Top 5 productivity hacks to strike more deals in less time during admissions using Higher Education CRM

Is your student recruitment effort going for a toss? Are you failing to serve the key audiences when it comes to recruitment and admissions? Unable to track your progress towards your recruitment goals? This blog on higher education CRM is just for you.

As decision-makers, striking your best deal during admissions and recruitment is all that you would want from a CRM software. The secret most salesperson won’t like to share when it comes to closing deals is their productivity hacks on how they close more deals. Not to worry.

This blog details five productivity hacks to strike more deals in less time and move towards achieving your institutional goals using higher education Customer Relationship Management (CRM). We have also thrown insights into how Creatrix CRM can help you in this regard.

The need for CRM

Business is all about connection and relationships. Dealing with a long list of connections requires tracking countless interactions, occurring at different stages of the sales pipeline. It is indeed a challenge. This is why more and more companies, higher education institutions, corporates, government agencies are moving to Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

A study by Forbes and Brainshark shows that 55% of the leading companies are investing in CRM software for their sales enablement technology.

What is CRM?

CRM is Customer Relationship Management in short. It is a software application that automates and manages communications with prospective and existing students, employees, alumni, donors, and everyone in the institution’s community.

Unlike a fragmented database, the CRM systems houses all details of the leads that come through the admissions funnel including the applicant’s name, gender, educational background, telephone, email, marketing materials, social media, and any other relevant information across different channels is compiled into a single database enabling easier information access, allowing to personalize and customize messages and the channels used to deliver the messages promptly.

What does Higher Education CRM do?

Every interaction with the “customer” is tracked by the CRM, all in one place.

In higher education, CRM bridges the communication gap between teams and individuals. It stores and organizes data efficiently, allowing users to streamline admissions, conduct marketing campaigns, and track results, finally!

CRM in higher education irons out clumsy admissions processes by identifying and recruiting the right candidates, engaging them, and increasing the enrollment results. By performing all these tasks seamlessly, Higher Education CRM proves to be the best student management software.

How to Track and Close More Deals using higher education CRM?

Winning a deal is easy with a potential sales tool like CRM. Delegating the mundane admission tasks to a CRM can streamline and save a lot of time.

Here are some of our secret productivity hacks for the benefit of your admission team who is searching for ways to take advantage and win more deals during the phase of admissions.

1. Try to outreach prospects effectively using contact management

Deals are your favorite, we know, but not the manual task of jotting them down on your notepad. This only leads to information slips from your memory. Why not give a chance to a CRM?

With a CRM, you can systematically organize and control the contact information you emanate through your marketing efforts and make way for more leads generation during admissions.

By automating the entire deal creation process including the creation of leads, owners, contacts, and setting a timeline to finish them, you not only reduce your tasks but also won’t fail to follow-up on your future opportunity.

This way, you would have more time to speak to applicants/leads in the sales funnel.

Creatrix CRM has some essential perks to iron out your communication efforts. It comes with options for emailing, texting, sending notes/comments. Some even come with options to upload resources or document repository, as part of your marketing efforts.

2. Customize your pipeline to match your admissions process

The entire admission process can be more demanding. It could get even more challenging to move forward without having a clear picture of your deals, proper guidance, and tracking. You would only tend to lose sight of their progression.

Leads in any admission process are the applicants who have expressed their interest to become enrolled in your institution. With CRM, higher education institutions can instantly view and filter leads, create customized views, segments, and figure out potential enrolments. The information fetched here can be used to forecast enrolment numbers accurately.

Those intuitive dashboards in CRM allow you to easily maintain the contact databases. The kanban view offers greater visibility to even an abstract sales process, leveraging the procedure to consistently striking deals.

By simply adding the leads (applicants) to the pipeline, the higher education CRM allows you to monitor key sales metrics and get a bird’s eye view of,

• what your pipeline looks like in real-time
• the average size of the deals in your pipeline
• the average percentage of deals you win (close ratio)
• the average lifetime of the deal (sales velocity)
• those on-site and off-site visits, all in a single window, and spend your time wisely.

Creatrix CRM offers a visual sales pipeline with the easy categorization of the leads (warm, cold, inactive, converted, closed) and helps you spot the one where your revenue lies.

This funnel timeline gives you a quick and holistic view of the individual leads. With Creatrix’ comprehensive timeline view, you get to see every interaction, activity connected to a prospective enrolment, in just a few clicks.

Thus, you can have all your leads in the spotlight, know where they are, address bottlenecks, if any, and keep moving forward before it’s too late. This way, the entire team can push themselves to improve their performance.

3. Gain transparent visibility into individual and team performance

The winning and closing of the deals in CRM rest on understanding the individual performance of those involved in the process along with the overall team's success.

This way you get to know those overperforming and under-performing in your team and assign specific tasks for improvement. CRMs generally offer this sort of insight, where you can easily gauge the fair amount of effort that comes in from the entire team.

A good CRM should allow you to track the trends and metrics performance. This helps you diagnose the health of your sales pipeline, before it turns unhealthy. You can easily have hands on your team’s collective performance in the sales pipeline and offer ways to address them to consistently close more deals.

4. Improve productivity with online cross-collaboration

While we all know collaboration is critical to winning deals, it need not be a painstaking task. Negotiations and discussions during deal closure go fruitless if not consistent.

There has to be a proper collaboration or cross-collaboration with the admission committee, decision-makers, students, and all those concerned for making an informed decision. The rich student experience is what most students prefer in their entire student lifecycle. The concept of cross-collaboration, which often gets challenging, can be streamlined using effective CRM.

A lot of it can happen in a Customer Relationship Management System - allot time to meet the person in the team, discuss the project, share information, and much more.

Getting trapped with those multiple email threads can slow down your decision-making most of the time. Online collaboration becomes easy with many CRMs.

5. Upload files in the file repository, so you don’t have to search for them

When was the last time you spend a long time in your sales process? It could be in collating files and documents for your leads.

Time is precious, no one likes to spend their long time searching for files, documents, or relevant content. Creatrix Document Repository allows you to upload files and instantly share them with your team.

You can attach and email files to anyone in a jiffy. It is easy to even attach files using your Dropbox, Google Drive, Dropbox, or from cloud storage by simply copy-pasting the URL.

Conclusion

When it comes to improving admission rates, your only targets could be increasing sales velocity, and lessening the time taken to close a deal. A user-friendly CRM solution can leverage this by saving time and boosting productivity. It’s something that sets most education institutions, from the rest.

Creatrix CRM interface is user-friendly and provides a consolidated summary of updates related to prospective enrolments. Users get a real-time overview of enrolment activities to make sure your institution’s relationship with every prospect is nurtured. Contact us to know more.