IESE Business School
IESE Business School makes connections for life with Salesforce
When Carolina submits her application to IESE Business School, she begins an academic journey tailored just for her. She receives invites to interesting and relevant events. She has access to course materials at the click of a button. And after she graduates, she is updated on alumni events and continued learning opportunities.
From enrollment to graduation and beyond, this journey is managed via Salesforce.
“We believe that personal and professional development is the primary driver for positive change and impact on business and society,” says Aniya Iskhakava, Programme and Marketing Manager, IESE. “To help our students reach their potential, we need to understand them. And that’s where Salesforce comes in.”
Thanks to Salesforce, IESE Business School has a single view of 250,000 prospects, students, alumni and fundraisers across departments and across continents. This means it can work as one team to deliver smarter marketing campaigns, build more meaningful relationships and recruit more students.
A ‘one team’ approach
The school’s 250 Sales Cloud users have been up and running since November 2014. The solution is used in every department – from the Dean’s Office to programme management. “Sales Cloud is user friendly and intuitive,” says Andra Baclacian, CRM Manager. “Adoption is increasing every month and so is productivity.”
With four international campuses, including Barcelona, Madrid, New York and Munich, plus an office in Sao Paulo, IESE Business School needs a joined-up approach to ensure all the departments are working together.
“The beauty of Sales Cloud is that it’s multi-lingual and scalable so we can collaborate seamlessly across our campuses, share best practices and standardise recruitment processes across different locations while still taking a heavily personalised approach,” explains Baclacian.
Using Sales Cloud means that prospective students receive unified communications from the business school.
“We used to have no way of knowing what materials other departments might have sent, so there was a lot of duplication,” explains Iskhakava. “With Salesforce CRM we’ve eliminated those data siloes which not only improves efficiency for us, but also means a better experience for potential students.”
Sales Cloud is integrated with the school’s website, campus management system and learning management system, which means data across all four systems is accurate and consistent.
Turning events into opportunities
From seminars run by business leaders to alumni reunions, events form a core part of the IESE Business School experience. With Sales Cloud, the school can make smarter guest lists and send attendance rates soaring.
“For every step of event planning there’s a Salesforce solution to make your life easier,” explains Baclacian. “With Sales Cloud we can segment contacts based on interests and previous experiences.”
Via integration with the school’s mail server, the team can easily access metrics to evaluate its marketing campaigns, giving it total visibility over what works and what doesn’t. The team can see which campaigns each student has responded to, make informed decisions on what to send them in the future, and measure its investments. “Our audience is growing bigger and bigger – the more successful campaigns we run the more positive feedback we get from our customers!” affirms Iskhakava.
Not content to rest on its laurels, the school is continuing to explore further possiblities with the Salesforce solutions. “There are so many things we’d love to explore with Salesforce. For starters, we plan to integrate it with a business intelligence system so we can produce insightful reports at the touch of a button,” confirms Baclacian.
While Salesforce CRM is only in its first year at IESE Business School, the educator is already seeing benefits across the board. “Thanks to Salesforce, we have more people attending events and more successful marketing campaigns,” explains Iskhakava.
“We can’t measure it just yet, but this will boost recruitment levels and student achievements, and that’s what the school is all about – helping more students achieve business success.”