About African Leadership University
African Leadership University (ALU) is pioneering a fresh approach to higher education in the 21st century by offering accredited undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive education programs in a unique imaginative way. ALU is setting the bar for higher education and leadership development by integrating students’ learning with the real world, empowering students to take ownership of their own learning, equipping each student to think entrepreneurially, and employing engaging and inspiring teaching methods.
To find out more visit: ALU Education
Big Bang was essential in creating and optimizing the ideal buyer’s journey for ALU’s stakeholders from recruitment, lead development, sales, admissions, enrollment, advisors, undergraduates, graduates, corporate revenue streams to employer partnerships.
The Challenge
The African Leadership University (ALU) created an online student portal which integrated the journey for leads, applicants, and students uncovering bottlenecks and other issues pertaining to a lead’s journey throughout the undergraduate admission process. Ultimately, this preliminary step helped ALU forecast and predict how much money they wanted to invest in advertising and recruitment efforts, however, they knew that the system they were using to increase enrollment would need to be upgraded to a much more robust system if they were going to implement an optimized workflow on a bigger scale.
ALU needed a team of experts to help them bridge the gap between their ideas and reality. Not only did ALU need a CRM for post graduates, corporate revenue streams, and employer partnerships but they also needed their system to allow them to create the ideal buyer’s journey for all their various stakeholders.
The Solution
At the time of the customer journey project, Big Bang was working with ALU’s business development unit to implement Salesforce for their business development department. Justin MacDonald, Head of Marketing at ALU did his research and confirmed that the best solution to manage the ALU recruitment customer journey was indeed Salesforce as well. Big Bang agreed that leveraging one cloud solution would be best for its ease of integration, marketing automation, and Lighting Bolt solutions. The ability to segment lists in order to send the right messages to the right people at the right time was also a key factor in determining their tools.
Through a phased approach Big Bang implemented ALU’s workflows into Salesforce and Pardot. The fundamental elements of the different client journeys were then built into Pardot in order to lay the foundation for all future stakeholders.
One-quarter later, the sales journey was created. From creating records to integrating the student portal and adding new stakeholders, Big Bang had a vested interest in every aspect of the development.
According to ALU, nothing fell through the cracks during the 2-week overlap where the ALU staff worked alongside Big Bang in order to transition.
Big Bang understood the business and technical landscape of ALU and could orient themselves around the accounts and they were always there for us taking the time to do research and recommend options whenever there was no immediate answer to a problem, said Justin.
Big Bang is proud to confirm that not only did ALU go live on-time and within scope on July 1st, 2017 with their new and improved undergraduate customer journey, that included lead generation, application, admission, enrollment and targeted marketing for each new lead. project management transition process from Big Bang to the new ALU team was a smooth and successful one. ALU looks forward to using their new business tools and learnings to create new integrated journeys for all their B2B & B2C stakeholders.
