Higher Education institutions realize, now more than ever, the need to maximize revenue and reduce costs by effectively and collaboratively acquiring, retaining, connecting with, and engaging their constituents throughout their constituent life cycles. Salesforce.com is an enterprise CRM solution that has the capacity to enable Universities and Colleges to achieve this goal by providing an organizational and technical platform to support lifetime, enterprise constituent engagement in real-time.

Smeal first implemented Salesforce in 2009 in the MBA/EMBA programs and began a College-wide implementation in 2013, the goal of which is to develop and support a CRM platform architecture and constituent model for the entire Smeal user community to help increase enrollments, streamline communications, and improve efficiency across-the-board with our constituents. To that end, the CRM Team has developed expertise and resources focused on the growth and support of the core Salesforce CRM platform as well as tools and technologies to enhance its effectiveness, such as:

D&B Optimizer and Visitor Intelligence (Form Fill)

• Used to clean our Salesforce accounts, contacts, and leads can be automatically updated and enriched with data from trusted source Dun & Bradstreet.
• Blank or missing fields can be automatically filled in for higher quality, more usable records.
• Form fill auto-populates someone's company from the D&B database when filling in a form. This links them to a clean D&B account and eliminates hours of manually connecting contacts and companies.

Marketing Cloud

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a world-class cloud-based marketing automation solution.
• Provides Smeal with the ability to market more easily to all constituent groups by leveraging all the data in our CRM system quickly and effectively
• With direct integration into the Salesforce Sales Cloud, we can create targeted messages, drip campaigns, customer journeys, and much more with the goal of increasing engagement with current, former, and potential students.

Event Management (currently Cvent and Zoom)

• The CRM team supports our Cvent platform through which we create and track college event attendance.
  • Invite lists are created in Salesforce
  • Invites are sent through Marketing Cloud
  • Event web registration is done through Cvent or Zoom
  • Event attendance is done through Cvent and/or Salesforce; Zoom participant lists are uploaded into Salesforce
• As of Spring 2022, we are evaluating a Cvent replacement to improve service and quality

System Integrations

• Salesforce integrates with other Penn State systems both within and outside the College using multiple technologies including direct API access and ETL web tools.

For Salesforce questions or project requests, please email the CRM Team at smealcrmteam@psu.edu.