The State of Enrollment Marketing in Higher Ed

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker: Hey listeners, we had a few audio issues in this episode, but the discussion is still top-notch. Thanks for your patience. Enjoy the episode. You're listening to Filling Seats: The State of Enrollment Marketing in Higher Ed, hosted by StudentBridge. In this podcast, you'll learn what's working to grow, shape, and sustain enrollment at colleges and universities directly from fellow enrollment marketers, thought leaders, and Ed Tech innovators.

[00:00:25] Host: Welcome to Filling Seats podcast, episode 44. I'm Jonathan Clues, CEO and founder here at StudentBridge. Today, we're going to talk about how to evangelize, the importance of evangelizing your CRM across the campus.

And with you today, we have our special guest, Mark Forehand, who's been a friend of mine for several years. He was the former Senior Assistant Dean of Graduate Enrollment at Kennesaw State University, one of our proud partners as well. Mark, thanks for coming on the show today.

[00:00:59] Mark Forehand: Thanks for having me, Jonathan. It's really great to be here. I'm excited.

[00:01:02] Host: Good, well, I know we've got some stuff to talk about. Talk about evangelism, Mark. You're one of StudentBridge's big evangelists on campus. We're not going to talk about that so much today, but one of the things that really struck me, and why we struck up a friendship, is not that you're just 20 miles away up the road, and our love for Indian food, that we used to go and get some spicy food, but it was also the fact that you really believe in change management and getting things done. You rolled your sleeves up and got things implemented, and made things happen. So thank you again for all those years of dedication to partnership. But look, let's talk about evangelism. When you say that CRM evangelist, what do you even mean by that?

[00:01:44] Mark Forehand: Great question, and I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. A CRM evangelist is really the point person for everyone at the university. We talk about customer relations management software or any consumer software; the go-to person at the university who is always talking about the benefits and opportunities of the CRM on campus.

[00:02:09] Host: Now, I'm glad you already said CRM stood for. I'm sure everyone listening to this podcast, most people, will know what CRM is. Tell me, the use of a CRM, the panel of CRMs that have been around in Higher Ed—the known enterprises like Interact, but you know the name Salesforce and HubSpot, things we've used on the enterprise side—but within the university infrastructure, how long have they been around?

[00:02:29] Mark Forehand: It hasn't been as robust for as long as it has been in the private sector. There were CRMs from smaller providers that were not nearly as robust 20 years ago, but in the last 10 years, CRMs have really taken on the kind of robust customer interaction that you see from private CRMs, like those from companies like Salesforce, which has a Higher Education product. Many of them have built these based on what they were doing in the private business model, and they do a great deal of customer management for you, but they don't do everything.

[00:03:11] Host: Now, when we say customer management within a university, we've been involved in Higher Ed for 70-80 years, and if you said "customers," you'd get thrown out of the room. So we're really talking about student relationship management or prospective student relationship management, and parent stuff in there as well. But it's about having a potential prospect and looking at that. We're talking about recruitment and enrollment.

[00:03:32] Mark Forehand: It's fascinating that you say that. Large portions of the university do not like the word "customer," but it is called customer relationship management software. So an evangelist does need to talk about student relationship management software, not customer relationship management.

[00:03:48] Host: That makes sense, that makes sense. And so look, we're very proud of our partnership with Slate, which is probably the dominant CRM in Higher Ed, but we're biased, so we are happy with it. But CRMs really serve the same purpose, they just go about it in different ways. We've got TargetX, they actually got the Ellucian products. You've got Hobsons and Carrozza. There's a bunch of people out there that are fighting for CRM space, and this evangelism, the requirement for evangelism, is totally agnostic to which one you're signed up for, right? It doesn't care which platform you're using, but CRM is a key proponent of the enrollment process.

[00:04:16] Mark Forehand: And the failure to use that will affect student success, student customer service, enrollment, conversion—everything. The fact that CRMs are here to stay, and they will become more and more robust, and they are very seeking for your stealth concern.

[00:04:46] Host: So let's go over that again. Some of the issues here—you're saying the outcomes, I should say, not issues—the outcomes of not using a CRM correctly and/or having that evangelism across the campus result in bad outcomes for students, yes? Bad outcomes for the school, yes?

[00:05:01] Mark Forehand: And by bad outcomes for the school, if we're all worried about the conversion of our students, if people do not have a good experience in applying and getting in, in finding their classes, they pass on that bad experience to others in the 21st-century social media market.

[00:05:20] Host: Right, sharing that bad experience.

[00:05:25] Host: So how much about what I think of a CRM, right or wrong, is kind of behind the scenes? So where you are, our partner, a customer, you know what? You don't feel you're in a CRM. You feel you have a relationship with StudentBridge. How much does the student, or prospective student, or their parents interact with a CRM?

[00:05:40] Mark Forehand: At the graduate level, a lot of them. The application is stored within the CRM, so that actual initial experience is immediate. But with undergrads, a lot of the interaction is signing up for events, signing up for orientations, and that's parent involvement as well. And some universities use the CRM for their undergraduate application as well, and that is often a parent-heavy experience.

[00:06:06] Host: And so when we talk about some of the things you spoke about, the CRM, there were a lot of fits, yes, but of intake of information from the student—filling out forms, doing something, and then the CRM starts building a picture, right?

[00:06:18] Mark Forehand: It does build a picture because once you have a contact piece of information, you can now score that individual as you go through the process to determine their involvement, their interest, and ways to better effectively send them communication from within the CRM.

[00:06:35] Host: That makes sense. So it starts with a record. Starts with the contact. Yes, maybe the school bought that? Maybe the student has self-selected and said, "Hey, I'm interested." But something's happened, and a record's created.

[00:06:48] Mark Forehand: It's almost always a result, nowadays, of digital marketing hits, where, if you hit, if you go to the click, we're going to get the information that provides the contact information. It's not invasive. It's just part of social media and how the networking works nowadays.

[00:07:09] Host: CRM holds a record, yes. Oh. Mark Forehand, Jonathan Clues—a name, an email address, a record. Yep. Then there's this element of marketing automation around that, yes. So kind of like it's then, then that. So hey, Mark visits this page on a website, does this, Jonathan didn't visit the campus yet. So there's some stages of knowledge. Are you seeing that more and more integrated within a CRM, or are those two separate systems?

[00:07:33] Mark Forehand: Now that that has become, as the CRMs for higher education become so much more robust, for lack of a better word, you can take two individuals and drive them in different paths in the CRM through communication and contacts within the university sites, so that you can then drive the next person to that conversion. Yes, go ahead.

[00:07:58] Host: Now, let's go back to the evangelism. Sure, it means different things to different people, but you've got an option of enrollment, admissions, and enrollment that's there to recruit, attract, and enroll students. How many people need to be involved with a CRM? How many different departments or teams?

[00:08:16] Mark Forehand: Well, the scarier version is everybody, but the leadership of the university because if your CRM is handling advising, it is handling scheduling, it is handling orientation, you have faculty involved. If you have faculty involved, you've got most of the university, but at its base need, it needs to be your staff who are managing your enrollment processes in undergraduate and graduate enrollment, along with your marketing team.

[00:08:44] Host: Got it. So, so this is—you had a lot of experience throughout education, not just at Kennesaw State. And I know you had a great career. But these issues you're seeing, when you talk to your peer groups, your colleagues in the industries, are CRMs having a hard time? Everyone knows the importance. Are they just being cumbersome? Is it that they shy away from it? Why isn't there just a natural gravitation towards it?

[00:09:06] Mark Forehand: There's a lot of nuance inside that statement, but if you take it at its base, for years the situation was, I went to college as a public good, and I'm going to learn something from faculty. Technology runs massive parts of the university now, and the faculty are sometimes taken out of that equation, and they sometimes don't appreciate that. If people do not understand why we have purchased this, if someone has not evangelized why we're doing it, you have a problem from the start.

[00:09:44] Host: Got it, absolutely. So who do you feel is responsible for being the evangelist? Who do you designate? You're the on-campus evangelist, who is the best person to be out there?

[00:09:55] Mark Forehand: My opinion is it's a job at the university, a CRM or tech evangelist. But within a university that's not going to make those decisions, it really needs to be people who are in the CRM every day, but at a higher leadership level and able to give presentations regularly to faculty and staff who might be put off by what's happened.

[00:10:18] Host: So you kind of shared with me that research shows that quite often executives stumble into one of four common pitfalls. Do you mind kind of explaining some of those pitfalls, please? Oh my God, implementing the CRM. So we've got four to get through.

[00:10:33] Mark Forehand: Well, that's a great question. So the first one is, you buy more than you need. Okay? The second one is, you don't buy enough of what you needed. The third one is you don't have an understanding that you are going to have to upgrade it every year, and there's going to be an additional cost every year. And the fourth of these is employee turnover issues, which goes back to training. There is churn in enrollment management, as everyone in higher education knows, and new people come in, and they weren't part of the initial evangelism tour, and you lose some trust and excitement. Then you've got a third or fourth person coming in, and they've completely lost the excitement for this CRM.

[00:11:13] Host: Before we double down on that, let's talk about the first two. Buying more than you need, buying less than you need. Those one and twos are almost like a sizing issue, right? Yeah, give us some classic cases. Why do people buy more than they need? Is it just a great salesperson on the CRM side? Is it a lack of understanding on the buying side?

[00:11:33] Mark Forehand: Truly both. I think sometimes people buy more than they need because people who are making the decision are people who have skin in the game for their particular unit and what they want. A lot of times, people will overbuy the marketing part of it.

[00:11:48] Host: Got it, yeah. So you've got the record management part, you have a marketing part, and there's like an extra module and/or additional expense. So then I know we see that even on, you call it on the private side, the enterprise side—CRMs are massively complex. There's a lot going on, right? I mean, even I care about all of our customers, but I have a hard time logging into CRM and getting around, to be super honest. Yes, I want to create a report. Brief me on it. A lot of data analysis paralysis goes on. So the bigger the CRM is, the more features it's got. We probably suffer a bit from feature fantasy—thinking I need that, but didn't, right. So that's a common thing with just buying too much of it.

[00:12:29] Mark Forehand: And they're all sold in packages.

[00:12:29] Host: Got it. So if you bought two of the three packages, but you really only needed the first package, you just thought something was interesting in the second package that you were going to use down the line. But then you discovered you didn't have the people, the training, the evangelism, to make that happen.

[00:12:45] Host: Got it. I mean, the opposite side—buying too little because you've

[00:12:48] Mark Forehand: got a budget, and you say, "I can't go that far."

And I've got this budget issue. And what are we doing? Are we state? Are we private? That's the number one reason people don't buy enough, and then all they really have is a contact management system without the bells and whistles of marketing.

[00:13:09] Host: Sure, right. And so now the first group that buys too much, I'm assuming they also have budget issues as well.

[00:13:16] Mark Forehand: You would think they would, but sometimes they don't, and they buy things, but they also are the ones who are quickest to retract out of the contract, and go get a different CRM, learning from the last experience.

[00:13:29] Host: I imagine CRMs are pretty incumbent. Once you're online, it's probably a big pain. We've moved from Salesforce to HubSpot, back and forth, a couple of times, moving all those data records in and out. So once you're in, are you pretty well married to a CRM?

[00:13:42] Mark Forehand: My personal opinion is yes, for at least three to five years. In the two CRM rollouts I've done, one took nine months, one took a full year.

[00:13:57] Host: Gosh, that's to get everybody on board. So these can take a long time.

[00:13:57] Host: Got it. Okay. Excellent. Now let's talk about the lack of understanding that constant upgrades are necessary. That was your kind of pitfall three.

[00:14:03] Mark Forehand: Well, yes, as we all know in technology, there's always an upgrade, and then you have space issues. If you can imagine a CRM with 45,000 contacts, space is not unlimited. Contrary to what a lot of people think, the internet is not unlimited. You have to buy the space on the CRM. Then once you use it up, you'll need more space, or you'll have to figure out a system to get rid of the old names, and whether or not you want to lose those old names, whether to archive the old domain.

[00:14:29] Host: Yeah, so, so that's that, I agree. But as a proud vendor in the space, we only work with higher education. It's our goal to constantly innovate, yes, and nothing worse than providing a solution to a customer who is brand new and thinks, "Oh my gosh, this is great." And three months later, something slightly brighter, slightly shinier, comes out, and they ask, "Why didn't you tell me about that?" That's just technology. Look at the technology we use, from my watch to your phone. I mean, things have progressed. You don't want the same. So people do get in the mindset that buying CRM is kind of one and done.

[00:15:05] Mark Forehand: They would like it to be that way, because they have budget issues every year. They can't hardwire the budget for the cost of the CRM. You can't. It's difficult to hardwire the change because there are a lot of follow-on effects of changing the CRM. Some of that is employee turnover.

[00:15:24] Host: Good. Well, let's go to that. Okay, that was your fourth pitfall. Yes, the great resignation has impacted many industries hard, right? So restaurants—you see a lot of restaurants having difficulty, but education, we know, again, we're in it together. But we've seen, we would talk to our partner schools that they may have 15, 20, 25 people in that department. Now it's 10, 12, right? Let's talk about the great resignation first, right? Well, you lived through it, yeah, been there. What was the impact?

[00:15:54] Mark Forehand: The impact for us was an inability to find people who would come and work for the state, because private was really excellent. We would have really good jobs where we'd have two and three people apply.

[00:16:07] Host: Before the pandemic, how many would apply?

[00:16:15] Mark Forehand: Oh, 60, 70.

Over time that has built back up to where you're getting 60 or 70 applications again, but still, people are moving because the workforce is different. There's not a lot of corporate company loyalty. There's a lot of personal initiative, as we all know. And I'm not talking about generations, I'm talking about the state of how we are as an economy, right? So people move on for their own personal interest, for what's best for them, and that turnover causes a downside effect. Every time someone leaves, that person was handling a file, that person leaves, this person calls and asks about the file, and there's nobody there that knows anything about it. And if you haven't CRM-trained properly, you're in trouble. What you then have is a frustrated student/customer who can't get the customer service they want and they start thinking about someplace else.

[00:17:04] Host: So is that continuation of knowledge? Yes. So look, I agree with you. It's not a generational thing. It's just a life thing, but at the end of the day, life as a career. I'm gonna say, is what I've seen over many, many years, maybe back in like, manufacturing almost died, but so you've got this turnover, natural turnover, but then when that person leaves, knowledge and/or facts go out the door with them, right? And so it's the inability or that—not the inability, you should be able to—but the non-performance of continual training.

[00:17:38] Mark Forehand: Right. It's—you said it beautifully. CRMs are complex. Some people are better at using it than others, right? And if you've got two disparate types of users in your office, without any effective training to connect it, you will continue to build a problem in your own office.

[00:17:55] Host: Now with that, who does that training fall upon? Does it fall upon the supplier? Does Slate/TargetX provide training? Or is it really up to that evangelist to be there saying, "Hey, I've got this whole training program."

[00:18:09] Mark Forehand: I strongly believe it's the evangelist, who is an evangelist for the CRM, who says, "We must have a training program. You have to complete this before you start this." And it's the university's evangelist or the company's evangelist. That's what they've asked that person to do. It should be in their job description.

[00:18:29] Host: Right, so again, going back to the importance of that evangelist role, that can really empower people, but also require you to do something, right? So, hey, look, to do this role, you can't jump in without training, right? You don't let a pilot jump into a plane without training. You don't let someone operate a ditch digger without having training.

[00:18:59] Host: Yeah, absolutely. Forklifts, right? Now, this will come down to what we maybe have thought in our pre-brief. We're talking about bad decision-making, yeah? And you see, kind of all these four things kind of roll into one, right? When you expand on this a bit.

[00:18:59] Mark Forehand: Well, it's that leaders seem to think the software tool is going to manage the entire set, and they're going to—I've heard people say, "So how many people can we cut if we use this?" Well, actually, you'll be adding people because of their budgeting concerns. Leaders think the CRM will do everything because it's technology, and they've been told by the salespeople that it can do this, this, and that. That's just not how it works. People have to build it right. It must be built, and it must be maintained, and it must be managed all day. They break three or four times a day. There's always something that happens to a CRM. If you have a large university, you could have 25,000 people inside your CRM at any given hour of the day. Well, yeah, no issue with it. Even if you have a small operation and you haven't bought enough, same problem.

[00:19:48] Host: Yeah, might you say it's a big picture, concurrent people, yes. Systems go down. It goes down. LinkedIn was down. The best in the world get it wrong, right? Microsoft, CrowdStrike.

[00:20:02] Mark Forehand: Yes, stuff can happen.

[00:20:04] Host: It does happen.

What's the contingency for when—I actually let me go back. I've actually been surprised—definitely less so now—but 5, 10 years ago, we would talk to some very large, well-known universities that I won't name today, but, um, were doing it on Excel. Yeah, never had a CRM. Does everyone have a CRM now?

[00:20:21] Mark Forehand: No, not everyone has a CRM. There are still people fighting tooth and nail not to have to do it this way. Those who do not want to get caught by the enrollment cliff, on the other hand, are well entrenched in the CRM.

[00:20:34] Host: So what does the CRM do really nicely?

[00:20:37] Mark Forehand: It allows your—unfortunately, sometimes you have to say it. As a businessman, it allows your employee to look at the people who hit their unit in their section and reach out to them immediately through three ways: phone call, email, digital art, and then continue to follow that journey and watch as they fill out an application, moving that to the next person in the team who handles applications and doing the same thing. It's seamless customer/student service from front to back.

[00:21:09] Host: So all those kind of outreach touchpoints creating interest, move that interest through.

[00:21:15] Mark Forehand: But all those outreach touchpoints have to be built by people, and that's the back-office people, where you're going to have to have people build this stuff.

[00:21:23] Host: Now, I think it's pretty well publicized that Higher Ed has some issues right now. But how do you know—is it worth it? Are there democratically clear that there could be this? The great resignation, three things we speak about to our partner schools. There's a "sell your way out of it" and "save your way out of it," two different mentalities. You can't do both. Right.

What you're saying is that a CRM is there to help. This is an investment, right? Because the CRM will get the people in there, get it implemented, create it, get it installed. It takes nine to 12 months. Potentially, it's a big commitment. Yeah, the bigger the school, the longer it takes. And we, unfortunately, as a company, we don't compete with CRMs at StudentBridge, but we see this quite often where, hey, we'd love to do what you're doing, but we can't talk about it right now because we're taken up with CRM integration. So it just becomes a bandwidth suck for a while, right? But it's an investment because for years to come, you're going to get better returns out of all your other activities, right, even though it means staffing up the CRM.

[00:22:20] Mark Forehand: But I would put it like this: CRMs have been around a very long time. Businesses have been extremely successful in the private sector using CRMs. There's no reason higher education shouldn't be the same.

[00:22:31] Host: Right. Absolutely. So, um, all right. So let's talk about evaluating this in departmental product, geographic structures. You said you believe the CRM effect is only on customer-facing processes. But you said, that's not true, no?

[00:22:50] Mark Forehand: Because what the actual student sees is very little. There's a queue, it's an iceberg. There's this top that you can see, but there's this huge amount of work happening by staff and faculty underneath that they never see, and that's where all the work is. Who builds the coding to send out the emails? Who builds the emails? Who builds—who decides who's going to get the focus for programs that week and not the next week? Decisions made by an evangelist. Key are the huge amount of work that happens underneath.

[00:23:23] Host: You kind of likened it to painting a house.

[00:23:30] Mark Forehand: If you don't get your underneath set up, nothing happens up above. Because if your team of coders, writers, marketers aren't set up to talk about this program—for example, we're selling the Masters of Science in Information Technology. Well, it's got to be about that. And all those people have to be on the same page, and they must understand what the CRM can do, because someone has to be able to tell the person who has asked from the faculty, "We could do that. We cannot do that."

[00:24:04] Host: Right. Yeah, it's very powerful, but sometimes we have to say, "We can't do this," right? Do you feel that too many people in the workplace are being under pressure to say they can do something when the system can't? Or where's that coming from?

[00:24:19] Mark Forehand: Because of the way—complex issue, great question, though—because people are in a situation where, what is the basis of their position? Are they being judged by percentage sales? Are they—what's happening to that person? Right, to where they have to say, "Yeah, I can do that." If it's working for the state, a staff member is allowed to say, "Yeah, I can't do that." And they're just the person whose job is to say, "I can't do that." Got it? There's no bad, but on the other side, you do get some vendors saying, "Yeah, we could do that." Then you're six months in, and they can't get it done, right?

[00:24:52] Host: Yeah, yeah. It's always best to do the opposite. According to a survey conducted recently by an Online Resource Center, CRMs—okay, you've mentioned that—when asked what went wrong with CRM projects, 4% of managers cited software problems. Yeah. 1% said they received bad advice, which is quite low. So in their failure of their CRM program, the lack of adequate change management.

[00:25:18] Mark Forehand: Evangelists.

[00:25:20] Host: That's the evangelist answer again, yes.

[00:25:23] Mark Forehand: And this happens every time. Everybody says, "We are changing." And in Higher Ed, it's a faculty-driven process. "We're making a change," and the faculty don't have to read that memo. All they do is teach. The staff will have to make the change, and if everyone is not on board with the change, and you don't have the critical infrastructure and the pre-trained individuals to train all these other people, you have some change management issues, right? The evangelist should be performing, right? Telling you all of these things, we really need to say these things.

[00:25:57] Host: What roles do we see, an existing role in a university, that may see a good career path into this CRM evangelism? Is there a role that seems more naturally aligned with that?

[00:26:06] Mark Forehand: A majority of universities I've seen have a position called customer relations management coordinator or officer, or something similar—that seems like the path forward. You're already in the CRM that they're using. You had experience at the university; that could be a director level or anything like that. For that person's job, 40 hours a week, they should walk around and talk about the CRM.

[00:26:06] Host: Well, that's great. Let's talk about customer relationship management. Customers expect consistent interactions across departments. You spoke about this—like we're in the middle of the Olympics right now, it's a 400-meter relay, you've got to pass the baton off, right? So talk to us a little about that. And that's obviously what you're saying here. The consumer, your customer, is saying the same thing. We expect a consistent experience.

[00:26:52] Mark Forehand: And this is where sometimes I offend faculty. No, not on purpose, absolutely not. But higher education has been with transaction. So if I am on the Amazon website and I want to buy a pair of shoes, I have an expectation of what the experience will be. But if your expectation is inconsistent in Higher Ed, that's your problem. People believe that higher education should be exactly what they've been buying on the internet. They have really made that jump to, "If this is efficient, higher ed should be." Going back to your conversation on price point.

[00:27:28] Host: Right. Absolutely, absolutely. All right. Well, I think that kind of ties up some of the premise of the issues you see. Is it fixable?

[00:27:37] Mark Forehand: Not all of it, but the evangelist piece is, and I think the longer people are involved in CRMs, and the more they see what the ROI is on a CRM for filling seats, the more people will be involved in getting CRMs, and people like me will have an opportunity to talk about this.

[00:27:57] Host: Right, of course. Going back to how we started, you're a big believer in technology. You've really embraced it very well. What would be a situation for you now that you're out there, doing some consulting? Is it the opportunity to get out there, help the universities set up the CRMs, identify the evangelists, train the evangelists? Are those some areas you see yourself really pushing into?

[00:28:20] Mark Forehand: Yes, along with providing the answers that a lot of universities tend to ask another university 10 questions about their experience with the CRM—helping people come up with a better set of questions based on their university. I've had a lot of universities call me. The first thing I ask them is, "So how many students do you have?" They say, "10,000." Well, we're using a CRM for 45,000. It's not going to be the same thing, but that's some important stuff that a consultant such as myself can provide you.

[00:28:48] Host: That's great. Good, Mark. Thank you very much for coming today. Appreciate it, always a pleasure to see you. Thank you for joining us for this episode of Filling Seats. Keep your eyes tuned for the next one. It'll be episode 45 coming up next with our surprise special guest, and we'll keep you posted through our social media and other messages. Thanks and see you soon.

[00:29:07] Speaker: This is the Filling Seats podcast hosted by StudentBridge, where we help enrollment teams achieve more by fusing authentic storytelling with industry-leading technology and personalized digital experiences. To connect with this episode's guests, check out the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a rating and review, and don't forget to subscribe. For more information about StudentBridge and this podcast, go to StudentBridge.com/podcast.