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As an education provider at Upskilled I can honestly say there are few better feelings than helping people revamp their current career, or kick-start a new one and realize their dreams. But, Upskilled is also an SMB, with all of the typical challenges that go with that territory. How do you manage your data in an organized way so that your customers are consistently getting great service? How do you keep control of every customer conversation when there are more of them with every passing month?

The simple fact of the matter is that if one of our customers is sent to the wrong course venue, or doesn’t get their materials up front, they’re not coming back. And, there’s plenty more places for them to go – there are more than 5,000 registered training organizations across the country.

But they came to Upskilled first because they like what we have to offer and we don’t want to lose them. We want them to tell their friends about us. This is the challenge that was thrust upon us quite suddenly when we experienced growth on a scale we had never imagined was possible (from 18 to 10,000 students and seventy locations in only four years!)

Getting comfortable with various cloud technologies was the first hurdle. However more specific to this post, getting salesforce.com on board has made all the difference to our ability to grow with confidence. We decided that everything that needed to be tracked, standardized or managed in any way should be on one platform. This included lead and student management, sales, enrolments, government compliance, course management, teacher management, and customer service through our always-smiling student support team. Additionally, that platform would have to grow with us – how many SMBs can afford to buy infrastructure up front for the business they intend to have in five years?...I’m guessing very few!

Once we centralized everything in Salesforce we could just look at our dashboards to get an instant update on any area of the business. (I have to confess we’ve gone a little dashboard crazy here, if it’s something we need to know it’s in a dashboard!)

When I think back to the early days when any student request to vary their course was hand written onto a pink form, copied and walked from department to department, I know we couldn’t have scaled that model to the point we’re at today.

I’m a big believer in the flexibility of cloud CRM services for SMBs and I think Upskilled is a great example of what you can achieve when you leverage them for growth.

To learn more about our story, check out this video here.