Marketing is a Science ... CRM is Fundamental

I've been active working with colleges and universities to identify whether they have a customer relationship management (CRM) problem. Often times, it is the root of the CE unit's marketing problems. Seems that continuing education operations are operating off the premise that advertising is marketing and marketing is advertising. This may work for some ... until the wheels fall off and the enrollments start heading south. A quick review of the organization shows that either an advertising/creative person is in the marketer's driver's seat, an IT person designed the website or that a legacy system of tracking prospects is in place.

My recent adventures have taken me down the road of putting the science back into marketing. To do so, you first need the scientist. The scientist is the marketer ... not a design professional and not necessarily the PR person or copywriter that has been with the organization for a decade. Every good scientist measures and records data and creates experiments ... thus the need for a good CRM system.

Strategic marketing cannot be done without effective prospect and customer relationship management. This cannot be done without a CRM backbone. I've been fortunate enough to meet with a number of vendors over the past few years. While I don't necessarily get in the business of endorsements (nor do I accept kickbacks or commission), I do want to say how impressed I was with Destiny Solutions on their abilities to offer continuing education units a secure student information system, as well as with Intelliworks on their web-based CRM solutions. I've seen a lot of pretenders over the years, but these two companies have it together ... they are committed to higher education, have smart people in place and are investing in technologies to keep them at the forefront. Sure there are the SunGards and Talismas of the world and they certainly have their place if you have the resources and personnel to support these higher end systems, but for now, the middle-range providers of Destiny Solutions and Intelliworks gets my thumbs up in terms of how they can almost immediately help continuing education departments.

To keep these posts marketing focused, I will be launching a new blog soon that focuses purely on technology. I'll give greater insight to vendors such as Intelliworks and Destiny, but also pee on folks that have failed me or my clients.