SPEAKER_00
One thing I really do want to point out to people is make sure that you have a consistent question structure. So every time you go into these demos, each subject area expert will ask or at least make sure that we have some documentation of that exact question.

SPEAKER_03
You're listening to The Higher Ed Marketer, a podcast geared towards marketing professionals in higher education. This show will tackle all sorts of questions related to student recruitment, donor relations, marketing trends, new technologies, and so much more. If you are looking for conversations centered around where the industry is going, this podcast is for you.

Let's get into the show.

SPEAKER_01
Once again, welcome to The Higher Ed Marketer podcast. I'm Troy Singer here with the co-host of the show, Bart Koehler and Bart. I am happy we have made it to episode three.

SPEAKER_02
Yes. I'm excited about that as well. It's been really rewarding to have these conversations and it's just been great.

SPEAKER_01
Here, here, I definitely agree. Today, you and I get to geek out a little bit because Bart, as some of our listeners know, you are a long-time marketing and branding professional and I currently execute print and marketing projects and we both love the subject of relevant data for marketing.

SPEAKER_02
Yes. I think that over the course of my career starting in the late 80s and early 90s, just the amount of data that we now have available as marketers to be able to do some smart things and do everything from customized and personalized emails and direct mail and print pieces. It's amazing.

I'm really excited about today's conversation.

SPEAKER_01
I'm excited about it too, especially when I discovered our guest today who has worked with The Higher Ed in various capacities for over 15 years and has recently led his institution through a CRM migration initiative, which touched a lot of departments at the university he serves. I was just happy he agreed to come on and share his learnings of his fun and I did use air quotes there, although when he talks about it, it is with a smile, but I'm sure there were some painful points there as well. Without any further ado, I'm going to bring in Jarell Smith, institutional data analyst at Arbine University to the conversation.

Jarell, thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00
My pleasure, guys. Very excited to be here with you guys. Hanging out with two of the finest in the marketing areas, Troy with print, Bart with digital makes quite a dynamic duo.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you, Jarell. I appreciate you saying that. And I know I took you a little by surprise when I asked you to join the podcast and talk about data and your CRM migration journey.

But from the conversations I've had with you, they were just so interesting. And I am a believer that there are other people out there that are at points where they know they need to do something with their data and would like to hear some helpful experiences and stories from someone that just went through a similar project.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's nothing quite like a multi platform CRM integration. I mean, with any projects of this type and this magnitude, you can do nothing but just have fun with it.

SPEAKER_01
Well, before we jump into it, Jarell, I would like to give our listeners a little bit about you personally. So if you could share one or two aspects of your life outside of the work that gives us a glimpse of who you are.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, definitely. Family man, I have two kids. My son, Langdon is nine, my daughter, Olivia, who's six and a wonderful wife, Regina.

Getting to spend a lot of time with them now as even their hybrid classrooms at home, working from home remotely and also being a teacher has been, you know, a great experience. And a second aspect is just, you know, I enjoy to rebuild things. I like to, you know, tinker around with any electronics, iPhones, laptops.

Most recently took apart my bike all the way down to the bearings, giving them new grease and just that process of getting in and making things new and better is enjoyable for me.

SPEAKER_02
That's great. That sounds like the perfect segue into a CRM integration, the idea of tearing everything down and kind of rebuilding it. I think that's so true.

So, you know, let's just talk a little bit about that. As we look at the CRM project you co-led, could you describe where Otterbind was data-wise before the project and the reason why the university decided the upgrade was needed? I mean, that might really give us some context and help some of our listeners.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, data-wise, Otterbind is in a good place when we use data. We had some great leadership from VP, the provost levels that tend to really understand how to leverage data and push to use it consistently and widespread throughout campus reporting and leverage it in different areas, you know, whether it's enrollment, academic affairs. I mean, we are similar to most campuses where, you know, each division tends to have their own system.

So, it does try to provide these silos, but, you know, hopefully there's no different systems between departments, but we do a consistent job of finding the data flow to know how to move the data outside of these systems so that we can see beyond just one silo of maybe an admissions department or an alumni relations department. As far as the CRM goes, our CRM need was very obvious. We had a system for about seven years.

I mean, with technology evolving so fast, that system was probably two to three generations old. It still had a flat file database. It didn't even have a relationship database.

So we would push data into it as much as we can, but it had a lot of limiting aspects to it. So, as we start to realize that, then you just find the timing when contracts are up and then you start the process of figuring out, okay, what all do we want and need? So we knew we needed much better reporting from the marketing and admissions side of things from our communications. We also wanted to leverage hosting applications.

That system was also very clunky and getting run out and our graduate office was constantly wanting to be more flexible, same thing with certificate programs, wanting to do more with that. And we wanted to also be able to collect behavioral analytics. A lot of these new, more modern CRMs tend to collect a lot of the behavior interactions that they have within that system.

And all those reasons were why we need to move on.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, that's great. And I know that some of those behavioral analytics, even just being able to hook your system into the website and the landing pages and to email how that all performs, really can give you a, especially in the enrollment side, give you a really clear picture on maybe what the prospective students and families are interested in. So that's really interesting.

So you kind of talked about the idea and I hear this a lot from a lot of the clients that I work with is the idea that, oh, wow, we were in this dinosaur of a system that we would love to get out of. We're in a multi-year contract. We're kind of, you know, it's coming up.

But even when it's coming up, I'm sure that from a, you know, even if the decision was made, even from a high level, it's going to take some time in different phases to plan it out and put a timeline together to kind of get the project completed. It's not like you just say, hey, our CRM contract's coming up and at the end of June, and it's here it is in March, let's get going. I mean, there's a lot more that goes into it than that.

Maybe you can walk us through a little bit about what that project plan looked like, what that timeline was like. I mean, how long did it take you guys to implement this?

SPEAKER_00
Yes, Bart, you're right. We first started with a request for a proposal process which brought together kind of a committee of leadership and also functional perspectives, you know, anything from the top level VP of enrollment management to our marketing directors and missions counselor, managers, graduate office, front end users who actually have the hands-on responsibility with some of the data. And then of course, IT was a part of this, but we put together that group just to start the process of inquiring, you know, what systems to even look at, what these systems had to offer us.

So as we started to put that list and information together from these pre-meetings, we then went into a demo process. And one thing I really do want to point out to people is make sure that you have a consistent question structure. So every time you go into these demos, each subject area expert will ask or at least make sure that we have some documentation of that exact question.

It just keeps it a lot more even. So when you start looking back to say, okay, you know, this one had that, what do they say to this? It just shows us how to be much more consistent. Also, as we started to work through those, you know, that process tends to narrow our options down pretty quickly.

You can start to see where it's going. And then we start to dive deeper even into the RFP cost calculations, because they're all unique in how they charge you. And all of them are not unlimited.

There could be cost per text, cost per geo track. I mean, it really starts to build. So as we start to crunch some of the numbers, you know, it started to become, you know, obvious which one, you know, we start to go to.

And once we found that information, then we start to realize, well, we need a ETL tool. We need a tool that will move that information from our CRM to our SIS and then vice versa. So we can have data moving back and forth consistently.

So that almost in itself is a, you know, second mini progress or project process in the middle of this. So as we start to uncover some of those things, now we start to see where we need to go with it. We start to identify our stakeholders, you know, they're all part of the opinion of what we needed.

But now what's their responsibilities within this major project and really hashing it out with that leadership to make sure that you have a good communication structure because there's so many different expertise, you know, the marketing content expert is not going to really know much about the data. The people who are actually interacting physically talking to students or meeting with students kind of have that personal touch to help, you know, build another aspect, the marketing communication that you might want to leverage. So really trying to connect all those people together so that, you know, as you start to build a implement the product, you have the data, what you need with the marketing plan.

And then of course, you know, implementation map. I mean, there's when I say multi system platform, we have, we're a common app school. So we have a common app application data that goes into our CRM than that data goes into our ETL and then our SRS.

So you start to get a very complex series of data transfers that start to happen. So really got to lay that out. And as far as timeline goes, you know, we tried to do within six to eight months, but that's not a complete implementation.

There's definitely multiple phases. I mean, we had to even stand up temporary data transfers. So once we got the product in our old product, you know, we could no longer use contractors up, we could keep the communication seamlessly flowing to our current applicants.

While we started to build in some of the additional functionality that we needed with all the new bells and whistles that the CRM tool was going to allow us to do. And then of course, mid year, there's always adjustments and backup plans as you start to go through that, which want to make sure we were not left empty handed. If something was going to slow down or not respond the way we expected.

SPEAKER_02
I think it's interesting. I mean, what you've described here, I mean, I hear the analogy sometimes of, you know, trying to take apart an airplane while you're flying it. I mean, it's you've got so many complex things going on.

You've got so many different constituents. And I really appreciate what you said about the demos and making sure that everybody's kind of on the same pace because in a lot of places, you know, while you might do an RFP for CRMs, there is a wide range of CRMs today. I mean, you have everything from people that are using old systems and trying to, you know, do different things with software to some of the new web based systems that are pretty slick.

And then the feature set is pretty wide ranging on all that as well. And so I think that sometimes, you know, you can have one group, maybe the marketers get kind of geeked out over some marketing aspects of the automation, but you and some people that are more in the data are like, well, you know, this is not, this is more of a flat database. It's not, it's not relational like we need.

And so I'm sure it was very challenging sometimes as you, as you were kind of going through that to keep everything as an apples to apples, as opposed to, you know, hey, there's a banana, there's an apple, there's an apricot and, you know, that type of thing.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I can totally relate to what you're saying. I mean, there was even some systems that had the multi a modular. So they included not only the emission side, but the alumni side and the retention side of current students and those things.

There's just so big and great. And it almost allows you to have so much information on one place, which can be very dynamic to have the whole student life cycle in one place that you can really dig into. But then you start to kind of realize the scope of that and how many people are going to support this.

I mean, and then that just got so that was the one that really caught my attention, but it was pretty obvious we probably couldn't support it to its full needs at this point.

SPEAKER_02
Jarell, that's great. I mean, I think that there's just so much that we can continue to talk about here. I mean, you certainly have a large scope of work that you've identified and so many different stakeholders that you need to bring together and satisfy.

Maybe you can tell us a little bit about, you know, the project highlighting aspects of it that maybe higher ed marketers and similar stakeholders could benefit from when they're kind of considering this and being a part of that team that you've talked about.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, one thing from the marketer's perspective is scoping and prioritizing the functional enhancements that they need with all these bells and whistles. They're all look so great and fabulous, but they all take time, resources and expertise to be able to unleash, you know, the full power of what they have in them. So of course, you know, texting and emailing is usually a must have.

That's right from the beginning. What about communication flows creating those outside the system? So you already have kind of a template to lay out as you start to execute them in the system is something that we found helpful, leveraging micro sites, landing pages. We just realized that there is so much we wanted to accomplish that we really need to hone in on, OK, what's first, what's second, what's third, and then start to allocate our resources to those things in that order.

Because there was, to be honest, a couple of times when, you know, the data side was getting so much information to one place, but the marketing side wasn't ready to use the landing pages yet. So we kind of got a little out of sync on having, you know, so much attention put on one place, but they weren't ready to leverage that part of the process. So knowing what that priority is in the scope of what's there with your resources and also what data needs you have and want.

These systems are now starting to have built in analytics. So they're already tracking and giving you some sort of sense of what type of engagement they're having, whether it's websites, landing pages, emails, text messages. But is there other data sources around campus that maybe admissions counselors understand they want to have and you want to work into your marketing communications and then making sure that the communication networks are there with those stakeholders, you know, having that data analysts there with the counselors or the personal touch, with the webmasters, with all the digital content experts in that conversation flow.

So you can align all these skill sets together and have them moving in the same direction when you want them to move. So they kind of keep in sync. And then once you figure out that process, keeping that process repetitive so that it's always iterating, always cycling, because I'm sure, you know, you want the messaging, the marketing messaging to be as flexible as it can when you want that, you know, message to change and shift.

SPEAKER_02
Right. It's that continual improvement all the way along the road and having that data helps you make those continual improvements. And that's great.

Yeah, absolutely. It's really good. Well, I think we could certainly continue to talk about this.

I mean, as I know, as Troy mentioned earlier, I can geek out about this all day long. And it's for the sake of for the sake of time, I think that we can kind of kind of wrap up some of this. So I really appreciate the chance for taking some time here on our podcast.

SPEAKER_00
Oh, absolutely. It's been great. The implementation has been successful at this point.

One of the things we're already getting benefits from it already. And we've just touched the tip of the iceberg. There is just so much still in there that we have to draw out of it and draw into our marketing plans and campaigns that we have.

So and that's really one of the most exciting parts is that we still have so much more potential to further leverage the CRM that, you know, we can be working for years around the clock at just steadily drawing out more and becoming better at what this new tool can can do for us in the institution.

SPEAKER_01
Since you are at just the tip of the iceberg and you've touched on so many takeaways that I love listening to, is there one thing either additional or maybe something that you want to reemphasize that others looking to go into a similar project that you would want them to walk away from this message with?

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely. Good question. There is identifying those key data to marketing data points and individuals that you want to have in that process ahead of time and starting that communication now.

Like I mentioned, you know, you have the counselors who are talking face to face, then you got the marketing, put it into consistent messaging, then you got the data side and being able to align those individuals to work together and have a good relationship will help you contextualize the data into like real marketing actions. So I don't think you can start facilitating those relationships and that communication hierarchy or flow or governance or whatever term you kind of want to embed to show the consistency of it. But that will not only just help you continuously build it, help you get a good backlog of tasks and goals going into the projects.

So you kind of already have a little bit of results driven implementation. So you know where you want to go with it and you can hit the ground running right away. And that will also help the process be a little more nimble.

So you can always adjust on the fly with marketing messaging needs.

SPEAKER_01
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And thank you for sharing a lot of the other takeaways that you've provided today.

There's no doubt that there are people out there that are going to be looking at this daunting project in front of them and will be able to glean some benefit from our conversation today. And if someone would like to contact you if they had additional questions or things that they would like to engage with you on, how would the best way for them to do that be?

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, they can definitely find me on LinkedIn under Jarell Smith. They can also search J.R. Smith in LinkedIn. Jarell will come up there.

It's a little easier. Then also email jrsmith.autobind.

edu.

SPEAKER_01
Thanks again, Jarell. Bart, that was a wonderful conversation. And again, I am just thankful that Jarell was able to share what he did about the journey that he just took.

Autobind through.

SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I think it's so critical and it's it's so nice to hear somebody who's went through the journey who's, you know, coming to the tail end of that journey and just being able to kind of tell some of their war stories and what happened. Again, I think it's a daunting task for any school to to engage in a, you know, a refresh of a CRM or migrate in for other systems. And I think a lot of what he said, I think will be very valuable for a lot of our guests.

SPEAKER_01
Well said. And even though it's a project that seems daunting, it has to be done. It does has to be done.

Bart, thank you very much. We have made it through episode three. To everyone else, the higher ed marketer podcast is sponsored by Kailer Solutions and Education Marketing and Branding Agency and by Think Patented, a marketing execution, printing and mainly provider of higher ed solutions.

On behalf of my co-host Bart Kailer, I'm Troy Singer. Thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_03
You've been listening to the higher ed marketer to ensure that you never miss an episode subscribed to the show in your favorite podcast player. If you're listening with Apple podcasts, we'd love for you to leave a quick rating of the show. Simply tap the number of stars you think the podcast deserves.

Until next time.