time.

A huge amount of time is wasted working between each platform, and leads are lost due to the systems in place not lending themselves to supporting your sales and marketing team’s real-time goals.

It was apparent that we needed to develop a single piece of software that included the standard business functions, but most importantly gave the user the power to nurture their leads through a delightful sales journey towards becoming a customer. This meant Campus fundamentally had to empower each user to…

1. Easily create online lead generation forms to capture every interested teacher’s details.

2. Implement automated marketing strategies with triggered pathways depending on each individual teacher’s specific needs and interactions with your business.

3. Build a loyal following of customers by converting a teacher (from the Education Database module) into an opted in contact (into the Subscribers module).

However, the cornerstone to Campus had to focus on transforming marketing department’s perception that teachers are not looking for bog-standard marketing, or for pushy sales teams to force a ‘quick sale’ on them. Instead teachers are looking for solutions to their problems from people that can help them. If your products or services can do this, and if approached in the correct way, that teacher will soon become a long-term customer and champion of your brand.

To achieve this Campus is underpinned with the simple concept that relationship matter. Every phone call, enquiry, quote, web visit or sale, all of which are automatically recorded within the software and assigned to the relevant contact, giving your sales team the ability to go into every conversation at the teacher’s point of interest. It will even rank contacts so you can see where each lead is located in your sales funnel, and if they are close to the point of purchase.

We spent about two months scribbling down ideas of how Campus needed to work so it was clear in our minds. And then… nothing happened.

We had hit a wall, as the project seemed technically overwhelming and before long our ideas began to collect dust. But then one sunny Spring morning Guy came into the office with a new pumped up attitude and demanded that we grab this project by the balls and get stuck in, after all the future of the selling to schools industry was relying on us!

What followed was an epic two year hackathon of coding, development, interface design, and technical geek talk (usually from Guy), all completed in-house before a testing version of Campus was ready.
By July 2014 we were ready to implement Campus into Sprint Education’s day-to-day operations. Now for the past 6 months we’ve been rigorously testing that the software is not just robust, usable and delightful, but importantly we had to prove to ourselves that it can firstly drive our own business forward before we could consider releasing it to our clients.

The results have been staggering. Campus has transformed how we function as a business. Routine processes have been streamlined, service levels has been enriched, referrals of our services have rocketed by 88%, and it has attributed to a 24% increase in like-for-like sales in the period July – January. It even played a fundamental role in us recently winning Marketing Campaign of the Year 2014.

Campus will soon be ready in Beta version ready for only a select group of businesses to use before it is officially made available to all education sector businesses. So if you would like to be considered as a Beta user of Campus please register your interest here.

Tags
Campus Marketing & Sales Software for Sellers to Schools

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