822: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Brandon Samter, Senior Solution Engineer, LeadSquared

Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time at EdUp on the EdUp Experience podcast where we make education your business. We're at the Education Dynamics conference called Insights EDU in Phoenix, Arizona. We're interviewing people in and around higher education marketing, enrollment, all of the things you need to know if you want to grow. And growing is what it's all about in our industry right now.

Some schools are dying and thinking about closure or merger and acquisition. To turn your fortunes around, you have to invest in revenue-generating activities. You have to grow. Schools that are flat need to grow so they don't go into decline. And of course, schools that are growing want to grow faster, harder, stronger, and serve as many students as possible, particularly in the adult online sphere, which is continuing to be a market that many schools are jumping into.

Do you have a good CRM? It's a question you should be asking yourself. If you do, great. If you don't, get one. And if you're not sure if your CRM is doing everything that it should, I would suggest that you reach out to this guest and the company he represents. Ladies and gentlemen, here he is. He's Brandon Samster. He is a senior solutions engineer at Lead Squared. Brandon, what's going on?

Brandon Samster: Not much guys. Thanks for having me today.

Joe Sallustio: You know, Lead Squared. It's a CRM solution. A lot of schools still surprisingly don't use a CRM or they use something that's homegrown or it's in combination with this. It's an offshoot of the SIS and it doesn't work the way CRMs are very particularly developed design systems for enrollment and marketing. How important is a good CRM in our day and age?

Brandon Samster: Well, it's really the starting point of deciding when you actually want to end up communicating with all those different individuals that might be interested. So when you think about a CRM, you want to actually think about all the different ways and the communication plan that you're going to be dealing with them. And that just doesn't come from if they eventually come to your website. It starts way before that. It starts from Instagram posts that you might have. It starts from Facebook. It starts from LinkedIn. It starts from anything that you might've mailed to them. It could all be within your CRM so that you could start tracking whether or not you're actually making a difference.

Joe Sallustio: Bingo. That's a lot to track. It's a lot of people reporting upon. It's a lot to look at. How does Lead Squared help you understand the data?

Brandon Samster: Yeah, that's a good point. Understanding the data is a big part. So, you know, when you think about it, you want to make sure that you're understanding the life cycle of the student as a whole. And the best part about that is that the CRM needs to be able to really track everything from an email communication, like I mentioned, the LinkedIn. But then how did that end up translating into an application? How long did that application take?

So what we have is we have over a hundred canned reports that we've already figured out that individuals need. So when it comes to how many email opens did they get, did that email open translate into an application? The application took this person five days. Why did it take them five days? Can we go back and look? Do we have an engagement score that we could put?

So one thing that's great about our CRM, Lead Squared, is that we can end up having scores that are associated with different communication pieces that go out, whether or not they touched our website, just by going to an application, whether or not we actually ended up sending them an email and they opened it. All of these can have different communication scores.

Joe Sallustio: Amazing. What happens if you actually had a way to say, this person came to our campus?

Brandon Samster: A person who comes to campus is way more likely to actually be able to enroll in your school than somebody else who doesn't. So all of those things that we need to be able to allow universities, colleges, to be able to track and manage so that they can actually say, okay, you know, one of my favorite things was probably when a school ended up reaching out to my son. And they ended up setting up a meeting. And that was probably the most influential thing for him deciding to go to that school. Just to say, we want to meet with you. We just want to talk with you. Yeah, you applied. You applied to six, seven different schools. He actually enjoyed that more than anything else that he got from anybody else. And he ended up going there.

Joe Sallustio: They were talking about that today in the online student college report, how the comparison set is reduced now. So the students are only choosing three colleges rather than the 13 they were before. And what differentiates among those three? It's that personal touch. It's that personal service. But you have to know how you got there. You have to follow that person through and know when to engage them. When are they ready to be engaged? Then that's the hard part, especially with online students. Is when are they ready? They're ready when they're ready. How do you know that?

Brandon Samster: Yeah, online students, like we heard in that session, that was great this morning. And just the insights from that report talked about, you know, it's they're looking at a very reduced window from maybe a traditional student. They're thinking, okay, hey, I've got time. My work schedule allows it. I'm going to look for a program that's going to allow me to better myself and my role in the next day or two. You know, so they want to be in it in the next month.

And so you know, they have to have had some sort of experience. And I was in a session earlier today, too, that talked about how individuals are looking at things such as LinkedIn. You think about the billboard. I love this analogy that they gave. You think about a billboard for McDonald's. It's not really just to keep that they're driving the person to go get a milkshake. It's more that they're keeping them top of mind. And that's what we have to be doing completely through the entire process. We have to keep things top of mind and really focus in on that.

So I think that with a CRM, you can continue to have those different email campaigns, those different LinkedIn campaigns, all those different pieces to keep you top of mind so that when you do find that student who is ready, you're able to sit there and be right at the top of their mind and then move forward.

Joe Sallustio: Speaking of ready, Alvin Freitas asked, he said, you know what, Joe, I'm going to pop on this podcast, but are you in or out?

Alvin Freitas: Listen, I'm in, I'm in real quick. Tag, I'm it. And I do want to ask a question, though. I actually had a demo with Lead Squared. And I got to tell you, the user interface, I mean, it's so easy and simple. And I was blown away by that. Wanted to ask you to talk to us and the listeners about the interface, because again, I just think it's amazingly easy and very natural almost.

Brandon Samster: Yeah, we wanted to make sure that a platform that is as deep as it is needs to make sure that it's been easy. And we want to make sure that administrators have the ability to not always call us, but we teach them how to end up using the system so that they can make the changes. Because a key part of any of this is that if you can't notice when something's failing and then change it, you're going to then be stuck.

And so you have to be able to take different A/B testings on emails, for example, and we have a way to build out an automation, do an A/B test really quick and easy report that just one click, this is working, this isn't, let's change it. And so we wanted to make sure that that was as easy as possible for anybody. Because it could be you, you don't have to have a lot of IT support with our product.

It's all run through a lot of admissions, marketing offices, you know, all use it. And the nice part about it is that a marketing office and an admission office can use it together because sometimes you don't get that ability to have a platform that allows two siloed offices to be able to do that. Our product does because of the ability to have robust permission settings for each individual to have. So you can have marketing settings, you can have admission settings.

You know, that's a big part about it. And then it's really just, there's no code. The code's built in there. So you want to do quick email campaigns, drag and drop. That ability to just drag and drop something in, already have a template design that makes sense to people. And that's what they're using every day. And so we wanted to make sure our platform did that.

Joe Sallustio: By the way, admissions and marketing being under different leaders for me is insanity. In fact, I've been working in higher ed for 23 years and I would never take a job overseeing enrollment if marketing didn't come with it. I never would because it would be too hard to operate because I need to see the whole life cycle to make important decisions and the important decisions are backed with money, right? That money that I'm going to spend has to be allocated to a lead source that's going to generate enough leads and I need to track those conversions to a cost per.

Now people, I do a lot of advice giving in this industry. Yes, that's a technical term. How do I say consulting? Because it's really not. It's more like giving advice. How do I get better at marketing? How do we get better enrollment? I say start with cost. Answer these three questions. What's my cost per lead, my cost per enrollment and my cost per start? When you can answer those three questions, you are ready to start optimizing. Until or unless you can answer those three things, you are not ready. You're not optimized. You have no idea what's going on.

Talk to me about what you see. Let me ask it this way. Having a senior solutions engineer come to a conference to talk to a bunch of higher ed folks in enrollment and marketing seems like an odd pairing. You might have the sales guy here talking about the product or the demo guy. Why are you here? Why are you here? What is the need that's being filled somehow that you're filling as an engineer to talk to the enrollment and marketing folks?

Brandon Samster: Well, the big part was, I actually started in the admissions space. So for 17 years, I was the director of international student scholar services.

Joe Sallustio: I like your style, dude.

Brandon Samster: A big part of my background was that I have been trying to recruit these students in. I got into international admissions thinking, sweet, I'm gonna get to travel the world. What I didn't realize is I was more of an armchair recruiter. And so I needed to figure out different ways to actually use email campaigns and all these things throughout this to do better and bring in international students who I couldn't actually go travel around the world to. Now it would have been nice if I could.

The big part about it was that I was very successful. I was able to double the population at a couple of the different institutions I was at just by simply doing many things that a CRM could do. Now I did a lot of these things without a CRM and I was always purchasing, trying to purchase a CRM because I knew it would make things easier. And that was just the way that it was.

So having me here, you know, it comes back to things that have happened through, and I hate saying the word COVID, but we've kind of gotten away from international talk topics. And I like to end up coming in and talking to people and bringing it back to the enrollment cliff. We only have a finite number of students that we can go after, right? So why are we not looking at the international population again? And so I'm trying to bring back the forefront of we got to think about how we're going to communicate with them. We're going to have to think about how are we marketing to them?

Are we making sure that when we send an email out, it's not sent at three in the morning their time? When they see that they think it's junk mail, right? We need to make sure that we schedule those things. We could do that with a CRM platform that makes sense. What are the coloring? We got to think about those things. I think they brought me here because I talk more of that language.

Joe Sallustio: Within the credibility too, by the way. It's like, I've been where you are. I've struggled. I've sweat over a budget, but now I can build you a solution. And I understand the pressure. Yes. Right. I mean, there's a credibility factor that's important. Go ahead, Alvin. I interrupted you.

Alvin Freitas: No, no. I was just going to say that I'm glad that you talked about the international students piece because that's something that I've been thinking about. I've been hearing a lot about too, because, you know, folks want to increase enrollment. And when you increase enrollment, what happens? You increase enrollment, you get money to have more funds, more programs. You got money for raises, for increase in salary. You can do investments, you can do a whole bunch of stuff.

So I'm glad you mentioned about that, but talk to us a little bit more about Lead Square in the future. What's going on in the next three, four, five years for Lead Square?

Brandon Samster: Lead Square in the future, you know, we continue to sit there and advance the product in a number of different ways, but we're also trying to think about what universities need as a whole, right? We want to make sure that you're having one platform so that you could do your CRM, your applications. But then there's also, you know, we have another product, Service Cloud. How many CIOs out there are managing help tickets from what's going on? And there's a number of different products. Wouldn't it be nice now that you actually have a CRM that's also with your help desk ticket so that you really have a better picture of how you're helping your students as a whole, not just at the admission process?

You know, if you're using a CRM, this is another topic that we should probably talk about one time, but like, you know, for student success, are you using a CRM for student success? But then also the alumni, and then while they're there on your campus, there are a number of different times, especially in the online community, right? The Service Cloud, you know, you're able to end up making sure that you can communicate with them through our CRM, as well as a ticketing system.

If they're having online problems, online classes, there are some sort of technical difficulties that might come up. You want to be able to get to them as soon as possible, because you need them in that classroom. You need them to have the experience that they want to have. And without that, you're going to end up losing and not retaining that student. And that's going to be a big part. So again, Lead Square's about everything from the whole life cycle of the CRM, the student success part of communication, the alumni, but also we're trying to build in that piece of making sure that you have tools that can retain individuals through, you know, if they have an issue, then you can communicate with them.

Joe Sallustio: Elvin, I'm sorry to say that you've hit your two question maximum. I think that your time is done. I think that the spotlight should go on top of me. I found a way to use that in the last couple of episodes and really enjoy it. So briefly, in my other role, I said it was Superman Clark Kent, I'm here as you know, doing the EdUp Experience, then I have Lindenwood. And then I said that to Elvin. And then at lunch, he reminded me it's more like Robin and not Robin. That's what it was. Just say you took off your glasses. And he goes Superman and Robin and then just like not being Robin is your alter ego.

I use, I use Lindenwood. No, I work at Lindenwood and we use Lead Squared as our CRM solution. And I've had the pleasure of going through, working with the team. And my goals were the same as the people that you're talking to today. I need to increase enrollment. I need to do it fast and I need to answer those three key questions. Cost per lead, cost per enrollment, cost per start. And I needed a system that can get me to do that.

In order to do that, I need a user interface that is easy, I need to be able to drag and drop, not code, not custom, I need drag and drop. So you would pull in an email campaign where I can drag and drop the communications, I need a system that has some out-of-the-box reporting. So I don't have to go and customize reporting or wait, right? Because when you transition from one CRM to the next, you can get blackout, you know, you get blackouts, the data doesn't go right, you get blackouts in your data, there's always some hard parts of a transition.

What makes Lead Squared's value proposition? Right now somebody is going, you know what, I'm going to check it out. But it's so hard to switch out of a CRM. It's going to just ruin my business. So I'm just going to sign with the CRM I have. What can Lead Squared do as someone who's just done it with Lead Squared to get you a better CRM without the hassle?

Brandon Samster: Well, we did the building for you, right? That's the big part.

Joe Sallustio: But I'm asking you.

Brandon Samster: The big part about it is that we do the building for you as the university. We want to make sure that we take and we do a very in-depth scoping call even before you purchase. And then we do an even bigger scope of what you need throughout the product. And we build that for every institution. Every institution is a little bit different. Every automation is a little different, you know, workflow and so forth. And we want to really understand those things. And we want to know the nomenclature that makes sense. Because one thing about our system is that we can change, you know, is it not called the prospect of student? What do you call it? You know, something to that extent. Your enrollment process - is it intent to enroll and continue conditional admission? The words matter.

Joe Sallustio: But they matter, right.

Brandon Samster: And because you don't want to end up having your staff have to be trained on something else different on that. So we build it, our team is very good in regards to doing it quickly and you get to know them and you get to talk with them. Then the great part about it is they bring it to you, show you, then train you so that you can end up using it.

Joe Sallustio: So that is correct.

Brandon Samster: I think the best part about it is that you don't have to be the one building it. I've bought software before and I had to be the one building it.

Joe Sallustio: That, I don't think so.

Brandon Samster: And yeah, you don't have the time because you're doing your other job, right? You don't have time to build something. That's why Lead Squared is so powerful - we build it for you. We then show you what you got. Then we teach you how to use it and then you're off and running. And then if you need us, we have the customer support 24/7 there and come to us when you need us. We end up doing webinars, we end up reaching out to you, lots of different ways to manage that.

Joe Sallustio: Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, our special guest from Lead Squared. Here he is. His name is Brandon Samster. I was going to mess it up, but I got it right. Senior Solutions Engineer at Lead Squared. Excuse me, Brandon, this is your first ever podcast. Did you have a good experience here on EdUp?

Brandon Samster: EdUp was great, guys. Thank you so much.

Joe Sallustio: First podcast, it was perfect. It'll never be better than it is right now, Brandon. I need another macho man. I actually have another one but I'm not ready for it. You can't call me out like that because I gotta move the screens. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just EdUp'd.