Journal Student Living

Salesforce Implementation and Service Strategy Partner

Vision

To build out a CRM and marketing automation platform that will inform, automate and streamline the Journal Student Living sales process.

The Challenge

Journal Student Living’s first student accomodation residence opened its doors in early 2019. Therefore, the challenge for Social Garden was to build and customise a CRM, before the facility opened, that would manage the pipeline of leads, despite the fact that there was no existing sales process or data within the pipeline.

Journal Student Living made the decision of using the Salesforce and Pardot as their CRM and marketing automation platforms, and worked with Social Garden in creating a sales process to align with these platforms. It was important for the CRM to feature on-demand components, such as Salesforce’s Live Chat, to ensure the brand was accessible in real time by prospective students, but still manageable by facility staff members.

 

The Strategy

Creating and customising a Sales Process

Despite no existing pipeline or residents to model a sales process or CRM from, Social Garden took an incremental step by step approach to inform and build out Journal Student Living’s sales engine:

  1. Conduct a CRM and Marketing Automation platform audit and recommendation. Recommendations were Salesforce CRM and Pardot for marketing automation.
  2. Conduct a Customer Journey workshop, mapping out the customer consideration and purchasing process to create a framework for the sales process
  3. Build, customise and integrate four key platforms: Salesforce, Live Agent, Social Studio and Pardot
  4. Customise Salesforce in order to establish a sales process with automation doing the heavy lifting at every opportunity
    Configure custom dashboards and reporting functionalities within Salesforce

Throughout this process Social Garden introduced weekly check-in meetings with Journal Student Living to catch-up on progress and ensure timelines were met.

The Implementation

Onboarding the Team

With the sales process created and automation configured throughout each platform in use, Social Garden and Journal Student Living worked together to onboard the sales and facility team to get everyone up to speed on the new systems in use, in preparation for the facility’s open date when data and leads would start flowing through Live Chat and the website, and ultimately through to Salesforce and Pardot. This onboarding process included:

  • Salesforce sales training sessions
  • Pardot user training sessions and best practice
  • Live agent user training
  • Sales training user guide – to ensure a streamlined process of onboarding new staff members

What did we achieve?

Sales Process Established and Automated

CRM now set-up and customised, creating a framework for the sales process moving forward. As the sales team grows, the user handbook and training videos can be used as training devices when onboarding new sales staff. With the process as automated as possible in Salesforce, the sales team are able to focus on filling the pipeline with new residents, as well as retention of existing residents.

Integration Between Sales, Service and Marketing

With Live Agent set-up on the Journal Student Living website and integrated with Salesforce, the Journal sales team are able to liaise directly with leads on the website as their data is automatically passed into the CRM. The marketing team is then able to nurture through to conversion through marketing automation, making the sales process seamless for the prospect giving instant gratification and response to their needs.

Scalability

As Journal Student Living grows and opens more facilities, Salesforce will be able to grow and scale alongside it. The CRM has been built to be easily scaled as more products and locations are introduced.