SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mossri and Kiro Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_01 0:29

So welcome to the CRM Success Show, where we do deep dives into CRM success and failures, delivering real stories with real impact, where we chat with some of the most influential voices in the CRM space. I'm uh Dave Masri, or Maz for short.

SPEAKER_02 0:47

And I'm Kira Witzing.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Uh and today's guest is David Start, who will be telling us about his time at Bellevue University. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

All right. Um so so so David, um, we'll start off nice and easy uh for you and warm you up uh for today. Um would you mind giving our listeners uh a quick high high-level overview of uh your role, um, a bit about um Bellevue, uh your time there, and um, you know, just kind of a general landscape of your basic project history, if you could.

SPEAKER_03 1:28

Absolutely. So I was with uh Bellevue University as a director in their PMO from approximately 2013 to about 2018. Uh around 2015 is where I got exposed to the Salesforce ecosystem and fell in love with it. Um, we had a task. We had at a time we were an Oracle shop. Uh Bellevue University is an online university. About 75% of their uh students are from around the world. Uh they're all online. Uh they use very good, they were very high tech as far as using Blackboard, really being forefront of using telelearning. Uh, they had about 25% of their students that they were looking to continue to grow that on on campus. And they had a beautiful campus, they'll still do. So one of the things was we were in Oracle shop and we were thinking, okay, we have got this expensive technology that just isn't fitting our needs. And then anybody who knows uh Oracle knows that they bundle things. So the little piece that you may need here, you have to buy five things with it. And it wasn't becoming sustainable for the vision. The vision that came down was we have all these disparate spreadsheets. We call them shadow systems, people working in Excel sheets on different shared drives. And it was just, it was almost like they just transferred from the old pen and paper days to Excel and shared drives. And that's about as far as they got for their internal uh technology as far as trying to run things. Um, trying to look at a way to say, hey, we're very, very tech savvy when it comes to our LMS or learning management system, but how do we do that to get our students involved? You know, we've got our basic website and everything. So the the vision was if Rocket Mortgage, you can get a mortgage by never talking to anybody and you can do everything online. Why can't we set up a process that we can meet people where they're at, bring in more client, more uh customers, more students, and do a path to go through that. And if you didn't want to talk to anybody, you couldn't. If you or you wouldn't, and if you did want to talk to somebody, you could. And the technology at the time, email, text messages, phone calls, you can meet them where they wanted to be met. So the first step was really looking at how we could do that. And one of the things when we were looking at different tools, we looked at sugar, we looked at, you know, Microsoft Dynamics, we we we knew, you know, the Oracle, People Soft Stack, and we said, you know, let's come up with a list of what we need. And let's come up with a list of what's our aspirations. And the aspirations is let's do this where we can do it like Rocket Mortgage. Let's let people tell us how they want to be interacted with and see how that works. So the first step that we did was coming up with the vision. The vision was we want to be like Rocket Mortgage. We want to take people from what we call cradle to grave. The minute you raised your hand and said, I would like to be a student at Bellevue University to all the way to alumni status. And so that was really became the impetus of the vision. And it started off about a year and a half process of us getting set up to embark on our Salesforce journey.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

Love it. Uh, great, great insight. Um, I I guess this was uh around a time where the world was obsessed with digital transformation, right? It was a term that was being thrown out by every team ex um known to the universe. Um I would be curious, uh obviously you you had a uh a customer, uh, you know, a name that you were kind of following the blueprint of uh with Rocket Mortgage. Um did you speak to anyone of Rocket Mortgage uh whilst you were kind of you know conducting um this this kind of idea and putting putting the ideas on paper to kind of get a sense of how they had done exactly what you're trying to achieve?

SPEAKER_03 5:20

Well, we didn't actually talk to like Rocket Mortgage or anything like that, but we did talk to other universities to say where they were. Um once we had decided on a couple different paths that we could go, uh we talked to a few different universities and peers. Um, we were very well connected through our board of understanding different pieces and parts that we could talk to or people we could talk to. Um, we had some very wealthy donors that also helped put us in touch with individuals at very high-ranking companies that use Self Force similar or did use Salesforce. So we were able to kind of peek under and ask the questions like, does it tick check this box? Does it check that box? And it was all part of our due diligence of understanding, you know, what would be the right tool. But before we even got there, we realized from the beginning, when you when you mentioned digital transformation, people always want to jump in and say, I want to use this tool now. How do I make it work? We were pragmatic enough to say, we need to look at our people, we need to look at our processes, and then we can figure out the product. So prior to this, we spent a good six months in BPRs. Every department from alumni relations to registrar to admissions to the library to you name it, military services, and you you talk to them, and we mapped out we had these big conference rooms, these big classrooms, and we'd take these white pieces of paper and we'd map out with sticky notes all the processes that we had to understand where everything was. And it was amazing amount of time. But by doing that due diligence, we could then create a very complex spreadsheet. They love their spreadsheets, very complex spreadsheet that we could look at what are the processes, what are the people impacted, what's our one year, three year, and five-year budget, what are the cost savings, what are the metrics to measure success? How do we know we're done? You know, how do we know that we've completed what we wanted to do? And this this was just such a wonderful pre-work before we even made a decision to go with Salesforce that I think that's what really set the foundation for us to be successful.

SPEAKER_02 7:38

So just before we uh move into the project uh plan, um just to try and um who might not be as familiar with the higher education space, um you know, in between the lines, just to clarify a quick question. Um, who are the customers for universities that that telescopes ultimately, and we'll come on to that in a second. I know Matt is uh is good questions ready, but but who are the customers that that for the university would would be impacted by Salesforce? Students, but obviously, but you know, anyone else?

SPEAKER_03 8:12

Yeah, so that's a great question. One of the things that uh we were very cognizant of is that you know, not only are the students a consumer or or someone who we could benefit from our processes within Salesforce, we had instructors, we had our administrative staff, we had different companies because we had a very large B2B and B2B2C, B2C uh clientele. So we had to factor in all the different consumers. So uh for instance, to kind of take this back a little bit, prior to this, I was developing healthcare uh electronic health records. And I always would talk to people and go, Who is our our end user? Who's our consumer? Who's the one we make happy? And everybody would immediately say the doctor. It wasn't the doctor, it was the person at the front desk using our software. It was the person that was taking the notes and doing the transcription, it was the person in medical records. We took that same mentality and we said, okay, first and foremost, of course, it's our students, but who else? It doesn't, it doesn't help us if we are not going to the end user, the schedulers, the admission counselors, the registrars. If we don't make it simple for them and understand that they are a consumer or customer of Salesforce as well, we're failing the mark.

SPEAKER_01 9:35

Awesome. So um I think your question was more of like, are you just targeting like students in degree programs or extracurricular learning? Or you know, you said you were targeting alumni. Is that just for maybe bringing them back into a de a degree program? I think that's more okay.

SPEAKER_03 9:55

Let me readjust. Uh actually, um, so the question would be yes, or excuse me, the answer would be all of them. We were looking at looking at the totality of all students. Bellevue University was inter it was interesting and is interesting in the fact that they have international students, they have local students, they have national students, they have second career students. So people they had contracts with, say, Home Depot, Walmart, Disney, people that are looking to go through management training to accelerate their career, but may not be degree seeking. Um, we had students that were late learners, we had military, they got done and they wanted to use their GI Bill. We had single parents that were coming back in their 30s, 40s, and 50s looking to either continue their degree, get their first-time degree, or just expand their knowledge. Uh, so our consumer was a really a wide uh a wide swath of individuals throughout the United States and the world. Uh, we had a very big program with students over in Europe and over in Asia, where we would do exchange programs and we would offer degree swapping uh programs. So there was it was a really a wide market, which is why we went with that methodology of meeting people where they needed to be met, because we had such a wide net that we could cast.

SPEAKER_01 11:16

Awesome. So um before you said you were right, you had this big undertaking, you put together all these VPRs, which I assume for business process review. Right. Um so how do you like you're you're going through all these processes? How do you draw the line between I want to rebuild my current processes but digitize it as opposed to uh maybe we can improve those processes? Um and then you could like you can end up in a rabbit hole of let's fix our processes because otherwise we're gonna build something wrong or not efficient because we're rebuilding bad processes, but doing it digitally. Right. So how do you kind of balance that and you know not get stuck in this kind of analysis paralysis type?

SPEAKER_03 11:59

That's a that's a great question. Uh I we struggled with that quite a bit. Um, one of the things of having such a diverse group throughout the university where we were doing these BPRs is that you had anybody that was just new and was like not married to a process, to someone who was white knuckled on their desk going, What's happening to my job? If I don't put this on a sticky note on my computer and I'm the only one to know how to do this, my job isn't safe. So we had to get past that. We had to keep saying, if you can if you could just forget how these things are done, what's the right way to do it? How do you reimagine this? And we kept having these exercises of saying, reimagine. We don't want to take an existing process and just digitize it. We want to reimagine it. And we started coming up with these ways of getting people to get involved. And we had this saying if you could, how would you viciously automate your job so that you could be more beneficial to the university? And when we got them starting to think of, man, if I freed up some time, I could really do this, I could be much more fulfilled in my job and bring more value. So the facilitation, we had really good facilitators going through there. And I'll be honest, we had some very tough sessions, tough sessions where people were just married to this. I am not giving up my notepad. And we we would say, Well, what happens if you come into work? And you know, that old adage, if you get hit by a bus, how's the university going to survive? We can't have single points of failure. So the facilitation and getting through that to not just say, I've done it this way for a decade, because we had people that have been there 35 years, 40 years. You can't just continue and just digitize a process. You must reimagine, we must viciously automate, we must bring value and make sure that we don't have single points of failure. And by continuing those mantras and continuing those vision sessions and putting them into the BPRs, we really got some good stuff. But at first, you're absolutely correct. We were going down rabbit holes and we'd have to stop and pull back and say, we're not recreating your shadow spreadsheet in the shared drive under your folder that no one else can get to. We need to know what you do with it. So then we could say, here's the process that we can do.

SPEAKER_01 14:19

Awesome. Um, so it's funny that uh the phrase you know, get hit by a bus, what it really means in the business world is you quit or get fired. But somehow it turned out that getting hit by a bus in the business world is better to say than you decide to move on and better yourself. Um, it's just one of those those funny things about the business world about what's politically correct and allowed and not.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

Um Yeah, we also we also had a saying, and I I really like this is that you know, we would talk about it when a man or a woman dies, a library burns down. And so when we when we'd start with quotes like that, people would be like, That is true. Well, what does that mean? You can't be the only person that has all the knowledge, you have to share so then we can all come together to understand how that knowledge can be useful. So we were really looking to stop libraries from burning down, and uh that that again, that certain phrases resonated with certain generations.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

Okay, awesome. So great. Go through the VPRs, do some process um mapping, improvement, um, and then I assume you have to come up with some kind of plan of attack, right? Um, as well as core goals, at least for the first iteration, some kind of roadmap. Um, so you can tell us a bit about that, where you ended up, what did this roadmap look like? Um, what was your plan of attack? What was your, you know, your biggest um your biggest goals or KPIs, KPIs key performance indicators?

SPEAKER_03 15:46

Yeah, so as I mentioned, we we would use classrooms, we would have reams of white paper with sticky notes all over that. Just this the exercise of us getting together and transforming that into spreadsheets of functionality and tables after table after table. It gave us the ability to even go through and create charts and graphs within Excel and use some of the power of Excel to say, okay, what is the ranking of importance? What is the absolutely must-have to go live? What does MVP and success look like? Our KPIs were pretty simple. We were looking for adoption. Of course, the big one is enrollments. We wanted to drive enrollments. The unspoken one was how do we reclaim FTEs? And I'll talk about that in a little bit. But FTE driver was kind of an unspoken thing because if you talk about it too much, people automatically heard, well, you're looking to cut jobs. No, we're looking to improve efficiency. So we would look at ways to label that as an efficiency gain or an automation gain. And so we we had all these metrics that we'd come out and we used them to go through and say, okay, for marketing, if we're going to do marketing, what does success look like? Are we looking for people? How many people respond? Can we measure that? And again, we're talking people and process before we even got to the product. So we didn't know what marketing cloud could do. We didn't know what sales cloud could do. We didn't know what service cloud could do. But what we knew is what we wanted to do. And so we wanted to be able to drive enrollments. We wanted people to be able to have that face time or the phone time or that email time to respond to future students and existing students and alumni. We needed ways to route information about a student between the different departments. We knew we needed to have a way that we could start to do analytics to wonder about can we look at past packages? What does enrollment rates look like? What does the cost per credit hour? Where's that sweet spot that we're getting stuff? How much are we growing internationally? We had all these analytics and all these questions that we had come up with. And that's where we were starting to put the process together to build that roadmap of what do we need to get this vision to move.

SPEAKER_01 18:12

Nice. Um, okay. So can you tell us a bit about your product selection, which clouds you decided to use, how they kind of work together, interoperability, integrations, affect that, right? So what was like high-level architecture?

SPEAKER_03 18:27

So we decided um to at the time, I think, buy everything that Salesforce had. I say that kind of tongue in cheek, but you know, I don't want to date myself, but analytics was called Wave back then. Um, but we did sales, we did service, we did marketing cloud, we had our integration suites, we did um, we did, like I said, wave analytics, but we also looked at how we could integrate in with our Oracle BI. We looked at how we could go to our data lakes at the time and where we could do uh different things to pull in from our customer or our excuse me, our LMS and our CMS, and how we could go and and pull that stuff in.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

We also looked at portal so we could set up that and then within the core portal, you mean communities, aka yes, I dated myself a bit. Yeah, yeah. Now it's uh now it's experience cloud, right? Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:19

The old the old experience cloud as portal.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Um now it's experience.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

Yeah, yeah. It was the the experience cloud now that's been uh we talked about rebranding that that used to be portal. Uh it's so those were the high-level tools that we used. Um, and we use those very effectively. Um, and by that I mean we used campaigns. When campaigns weren't even really that big, we used marketing cloud and really had a whole marketing team drive that. We had our Oracle BI team work with Wave Analytics and look at different ways that we could do this. We were buying SMS packages so that we could, we, you know, when it wasn't it was just a little add-on, we were looking at different tools within App Exchange. And I would say the one thing that was a misstep but an accelerator is we actually went with a managed package for higher ed. The way I say that it's a misstep but an accelerator, it got us to where we need to be. It got us out the door and it had all the tools and functionality we did. We didn't have to engage in a very pricey third-party vendor to help drive this from scratch, and it helped us build an internal team to be able to support it. But we also had a one-year plan and a three-year plan to eventually replace all that managed package with our own version that we would scale and be sustainable with sales and service.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Nice. I think that's a good go on, Dave.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

No, I was gonna ask one more quick question, but and then we'll we'll talk about how the execution went. Um, so you said the integrations marketing cloud, I think was probably exact target back in the day.

SPEAKER_03 20:53

It had just changed, yeah. It had just changed.

SPEAKER_01 20:56

Oh, so so Salesforce already bought them. Yep, yeah, okay, cool. So, what'd you use for integrations? Because I'm assuming this is the MuleSoft acquisition.

SPEAKER_03 21:04

We had MuleSoft, actually, we had that. We had uh and um and Boomi. So we had a couple of different uh couple of different tools. There was a point where we were looking at uh, I believe it was Data Stage, but um we went with MuleSoft and Boomi.

SPEAKER_02 21:22

Got it, fantastic. Um a nice segue into uh into into our next section. We we talked we talked a little bit about the uh journey and and and uh challenges. Um you mentioned kind of uh uh an unintentional, but it worked out well in the end, the pivot to the managed uh managed package. But um I I guess um you know could let's touch a little bit more on some of those um kind of surprises, what was unexpected. Um you know, you talked uh earlier about you know some of the biggest challenges were actually internal right around introduction and And this is the way it's always been done. And yeah, some individuals have in the business of 30, 40 years. And it's work for it then, why not kind of continue the way we've always known? So I guess that's a loading question, but on two sides. What was sort of the unexpected challenges and prices you have to deal with internally, but also externally when you started to implement sales costs?

SPEAKER_03 22:26

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of the challenges were, as you just touched on, people that had been there for decades. Um, changing the mindset of this is the only job I've ever known, or I've grown up and I've been here doing it for, you know, decades. Um, having a change management, and this is one of the things, this is one of the most incredible things that the university did. Obviously, we were a teaching university, so we would have a top-natch talent development department, right? And they did. They did. Our change management was a work of art. And I and I mean that, and it sounds kind of fluffy, but we put together communications, we put together a monthly newsletter. It we talked about the sales force, what it could do, what we'd give them little highlights, we would put them out to trailheads, we got people so excited. We had about a hundred people within the university all competing within or uh working within this. And to get them from apprehension to excitement, our training and development department did a great job. So that was a success. That's what helped drive some success because we all know adoption is killer. If people are like, this thing sucks, I'm gonna go back to my paper and pencil and all that. Uh, it could have been, it could have tanked us, and we, you know, and it, but they did a wonderful job. Wonderful job. Uh, I'd say one of the gotchas uh was we we didn't realize buying a managed package because we didn't know what we what we knew, uh, what we didn't know. And and one of those things was we we thought, you know, when you go through the sales cycle, you don't always get what you're sold, um, that we would be able to do a lot more customization. And a lot of that was just simply they're a managed package, they do it for universities all across, unless the value is to add it on, it became a lot of custom components, a lot of one-offs. And so there was some technical debt, which again, when we went back to the one and three year, was how much technical debt of doing these one-offs could we handle before we would say we're gonna rip and replace? You know, at what point do we rip and replace because of the technical debt? The gotcha was we made the assumption after doing all this due diligence, understanding all the processes and all the things that we needed to do. And because they checked the box, we never thought to add, well, what if we want to change? What if we want to add this custom little thing right here within this without having to throw a component on here, customized? Uh that was a gotcha. We we got further down and we started realizing again things that we didn't know and come to realize with the functionality like this. Would be great if we put this here. That would be great if we could do this. Oh, it's not part of the managed package. Okay, let's put that in the backlog. Uh, that would be a gotcha. Um, that was as far as all due diligence that we did, we missed that one.

SPEAKER_02 25:27

Um I'm curious, um, you know, throughout this kind of period, uh, we talked again earlier about you know who the customers were for South Cost and students were as you would expect, uh, a big customer um who's going to impact perhaps the most. Um throughout the the journey of the implementation effort, um were did were were consorted, were you know kind of interviewed and and and kind of you know um I guess input to write? I can't think of a better term, but but throughout throughout the different kind of um milestones of the project, were there interaction with the customers, the students, the getting to test the functionality and things like that?

SPEAKER_03 26:11

There was some. There was some. Um, because we were going to make it so intuitive that they could, you know, they could connect in these ways. And the majority of functionality was internal facing. But we did, we did have those. We had student groups, user groups, because at the time, you know, things were coming up. We were one of the first universities that had esports. So we had students that were very technical. Uh, our learning management system was Blackboard. So we had students that were very tech savvy on how to take classes. So we naturally expanded that into looking at the portal, looking at our existing ways that we interact, and would have user groups that come in and do A-B testing. Um, and but the majority of it primarily was internal facing. It was going to be the administrative uh counselors coming in and working in the system. The students wouldn't be working in the system. We would be using the system to connect with them. And therefore, their inter the interaction with them was more on a front-facing user experience where the bulk of how we would look at things and I'll talk to our internal customers, was where the majority of the work was.

SPEAKER_02 27:24

Well, what about um from a from a challenge perspective? Um, to do with resource and what I mean by that skill set gaps that might have been there using a new system, obviously, you know, rewinding to six, seven, eight years ago. Um, probably not many as many universities and content and clouds are out there around how successful implementation should look. Um what would the you know what kind of challenges did you run into from a resource, resource perspective, both physical people, but also knowledge articles out there to guide you and the project team uh to successfully implement?

SPEAKER_03 28:03

So that's a great question. And back at back then, you're absolutely correct that we had a a significant shortage. Our IT department had really good developers. Luckily, they we had really good Java developers, and so you know the transition from Java to Apex Code is fairly easy for those that are code inclined. I'm not code inclined. I can read it, but don't ask me to write it. Um, but at the time, we didn't have anybody that had any skills when it came to Salesforce. In fact, one of the things that I brought in or championed to bring in was the whole agile method methodology and to take certain developers and business SMEs and go through Trailhead. We took advantage of the uh customer success and the classes. Uh, at that time, I got certified as an admin so I could help uh you know understand what was under the hood and explain to it. That's what started my love of Salesforce is actually getting back under the hood of things. But we had to build our entire IT infrastructure to focus on Salesforce. We had everybody managing our web and our Blackboard and on Oracle, but we had nobody to do Salesforce. We had nobody in marketing that would be able to work on marketing cloud. So part of our training, our talent and development was working hand in hand with our really good Salesforce reps of saying, we need these resources, we need to go to these courses, we need to have these in-person classes. We brought in trainers to do Scrum and Agility and truly build out that team. And so while we're building, we were learning. And what we did is we created a workforce internally from various user groups that was then be able to support the system. We actually built our Salesforce development team from the ground up.

SPEAKER_02 30:04

Well, then I guess we just before we move on, um, you know, curious, because there's a long debate in a Salesforce ecosystem around around development, right? Developers and you know who makes a better Salesforce developer? Is it someone that only kind of was brought up with Dell Sport and that's what they know through Apex, etc.? Or is it the kind of Oracle, Talk developers, Java developers that picked up Dellsport? Um, you know, and we're not looking to start the debate today, but I'm I'm I'm I'm assuming again at that time there weren't the volume of developers available with Apex and Visual Force experience, et cetera, like there is today or now wide number components. But so like we said you built the team in-house for a large part of that, where were they coming from? Like the developer, the technologies, like what what type of experience and and did they have um before they learned and picked sales for stuff?

SPEAKER_03 31:01

So you're gonna like this uh because that's a great question when you're looking at that. So there's two considerations. When you're in a university, especially a uh a privately owned uh private nonprofit, the dollar is everything. So we would frequently be able to bring students in from our coding department and our our uh our our degree programs in computer sciences, and they would do internships and eventually come on because our more skilled and senior uh individuals for development, database administrators and whatnot would eventually move on to more lucrative careers. Um so our team actually started with a couple of junior um developers that had again uh Java, they had um they had some SQL, they had some integration, and two of our actually two of our best developers started out as BAs. They were just getting, they were in during the business process uh redesign, and we would go through and like I said, I went through and got certified, they got certified. We had a couple individuals that came from admissions that was helping us with the admissions process and the different things that we needed to set up, and they raised their hand and said, Yeah, I'd like to learn this, you know, and then they got certified as administrators, and then they started to learn how to code and how to do clicks and code and declarative. And and they just it it just again it just became the people who wanted to have a passion for learning, which is what you can find at a university fairly readily. Individuals that were looking to do internships and skill up, and individuals that were looking to do a stepping stone into something new to help the university, but knowing that long term this could actually be a stepping stone for their career. And so we were very lucky. That's that's like lightning hitting twice, uh, to be able to have that type of talent pool be available and that readily skilled up and to be as successful as they were.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

Oh yeah, I mean you guys um as a university, right? Training people should be like the easiest task you have, right? Right. Um, right, that's just your core skill. So um, and believe it or not, that's one of the more difficult things training. Um, that's often often struggles. So, like talking about that, right? Talking about um clearly it was a big concern of yours, right? How are we gonna get a user base to use this? How are we gonna train them? How are we gonna get over um you know these fears and the change control aspect of it? Um, you you you said quote it was a work of art, like you you guys think you did a phenomenal job on that. So, how did you like what what exactly did that art look like? I guess is is the question, right? How did you do that? Um, and then more importantly, how did you measure it, right? Because that's it's one of the big challenges nowadays is how do you measure uh user adoption? Um and it and it it's it's a tough thing to do because often the user adoption rates go back and then they adjust their behaviors to meet the metrics of the user adoption, right? So it's like a catch 22, you know. Oh, you're you're not using the system because you're not logging phone calls. Like, fine, you want me to lock phone calls, I'll lock some phone calls for you, you know? Um, but they're not really using the system, right? So how do you how do you right, how did you guys get past that?

SPEAKER_03 34:21

Um that's that's a great question. Um, so one of the things is is we have to understand at that time the the ecosystem that we were in was ripe for a process change. Um the the change management, like I said, we started doing the you know Salesforce trivia. People could win gift cards, they could, you know, do things. So they were engaging and they'd have to do these trivias to win. They would engage in trailheads, and we could track the trailheads because they could get their badges and we could see that. Um, so we could see the engagement going through there as far as wanting to learn, and then from there, we would put out feelers of who would want to be that department's champion of change. Okay. And so we had some committees that were all about making the university life, not for the students, but for the faculty, the university life fun and exciting, a great place to come and work. And so we incorporated some of that as well. So some of these little tchotchkis and these giveaways, yeah, it seems gimmicky, but it got people to start learning. And then as they got curious, they're like, huh. Now, if we do this, this is gonna help me how, and so we really worked with them to answer that question. And so in the various different departments, those champions of change could answer that. They'd be like, you know, this could be automated, you know, we could sue up your cues, and one of the things I like to bring up, and I don't know if there's a question later, but one of the metrics, you know, we can go with through the standard Salesforce metrics, you know, logins and you know, call logs and everything like that. But because it was such a manual process, it became much easier to measure certain departments. So let's take admissions. Admissions was spending 70, 75% of their day going through everything that had come in and saying, okay, I got to call this person, I got to call this person, I got to respond to this email, I gotta do this. They could be weeks behind. We had set a metrics, a performance metrics that we're measuring, you know, talking about, you know, trying to game the system, but they were trying to set a standard of nobody would go more than 48 hours without an answer. And sometimes that was that was being blown out, it'd be 72 to you know 96 hours. We wanted to get that down to within 12. The only way to do that, and we was we're talking to them, is how would you do that? And they're like, Well, we'd have to have our day organized. Great. Let's introduce you to cues and omni channel, or at the time it was just CTI, but let's introduce you to that concept. And as people got there, they're like, wait a minute, okay, we're measured on performance. We can now have our day set up for us, it's automatically routed, and then I can put my disposition in here. So I'm not spending 15 minutes a call, I'm down to like five. And that's where after we launched, we were quickly able to look at what was the conversion rate to people to enrolling, and then what was the net response rate okay for calls or incident resolution? What was the resolution time? And then how much of your day was spent organizing, dialing for dollars, or dealing with uh different types of issues versus the administrative work. And we flipped it, we flipped it till they were them spending 75 to 80 percent of their day working where they could be productive, and the rest of the time was just looking, logging in, saying, okay, I'm gonna rearrange my cue a little bit. That to them was the greatest thing that had ever happened to them because they were able to really service the student the way they wanted to, or service whoever the end user was, and it was something they never dreamed was possible. So we were able to do metrics or KPIs on matriculation, conversions, call resolution, and you know what else happened? Our NPS scores, our net promoter scores, which were already fairly good, started going through the roof. So we were able to really measure that the changes we put in there were measurable, they were discrete, it was facts and data. It wasn't conjecture, it wasn't I'm gaming the system, it was all these things. It was data within the system that we could run analytics on, it was surveys going out after every course, it was surveys after every phone call as applicable, and we were getting feedback like we had never gotten before, and we could adjust. If we failed, we failed fast and we failed forward. But we were able to measure everything, whereas before we could measure nothing.

SPEAKER_01 39:22

So um I mean, changes is so one, I I I I think you hit the nail on the head with this approach of process improvement, process improvement, process improvement, um, focused on users as opposed to management, right? A lot of times the management or the leaders are the ones setting division, they might be a little bit focused on their needs, um, and that drive right that makes sense, right? That ends up driving, but you but I think you like you guys did a solid job of like focus on the user, get users' processes improved to make their life easy, they use the system um and the uh evangelist approach, right? Those uh those super users. So like making it sound like a little bit too rude, like you must have had some problems converting some people, right?

SPEAKER_03 40:13

Oh yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 40:15

Yeah, so how how how did you how did you handle that? Like, particularly the good performers, right? Because that's one of the toughest things is right, I'm rolling out a new system, rolling out uh, you know, um process improvements, a lot of people on board, you know. I got someone who's not on board, they're giving me problems, they're a poor performer, no problem, right? It's easy to get rid of them, but when they're a top performer, and like I'm your best guy, I know better than you know. Like, how do you how did you handle that scenario? Did it come up?

SPEAKER_03 40:45

Yeah, you know, and and that's excellent. You're right. Um there was that it wasn't all roses and wine. Um, we did have a lot of resistance to change, and that's why I say that the the talent and and the change management did a wonderful job because we did have those pockets of resistance. We did have those people that were like, I don't want to change what I'm doing, but we also came up with a kind of a philosophy of we can surround and raise, and by that I mean by putting those champions of change within there, by having them be able to go right over to say Johnny Jack and say, I can't stand this system. What am I doing wrong? And having someone be able to help right there, someone that they trusted, that they worked, it's on their team. We realized right then that having that collaborative team spirit really would help drive. We had some individuals that saw themselves out the door, they didn't want to see change, they didn't want to adopt. Um, for this reason or another, they they decided to opt out. And it was unfortunate. We we always would have talent drained, but we had enough people that had celebrated it, they'd been wanting it for so long. And that that's there were there were two things that happened with that, okay, that helped contribute to that. One, the university was always a very collaborative spice, it and it still is, is to my knowledge. I'm no longer there, obviously, but uh still very collaborative. Um, we had clear direction, clear C-suite board, president, VP down direction. It was unwavering support. A lot of times you'll see where you go into a big digital transformation and they think it's all great and everything. And the minute they hit a uh a road bump or a speed bump, the wheels start coming off, or you have a lot of disruption at the top, and all of a sudden it becomes game of thrones, and they're trying to do this and that. And of course, it's very easy to throw a digital transformation project off the rails. We didn't experience that. We were very lucky in that the champions of change came from the top down, so we had ultimate support. The other thing is we did not allow any AVPs, RVPs, any type of executive management. Director was the highest level that could ever be in any meeting. And even in other meetings that they would get together as groups, directors would be excluded and it'd only be area managers, so we could have complete ability to air out the concerns, to bubble those up without fear of reprisal, without fear of someone and an assistant vice president saying, No, you're gonna do it because I told you to. There was none of that. We realized very quickly that once we had us our support from the top, that they had to pledge empowerment dela. And that was one of the things that we would always have followed signs around. Are you a chief or are you an Indian? You know, and followers versus leaders and all these things around the university, they were very big on that. But if what with we did not have that approval and continuous support, even when it got Tough even when we ran into roadblocks, even when we went off schedule, it could have derailed it. And by having upper level management in the meetings where we were getting down and dirty as a team, it wouldn't have happened. So I those two things I've seen those mistakes happen in multiple uh different uh organizations and projects I've done uh in my consulting career. Those are the two biggest culprits. We were lucky that we had that top down and to realize that from the top to a certain point, they stayed out of it. They empowered us and we bubbled the information up.

SPEAKER_02 44:36

Love it. Um I think that that that moves us forward uh quite quite nicely into our next section, um, which is talking around insights and advice, lessons learned, and and I've got a couple of questions we'll move into. But uh I think just around um the successes, I I I know from speaking with you separately, um the increase in enrolment figures once Salesforce went live and was implemented. Um I think first year was was was around about a 20% increase, and then it was as high as 80, 90 percent over year two, year three. Um how do you credit Salesforce for that? Uh an increase in those enrollment numbers. Let's say I'm scaling one to ten, how how effective would you say that that was because of the direct impact of salesforce?

SPEAKER_03 45:23

Yeah, and as we talk, you know, that's that's that's really good. And of course, as someone who was leading that, I would want to say, oh, it was a 10, of course. You know, would be great. Um, but that would be a complete misnomer and would not give credit to the hundreds of people that worked on it. Um was it successful? Yes. Was it easy? No. Uh lessons learned, I would have joined a gym uh and uh worked out more and had less cocktails because it was very stressful. Um, 13 months of running like our hair was on fire, at times forgetting what we were doing. Um, so having, I guess, a lesson learned was the fact that we would take pauses, we would try to reflect, we would work together in a way to realign our vision and make sure we were staying true. Um it was a very hard process. It was, I don't want it to make it seem like it was easy. It was because of it being hard that it became such a success. It's because of the due diligence up front. Um, you know, so I guess uh, you know, I would say it was a collaborative effort between our partners and the team and hats off to the management and the executives to give us the ability to work with them. And it would make a good solid eight or nine when it comes to projects. Um, and you're right, enrollment has been just in in increasing, and that during that time was kind of the dot or the education uh bubble, where other universities experienced a double-digit decline and Bellevue experienced a double-digit increase. Uh so that that in itself, looking at the times, looking at the different metrics, looking at how enrollment grows, we can attribute that to two things. Yes, the product. The product got us to where we needed to be. But if we don't ever acknowledge the very first when we talk about people, then process, then product, it was the people. It was the people that used the processes that we developed and the product that really made the difference. People are always at the core of any success. And Bellevue University had a great team of those who stuck around and wanted to be a part of it, had a great team. All the success goes to them, it goes to the people that continue to have a passion in higher ed. You'd really have to have a passion to be in higher ed, to have that passion for higher ed and helping students.

SPEAKER_02 47:59

Amazing. What about um so so correct me if I'm wrong, um but but but I I I recall, I I believe that this was your first first or maybe second Salesforce project, right? Um at Bellevue, correct?

SPEAKER_03 48:15

Yes, this was my this was my indoctrination into the Salesforce world.

SPEAKER_02 48:19

Okay. So so obviously you've consulted in the commercial sector since then with with with since um implement at the mother chip, but um knowing what you know now, um if you had to go back and and and redo this and and and lead the initiative and and and um do everything again with the same same mandate and same KPIs, etc., what what would you do differently? There might be many things, but what would be the key thing you would do do differently having accumulated all this knowledge and wealth of experience in different industries?

SPEAKER_03 48:59

I think one thing we would do is is have a little more belief in ourselves and not rush to a managed package and think that uh speed to market would trump technical debt. Um, again, as I say, it was it was a wonderful way for us to understand how to get there because we just didn't have the acumen within the Salesforce uh ecosystem to have people on board to say, yes, we could do this. Uh, we actually started with a managed package and we were using that vendor when we realized we needed to bring on a partner. That partner is part of or is part and parcel to the success of spinning up the ability to teach us how to fish, um, how we could be self-sustaining, the need to understand that when everybody packed up and left, we needed to be able to be self-sufficient. So when I look at a lessons learned, um, sometimes the bright, shiny, you know, speed to market customer overlay or managed package, and I'm not saying anything negative against that. Uh, there's lots of app exchange products that are out there, and there's a lot of great um app uh pre prepaid uh pre excuse me, pre-packaged overlays, financial services cloud, manufacturing cloud, all these things they have really good uses and pieces and parts, but I'm still a fan of using out-of-the-box core Salesforce. And where we should have started is what can we do with the core product before we looked at an overlay, before we looked at a managed package, before we looked at app exchange. What can we do first? Because we all know out of the box functionality is so much easier. You don't have to worry about the updates, you don't have to worry about something breaking, you don't have to be something out of sync, you don't have to worry about contacting tech support for for your managed package and them getting back to you a certain time. And you know, people can't get handled, you can handle it in internally. It's not a black box of code that you can't get to. So I think, you know, if I'd go back, we'd be a little more pragmatic about let's start with a partner, let's let's do the out-of-the-box, let's see if there's a need, and that's what I would change. But again, we had great partners. We had a great managed package that got us to where we needed to be. That's that at the end of the day, it was a success. But if I had to go back, that's what I'd change, knowing what I know now.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

But you never ripped it out. You never ripped out the the managed package.

SPEAKER_03 51:23

Some of it did, yeah. Oh, you did? They slow they slowly replaced it, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 51:30

What how much of that was um obviously this was was again for again for our listeners, or you know, there's gonna be um experienced as you guys, right? Um in terms of tenure in the ecosystem, but there's gonna be individuals that assume education cloud was was what it was always was. It was a product called Education Cloud, and that's what universities used, right? So uh obviously not the case, but but um you know, I guess for for a for a another university that might be going through this journey, um, maybe it's a 2.0 version of this journey, right? Um maybe maybe maybe it's a third time round, who knows, right? Um but but what advice would you give to uh to a an organization, a CRM executive, um who is is undergoing this journey uh for their university? And then and then the second part of that is just as a whole. Um so something that's niche to to niche uh for the university space, but then as a whole for for a CRM exact, um, embarking on a CRM transformation journey today, what would be the best bit of advice?

SPEAKER_03 52:38

So, yeah, you're you you're dating me again, yeah. Uh higher education cloud didn't we didn't have that. Um so let me see, uh what would what advice would I give to a university now? I've been out of the higher ed game for a little while, been more in financial services, and then as you mentioned, uh the mothership, and then I'm back at a financial service now. But the higher education space has always been very special to me. Um, one thing that I would recommend, and this would go for any type of Salesforce engagement, is there's a couple things you always have to remember. You know, when we're kids, we first have to learn to crawl, then walk, then run. And you think of those three simple steps, and then you think back of the mantra of people, process, then the product. If they can keep those in place, we are such a society now that we're looking for instant gratification. So any type of overlay that immediately gets us to market, anything that we can do that, even though it creates technical debt, if we don't take the time to do the prior planning to prevent, you know, as performance, um this is where things go off the rails. Salesforce is an extremely um complicated yet wonderful tool. You can over-architect it and it will still run like a champ. It has got incredible uptime, um, and you never have to worry about it. Now if you do if you just try to throw stuff together and hobble it together, eventually it becomes so burdened and so cumbersome that it becomes a failed project. Um, so I would always caution people think of the person first. Where are you trying to put this in? How does it impact your end user? Then think of what processes do you want to automate? What do you want to change? And don't just replicate an old website into Salesforce. Imagine what can happen. Think about what is the best thing. If you could wave a magic wand, and one thing I always ask when I'm doing these facilitations is I always ask at the end, is there anything I haven't asked that you want me to know? Spurring those conversations because someone may be sitting there going, I should have raised my hand, but I don't feel comfortable. I I didn't think about this, but I did that. So when when you're looking to do a CRM implementation, implement uh implement implementation, excuse me, you can edit that out. Uh sales, uh Salesforce CRM implementation. What I would always say is first think about the big picture, think about your person, and think about what processes you want to do. What's the end goal? What's your North Star? What does MVP look like? And then start from there before you even say Salesforce, dynamics, sugar, whatever is else is out, Snowflake, whatever else is out there for CRMs. Start with the person. Think through the processes, then look at the process at the product.

SPEAKER_02 55:57

Very much.

SPEAKER_01 55:59

Yeah, just to add to that, um often the reason people don't ask the question of what is the ideal state, right? I'm perfectly agreement with you. We should always start at what is your ideal state, um, and then we'll go back and and define our scope is because one, they're like, we can't afford that. And like, that's fine, but you know, until you talk to the implementers, you don't necessarily know what the cost is to build a particular feature that could get a very hard high ROI. You really want to look at okay, what's on my map would give me the biggest bang for my block. And and unless you're really looking, you know, big picture and you know, like literally best possible system, I say, you know, better to shoot for the moon and get 80% than right shoot for Mount Everest, right? And get there. Um so yeah, so that's that's really uh uh really a great point. Um, I wanted to ask you, um so we talked a little bit about what you would do different again. I think if it's just I think starting at a higher level, um but what would you do different because obviously, right, the Salesforce ecosystem, even education cloud, right, is a lot better now than it was way back then. So with today's technology, with what's going on with AI and a lot of the you know the advances in the data space, um, would you do anything different were you to start today? Um and then you know, where do you see like the ecosystem going as a whole, putting Bellevue aside, right? Where do you see the you know the CRM relationship space going?

SPEAKER_03 57:38

That's an excellent question. And you know, I think about that a lot, and it may sound kind of nerdy, but you know, I've been really on this kick of really looking at productivity enhancement tools. Okay, we call it AI. Whether it's co-pilot, whether it's chat GPT, whether it's BARD, whether it's anything out there. You know, I've been looking, I was just on a LinkedIn uh webinar the other day where they were building within Salesforce prompts to help build flows and to be able to write out and then have it visualize the flow out. And I know that you can use various AI tools to write code. I've been telling my uh staff for years, at least the last year, you know, when you're sending a very important email, take that extra time. We always used to say read it backwards, you know, because it slows you down and see if the intent's there. I now tell them read it backwards, then copy it into chat GPT, say make professional, flip it through. Look and see the difference and see where the tone is and everything like that. Those things I think are coming more and more uh into CRM and AI. Uh I believe uh Kiro on the last uh meetup, there was a gentleman whose company, I believe, uh I don't, I don't want to, I think it was out of New York or something, but using prompts and creating a bot to create project plans within Salesforce. The whole idea of using Omnichannel and AI bots and using productivity enhancements is only going to help and it's only going to accelerate the use of this. We have a generation now that was born with a phone in their hand. I'm old enough to know I used to have to slog across shag carpet and pick it up off the wall, you know. They have more computing power in their hand than we had in years past in computers, and they are tied to it. And having AI a part of it and having CRM link into this and connecting digitally to the world is really what Bennyff has been talking about with that fourth industrial revolution. We are really getting to that point where we can start to see value. They've been talking about AI since the 50s. It's now just starting to see its catching its groove. It's catching its groove. I'm seeing more and more use of it, and that's where I'm really excited and seeing the industry going. More intuitiveness, more speed to market, more bots helping build out the products and maintain it, and customer interactions. That's where I'm seeing my greatest excitement in the industry right now.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:35

Um be continued. Uh I think um that'll be the topic uh of of Dream Course uh again uh this year, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:43

Yeah, probably, probably.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:45

So so uh we can we can dive into that a different time, I think. But um but but but yeah, no, I I think that's a good good good good good piece of heart to end on. Um you know I want to say thank you, David, um, you know, for joining us today for the CRM Success Show. Um you've been a great great guest and and fantastic company. Appreciate you sharing some insights uh and your experiences with us today. Um it's quite clear to me um you know that the CRM journey that you oversaw uh directed influence led, you know, um with a lot of great support uh around you has been transformative for the university. Um and your passion for it jumps through in how you recollect uh your time there. So uh thank you again. Um for our listeners. Uh please don't forget to subscribe to the CRM Success Show for more episodes featuring CRM leaders uh as great as David, um, who are really shaping uh the present but also the future of CRM. Um you'll be able to follow us on LinkedIn, uh, YouTube, social media, and the episodes will be able to be uh downloaded and listened to on Spotify uh and Apple as well. Um keep in mind um, you know, uh in order to get to exclusive content and and and uh you know to follow those pages for more insight there. Um we hope you enjoyed today's show, uh bringing CRM successes and failures, real stories, real impact. Um and thank you again, David, uh, from both of us for your time.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:30

Absolute pleasure, and thank you. Thank you for having me. I absolutely absolute blast, absolute pleasure.