Sales Cloud Overview

What is Sales Cloud?

Sales Cloud is a cloud-application helping Sales teams to work more efficiently by centralising their customers data, keeping track of all their interactions with them, automating many of their tasks and allowing visibility as to individual and team activities.  The aim is for Sales colleagues to spend less time on administration and more time growing the business.

Schoolworks and Sales Cloud

Schoolworks offers integration with Sales Cloud for both Leads and Opportunities.

For information: in Schoolworks, Students are both Accounts and Contacts in Salesforce, regardless of whether the student enrols directly with the school, via an agency, or company entity.  The operational record to use for a student is the account record - Schoolworks maintains the student contact record in the background automatically so that Sales Cloud (or any other application) that needs to operate at the contact rather than account level can do so. If you are familiar with 'person accounts' in Salesforce then we have implemented our own equivalent of this but without the need to enable this feature.

Definition of terms:

Lead - a potential customer we do not know (sometimes they might be a known customer enquiring via a lead channel in which case we should qualify the lead, attach to their customer account and convert to an opportunity instead)

Opportunity - a potential sales event, with a probability of success and a value amount, which is linked to an account, estimate and enrolment

Estimate - a proposal or quote generated by Schoolworks based on Estimate Bookings and Estimate Finance. This does not count in Booking or Finance Income or Debtor statistics. An Estimate could be described as a temporary Enrolment.

Estimate Bookings - temporary course, accommodation, transfer, exam and sundry bookings attached to an estimate for the purposes of a estimate proposal document

Estimate Finance - price line items generated by bookings and the Schoolworks pricing system. This does not count in any income or debtor statistics

Enrolment - a student's visit to the school, linked to agent / company if required and holds arrival / departure dates

Bookings - course, accommodation, transfer, exam and sundry bookings attached to an enrolment which reserve space and generate finance

Sales Cloud Sales Process Overview

The sales process flow for Sales Cloud is:

Lead (unknown potential customer) → Lead is qualified and converted →  Account (customer details) → Opportunity (potential sale to customer, price/proposal sent) → Opportunity is Won (or lost) 

The Schoolworks process for generating an estimate (or quote) is: 

 → Estimate (student's potential visit to the school, direct or via agent / company, linked to Sales Cloud Opportunity)  → Estimate Bookings (course, accommodation, transfers are priced, proposal / quote is emailed)

Once we are confident the student is coming, we can convert the Estimate → Enrolment (student's likely visit to the school, direct or via agent / company, linked to Sales Cloud Opportunity)  → Bookings (course, accommodation, transfers are reserved, finance is calculated and invoice raised) → Placements (course, accommodation, transfers is delivered).

Another way to define an Estimate is that it is a temporary Enrolment - it does not count in statistics or finance and does not need to be 'cancelled' in the same way an Enrolment does if the student or agent does not wish to proceed.  However, it does allow the creation of bookings and associated prices to allow a quote to be sent.  Estimates can be easily converted to an Enrolment - either non-invoiced (convert) or invoiced (convert and invoice).

Managing the Sales Process

To manage the sales process, we monitor both the lead pipeline and opportunity pipeline.

Typically direct students will start the process as a Lead (as they are unknown to the school) and then transition to Account & Opportunity once they are qualified (which usually means we see a potential sales opportunity), whereas new students via agents will start the process as Opportunities (related to the agent), as the agent is already known to the school (and is therefore not a lead).

Schoolworks offers enhancements to the Sales cloud process both at lead and opportunity stages.

At the lead stage, Schoolworks implements tracking from the converted lead to the account - so that analysis can easily be performed from Booking → Enrolment → Account → Lead. It also allows the lead type (see next) to determine the type of account and opportunity record created upon conversion.

At the opportunity stage, Schoolworks links both Enrolments and Estimates to the Opportunity to facilitate quick and accurate quotations or enrolments using the Schoolworks pricing system, as well as automating the updates of Opportunity stage (status) and Opportunity value based on the total course booking value (i.e. excluding accommodation, transfers and sundries) of the Estimate or Enrolment.

Lead processing

Lead records can be created in Sales Cloud from various sources - website enquiries, campaigns via search engines or from social media channels.

Leads by definition are customers not known to the school, and are usually nurtured either via workflow automation or direct contact to become qualified for a potential sales opportunity. Once qualified (which might at times be a very short lead time), the lead record is converted to an Account (customer) and an Opportunity (a potential sale) record is created.

The lead pipeline typically looks to take in large volumes of leads from multiple sources, and then distill these down using various methods to identify quality and maximise conversion and sales.

Schoolworks implements the following record types on the lead object:

Student Direct -  new students who are not via an agent

New Agent - a new agent interested in a partnership

Company Training - a corporate client interested in company based training

New Accommodation - a new accommodation supplier looking for a partnership

Job Vacancy - an individual applying for a position or interested in employment

Opportunity processing

Opportunity records can be created either from: lead conversion for new customers, repeat business for existing direct students or repeat business (new or repeat students) from existing agencies.

Opportunities by definition are a potential sales event with an opportunity value, probability of success and stage (e.g. prospecting, price / proposal, won or lost).

Schoolworks implements the following record types on the opportunity object:

Student Direct - Students who are not via an agent

Agent Student - New students via an agent

Agent Group - A group of students via an agent

Schoolworks has linked both Enrolment and Estimate to the Opportunity record in order to attach the booking requirements and finance for the student or agent. The Enrolment or Estimate will behave differently depending on the type of the opportunity - we have automated the setup of the Estimate for example to process commission, discounts, promotions and special pricing depending on the opportunity type above.

Estimates

Estimates can be used to generate estimate proposal documents based on estimate bookings (course, accommodation, transfers), which can automatically price the proposal.

As the Estimate, related Estimate Bookings and Finance are not part of the main booking or finance system, Estimates can be freely generated without the need for cancellation, unlike an Enrolment.  Estimates can be easily converted to an Enrolment, so they provide an ideal staging area for situations when we don't wish to formalise finance or reserve the student on the course, but we do wish to give a potential customer a proposal or quote.

Once created, the estimate when saved will automatically update the Opportunity Value.  When the Estimate proposal document is emailed, the Opportunity Stage will be updated to Price/Proposal.

Enrolments

It might be desirable to enrol a student immediately skipping the Estimate stage. The main reason for this could be that we need to have the bookings count against capacity - i.e. we wish to actually reserve a place on a course, which an estimate does not do, or we wish finance to be accounted for.

Opportunity Stage and Opportunity Value

The Opportunity Stage is status flag on the opportunity which can be used to identity where we are in the opportunity pipeline, the Opportunity Value is the sales value of the opportunity.

The stage statuses themselves and the opportunity probability can be defined or updated by your Systems Administrator and these can be automatically updated by some of the actions in Schoolworks Estimate and Enrolment processing.

The trigger points and the typical stage values are as follows (however, these are examples and can be amended for each of our customers):

• Estimate saved
  • Update Opportunity value to Net-Net of Course+Individual Tuition fees
• Estimate emailed
  • Update opportunity stage to: Proposal Price/Quote
• Enrolment created or matched to an existing opportunity
  • Update opportunity stage to:  Enrolment Created
• Enrolment Invoice Emailed
  • Update opportunity stage to:  Awaiting Payment
• Enrolment Monies Received
  • Update opportunity stage to:  Paid
  • Triggered when we receive any money on the Enrolment
• Estimate is deleted, cancelled or Enrolment is cancelled 
  • Update opportunity stage to: Closed Lost