Beyond the Student CRM: 5 Salesforce Trends Driving Higher Education Partnerships, Innovation, and Revenue

The Q&A functionality in the webinar, drop your questions throughout and we'll get through as many as we can at the end or follow up over email where needed. We are recording today as well, so you can access that after the fact. And my colleague Sabrina will be taking a peek at the chat here and there, so we'll try to kind of keep up as we go. Very briefly, my name is Jane Corgan Monit. I am Redpath's vice president of operations and go to market. I've been in the higher education industry for 14 years and have been using Salesforce for nearly the same duration. I started my career in higher education initially in recruiting and admissions, as many do in the industry And I've had direct functional roles in various departments, including international students, scholarships, public radio, before moving into central IT, where I had the privilege of supporting many departments across an R1 institution on Salesforce. Along the way, I picked up 12 consultants coming from roles like the director of admissions, centralized IT, financial aid, etc. From that experience, we know the impact of the work our clients and partners do at colleges and universities, and we know the real impact of budget shortfalls and revenue gaps on staff, faculty, and of course, most importantly, students, which is why we are incredibly passionate about using Salesforce as a tool to help institutions realize revenue growth and diversification

Often outside of the traditional student life cycle, because that's where we see real opportunity for change in how an institution operates, offering an avenue to change the trajectory of a school and its students. Finally, we've been doing this work for a long time. Red Path was established in 2008. We've refined our approach to ensure we can hit the mark and deliver real value We are almost to our panelists, so stick with me for two more minutes. Before we talk about the trends and the technology, I want to talk a little bit about maturity and how to assess where your institution stands and then find a path forward. Often in webinars, we talk about our clients who have already done the work and are already well on their way on the journey And sometimes that can feel overwhelming, and depending on where you sit, it might even look impossible to get to the same place that they are. The framework we're going to go over helps us recognize that where we are today so we can find our next step and a path forward To avoid falling behind or allow us to strive to get ahead. So before we get into the model, most institutions suffer from severely disconnected data and systems. While you might in one department have a really great team and fantastic operational processes, the disconnected and fragmented nature of the work can cause real pains to students, partners, and ultimately institutional risk. And I think in 2026, most everyone sees this

Feels it and understands the problem, you know that you don't have access to Intium's data at the click of a finger, or you aren't able to see how Career Services is working within Handshake, because it's all spread across campus. Fixing the problem requires more than just technology, though, to alleviate and reconnect how we work together Moving forward to solve the problem of disconnected data, it requires more than new technology or integrations. It requires moving the organizational culture and technology together to drive a real impact. When there's significant gaps between technology And the people within an organization, the investment rarely is fully realized. Towards the start of my career, I most often saw the challenge on the left, where technology gets ahead of the people. So an IT department or select group of individuals maybe have invested in technology to drive innovation But an organizational culture and team might be resistant and slow to adopt the tools, whether that be due to a fear of being replaced by the technology or a fear of collaborating across campus in a unified system, feeling protective of data. However, lately, increasingly, and maybe encouragingly, I actually see the challenge on the right More and more, which as a technologist, is really a fun challenge to work with. It's teams who are locked into a vision of data sharing to drive collaboration and innovation, but the technology needs to catch up. Regardless of where the gap lies, real value and opportunity is still

left on the table At Redpath, we've honed our approach to ensure that we understand where our clients are joining us on their journey so that we can support bridging the gap. As much as we love technology, we also need to ensure we don't overpace the team that will use it. This is so critical, especially when we're talking about external partnerships, research, and innovation. We often see teams fall into the trap of seeing relationships they've established as their account, their lead, their partnership. And while they may be driving real value for the institution from their independent work It can cause damage to the partnership and the revenue potential for the institution. Single-threaded relationships are dangerous. Once they leave, so goes the partnership. Or we often hear from our clients that you might walk into a meeting with a prospective partner and appear clueless when you realize that they actually already do significant work with another department on campus. There's so much potential in the work our clients do that leaving the relationship to be owned and controlled by one person leaves too much opportunity on the table.

Or in the inverse, when you have a team who gets it, who wants to collaborate, have clear visibility into the data, and work across campus to be a unified front, but has to find time on the calendar with 10 different people to get one hour to get that full picture together. We're wasting real time and opportunity So Sabrina, my colleague, will drop this into the chat of the webinar, a PDF so you can reference it throughout. Do not try to read it all in this moment, but I'll kind of orient you here briefly. We've categorized both of the curves that I've shown you thus far into five stages to help institutions identify where they fit on the curve and determine where you need to move the needle and what's your initial focus might be. So one being low maturity and 5 being high maturity, innovative, and kind of pushing the leading edge. You might find yourself at different stages within both curves. So, for example, in… if you're a 1 in technology, you may be operating from spreadsheets in Outlook, but you could still be a five organizationally and culturally Where everyone does desire full transparency and collaboration, and you have leadership driving that across campus. Or it could be the inverse, where maybe you're higher like a foreign technology and a two organizationally, we're still protective and careful with our data. Understanding where you are helps you and us determine what our next step is The good thing is there is always a next step, no matter where you fall on both curves. You're just identifying where that is so we can figure out what the next step is.

For example, when you're ahead in culture, but behind in technology, then my goodness, our consultants and architects have so much fun propelling you forward. But if you find yourself in the inverse, there is a path there too. And this is actually a path that I really enjoy supporting our clients in Because it isn't just about meetings or directives from your leadership. That's still needed and important, but the technology can move the needle too. And it's a partnership. In this case, we might start smaller and help people dip their toes in to show the possibility of what it looks like with a life vest on. Keep it safe, take our time with the partnership of the leadership of your organization and driving through a change management framework to show What is possible when we shift how we engage with our data across the campus? Again, you can grab this from the chat, but with that, I want to start engaging our panel. So first, I will hand it over to John Stevenson from Georgia Southern John, if you would introduce yourself, your institution, and share where you might see your office on the matrix today. Oh, John, you're on mute.

Nails are ready to go. Hey, thanks for that introduction. Like Jane said, I'm John Stevenson. I'm the Associate Vice President for Business Engagement at Georgia Southern University. We have campuses in Statesboro, Georgia, Savannah, Georgia, Hinesville, and then a campus in Wexford, Ireland. So think Southeast coastal Georgia. That's where we're located. Carnegie R2 University with about 30, 31,000 students and growing and hopefully be Carnegie Arguan here in very short order, something we've been working on for the last couple of years. And we've certainly got there. So yeah, so I started up the… I brought in to start up the Office of Business Engagement for Georgia Southern University about a year ago. So we're certainly, I guess, newer to that area, although there were different divisions, different units, obviously over the years, working in corporate relations, working in business engagement, and the mandate for our office was And is to create more partnerships, more external collaborations, and to be agnostic to what those look like. So whether that's philanthropy or student experience or experiential learning, research, really agnostic to what the form of the partnerships look like But to bring more of those in and more connections between the faculty, staff, and students and real world companies. And on the maturity curve, you know, like Jane had mentioned, I think we were maybe one of those organizations. And again, newer to the red path in Salesforce world You know, certainly aware that the CRM was desperately needed across the units and divisions. When we first started, we did a kind of a deep dive cataloging of the different units and departments and talk to everybody we could across the campuses to kind of identify some strategies that may work best for us, and seeing a lot of disparate

programs, a lot of H unit was using something different. You know, looking at what a kind of a collective or enterprise level program might look like was was a little bit of a daunting thing to think about at first. So You know, I would say our organization and our office certainly was probably on that minimal to emerging on that technology curve. A lot of us are super familiar with different enterprise level programs and solutions. Lots of experience there, but without kind of a clear direction on what the solution would be best for what our mandate was. So again, minimal to emerging on that technology side, and I think organizationally, we might be one of those folks that Jaden had talked about that we're probably further along on that curve. Like, we were ready, we were looking forward to it, we were Understanding that that's probably the solutions we're going to be. So we were opened armed to what the solutions might be. So probably further ahead on the organizational maturity, ready for the technology solution. Awesome. Thank you, John. And Tracy. Thanks, Jane.

So my name is Tracy. Nice to meet everyone. And I'm the Assistant VP for Communications, marketing and digital operations. And I work for Research, Innovation and Economic Development, which is a unique area of the University of Buffalo. It's about the fourth largest group The State University of New York, the SUNY flagship, we are an R1 research university. And our divisions really span corporate engagement, tech transfer, sponsored programs, commercialization, entrepreneurship Even support for the researcher throughout that life cycle and business and entrepreneur partnerships was stood up to kind of be the front door to the industry and bring in the many different programs that we have that are those industry collaborations or those corporate collaborations, and start to build a front door that really leads people in a way that it's easy for them to navigate. So what we're really trying to do is be more customer-focused and treat our partnerships as customers so that they don't have to figure out who to speak with, how the system works internally And how do we actually get them in a place where it's very comfortable and more transparent across different units or programs internally to understand who's talking to this account, what is happening? How do we actually report up through leadership

So I lead communications and marketing, and I came from private industry where I was very familiar with business development and really tracking revenue and tracking things from the customer's point of view so that they are really feeling felt taken care of from a constituent level. So when I looked at that matrix that Jane put up, I chuckled because I could say that we're really in optimizing or the optimization and that our technology is maturing at this point. It gives us a broad view Of those engagements across those focus areas, but our real work now, and always will continue to be making sure that our people and our processes And our culture continues to keep pace with that system. I think one thing that I also could say is that our salesforce org is used really across the lifecycle from prospect tracking to program management to internal collaboration. We're even using it to identify who should be involved with large proposals and maybe even learning about some of our 3,000 researchers, things that we didn't know that they're working on in ways that can help us better align and go after maybe some limited submissions and things like that. So we are in optimization in the business development and the partnership area, I would say, but I always look back and say, you know, in other areas we might be just starting something new, or maybe we have a new program that we're bringing on board

And those individuals are new to the organization, and we have to start back from the beginning in some instances. But growing that 360 degree constituent view across the university has just been very helpful for us to continue to help us not only invest in what we're doing here, but also expand it. So we're still evolving, and because our system is embedded in that day-to-day operations of what we do in research innovation and economic development. We are also trying to centralize functions and really look to be that support system to the entire research community, so that when they're here and they're at a place in their career and working through either getting, you know, doing their first research project to actually then promoting or commercializing, that we can be there with them. And so I think that that change also happens because they're all at different places in their careers. So that really kind of fits that organizational lag concept, too. But bringing people along through that change is what I think communications is is essential, but also having a partner that can help us navigate that.

Thank you, Tracy. And last but not least, Ryan. Hey, everyone. My name is Ryan Frazee. I work for Salesforce. But before that, I spent almost 10 years working in higher ed. And so putting my previous institution on that maturity curve, I would say we clearly were at the Zero minimal level tracking at the very, very beginning when we started that thing, and protective across departments, countries, everything that we were working on was very much that way. And over the eight years that I was there, with a lot of people involved, we were able to push way beyond the three and four we had AI. This is back in 2015 doing things on Salesforce, that was really a lot of fun. And leading that whole process, not just from an IT perspective, but from an overall organizational transformation piece. And it was just really fun to watch how we were able to move through that. The dirty little secret, and this is to Jane's earlier point about This process is, is once you get to those maturity levels, your mind expands even further, and then you start elevating your standards even further, and then you want to take a step back and improve the next piece again and keep going through that. So there's always ways to keep improving As we're going through that, and it was a really good, fun experience, but I've taken the last six years working at Salesforce, really being able to not just help one institution, but help many institutions. And so I've really enjoyed that experience so far.

So one of the things that really kind of sticks with me in this sort of thing is how do we help people with that? And so when we were talking a little bit ahead of time before we did this webinar was is really, how does it all set up and how do we make these pieces fit together And for those of you who know what Salesforce is, Salesforce is a really cool set of toys and tools. And if you're super geeky and technical, cool, you've got that bottom layer of all the foundational stuff, and then you've got the AI and the data foundations pieces There's a lot here, but let me kind of just boil it down to a couple different pieces. If you look at that layer that says that unified trusted data piece Most institutions have the same human being being talked to by different parts of the institution. Being able to unify those into their different parts of the organization in a way that doesn't say one is right and one is wrong, but how do we know that it's the same person, even though They might be different email addresses, or they might be different experiences where in one use case or one circumstance, they're a student and another circumstance they're an executive VP of research and development at a major corporation. And how are we doing those two things together

That's really where you can unify that and have that puzzle piece there. But when you think about all these puzzle pieces together, I think the other puzzle piece, when we think about it from that business engagement that John was mentioning before is this, you know, sometimes it's just the outreach and how are we connecting with people and some of that Hopefully, we'll be able to get into some of that future of what's possible and what we've seen so far as we're going into that from a CRM perspective. But again, what I think that the key thing here is, is it's a full-on platform that allows for not just that data unification layer But also all this work that can be done in the prebuilt just out-of-the-box capabilities, and then on top of that, understanding that the education industry is truly unique and has a whole lot of different processes that are purpose-built for education that aren't exactly the same as other industries. And so we can learn from those, we can take from those, but at the same time, we're using the purpose-built stuff that is in Education Cloud to make that make more sense for a higher education institution

All right, let's get into the panel. I'm going to stop sharing my deck so that we can kind of focus on the conversation for a bit here. The first trend that we wanted to talk about is this shift that I talked about earlier of really starting to think and that Tracy talked about a more partner-centric model, working together collaboratively, and so I wanted to start with John, who's earlier in the journey of both the office and using Salesforce, of how hearing how you began to build alignment and change around data sharing and why did you intentionally start small Yeah, no, happy to just talk about that. So us being a new office, you know, I was newer to higher ed. I had brought in two directors as well that were a little more experienced in the higher ed space, but didn't have any reputational or, you know, credibility within the walls of Georgia Southern. Not that there was resistance, but You know, I think we realized very early we're the new folks, the new office being stood up. And there's nothing worse than having the new person have lots of great ideas, right, that doesn't have any relationship capital or credibility potentially within the university. So recognize that fairly early on, that although there were a lot of smiling faces and folks, you know. you know, happy that the office is being launched and there was kind of one-stop shopping for all the engagement connectivity. You know, we had kind of decided early on that, knowing that this enterprise-level CRM was going to be one of the most critical things that we could do Going forward. We had some deep conversations on

We don't think that there's going to be a world where this goes smoothly if we're trying to ask enrollment management, we're trying to ask philanthropy, we're trying to ask Different divisions to say, hey, let's collaborate on this big CRM process, although all the division leaders we had spoke with said, we desperately need an enterprise level CRM. We've got folks using all these different programs across units. It's very challenging, and we're halfway committed To these, sometimes we go off the existing tool and we just spreadsheet stuff. And so everyone recognized there was a need. And so we had made the decision early on as a strategy. Let's roll this out Just within the Office of Business Engagement, we know we can set this up, and we can get this moving fairly quickly, get it on its feet, and then kind of strategically say, well, let's have the heads of these different units, let's get extra subscriptions, extra licenses And we'll give them access to what we're working on and kind of promote that internally. Hey, if you want to know what our metrics are, you want to see what opportunities we're working on, you want to see what relationships we're building, you're more than welcome to call us, but we would prefer use your login. Jump in, you know, look at these couple of pages, you can see the metrics. And so they have access to that data and say, well, if you want to know about this particular corporate partner Just log into that business account, click on them, you'll see everything that we're doing, all the conversations, all the email back and forths. So it was a great big, you know, data catalog and customer service. And that was our strategy

Rather than trying to establish credibility, being a new office and being new to the university We didn't want to wait 24 months and have relationship capital that we could say, hey, let's all do this. We would rather show them than tell them, and so that's what the decision that we made. I think it's worked really well, because even during this process of setting up the Crm, working with Redpath. working with Salesforce on customizing this tool to what the OBE, Office of Business Engagement needed, we very quickly had our career and professional development unit come to us and say, hey, we're desperate to do this too. Let's do it together Like, you know, we definitely… they're early adopters, and so we had the benefit of not only was it an office of business engagement effort, the career services jumped in, said, we want to use this to as long as we can integrate the handshake program that pre-existing into into the program and red path did a beautiful job of setting that up So we very quickly got maybe two divisions, two units that were working on this together. And we see, you know, it's great to be able to see just even those logins from the other divisions, the other units going, hey man, we see the vision here now. This is really great. We think this can be a solution And it's just the access. And when people need reports now, they're starting to call us directly. Hey, can you put a report on this company? Can you let me know what's going on with this company? Say, use your login, I'll show you how to do it. Because I really want them, you know, to go through us and to be exposed to it. And I think they're appreciative of

See on the resource, you know, and some divisions are using it and logging in more than others. But the conversations have now shifted to, you know, as soon as we get some time, we really want to talk to Redpath. We really want to talk about maybe this is a solution for us, and we can kind of grow this project. So that was the strategy Thankfully, it has worked as we had hoped, and we're continuing to see adoption and interest in growing the platform throughout the university. I think it's such a smart strategy to start with like your department being the one that's sharing first and entice them to start seeing the value. So I've loved the approach you started with and it's been really fun to hear from you how it's been playing out since you've been live in the system earlier this year Yeah Tracy, from a department that has a more mature use, longer use of Salesforce, what has the impact of having the 360-degree partner view across campus been? I think there's a lot of jealousy of, I think others that might not be part of our instance yet. But right now we have more than 10 areas and continue to have other areas exposed just like what John's saying, I think that's a really smart thing for you to do, John

And I think what we're showing is that having this focus across these different areas and how they're integrated really show how the partners experience us And treating those partners as customers of that whole institution. And it's not just an office so that it really piqued the interest at the, you know president and provost level, that they were able to see the much richer story. And so that structure really reflects how we continue to work toward exposing more or new programs or new departments so that we can really help that partner work with us, and we look at that as a full engagement, you know, from internship, hiring, joint research, space usage. It's not just one transaction, and I think it's… it's… early on, we said, you know, this data belongs to everyone And that helped us. We also made it part of that the partner-centric engagement was really

a culture shift to say that this was what was important. And what it's allowed us to do is avoid, you know duplicate outreach, or really design engagements that feel a little bit more seamless We've even gotten to the point to develop solutions from the perspective of the customer, where they can get a report to really better understand how is my organization working with the University of Buffalo They didn't even know in their own organizations, and so by showing them the different points of contact, it helps report things in a way that are a little bit more comprehensive and holistic So those isolated metrics from individual programs can be meaningful, but when we tell this integrated story, that impact not only helps them you know, sell up to say, you know, we should be doing more with UB, because we're doing this all right now. But it does help contribute to showing really the talent outcomes, the research funding, the economic impact And really helps us tell a much more compelling story. And it gives us reason for case for continued investment, which is something that, you know, as we grow as a university, we have to continue to invest, and we are going to be growing not only from

or Salesforce org, but for the different programs that we're going to offer as we reflect the future of higher ed. So Yeah, that's great, Tracy, and like a great segue, because you're sharing a little bit about how you're able to see the impact of your partnerships more with the system and have a holistic approach. John, from your angle of just starting at the very beginning, how are you using the metrics in the system now that you have to shift your focus from being able to count activities to measuring real impact and accountability. Oh, it's been fantastic. I think it's exactly what we were looking for to be able to measure outcomes because there's a difference between being busy and being productive, right? So you don't want to fall into that trap, I think, from a nimble standpoint because we're given the benefit of being a fairly nimble organization, being able to pivot quickly and be super, super creative. No idea's a bad idea, which is just amazing support from leadership to be able to have that kind of ethos throughout the Office of Business Engagement And so those metrics, you know, you can have that perspective probably from a leadership standpoint, as long as the outcomes are delivering, right? And you want to be able to see that, say, hey, we don't want to be spinning our wheels. So those… and sometimes it's just as simple as

Hey, the president or leadership needs a quick report on this company or that company. It was before you would be, and from what I understand from other divisions as well, it would be a little bit of a, okay, well, let me kind of consolidate everything into a Word doc, a Google Doc, or let me put an email together and kind of manually put all this stuff together. I take snapshots of our dashboard Or the reports, when I drill into them, I just take snapshots of those, or forward that report over. And leadership is like, this is spectacular. This is, like, real-time data. I'm like, yeah, I refreshed it 5 minutes ago, so this is the latest and greatest. So it lightens the load in terms of that at admin from the Office of Business Engagement side of things And it provides really deep dive data to leadership to make decisions. So for them, it's been fantastic for us ourselves as well, really being focused on outcomes. And we have a strategy that the dashboards and metrics have been really helpful in because in what we're doing, we have collaborations sometimes that involve dollars, monetary collaborations, if you want to say that. And we have a lot of collaborations and partnerships which are as just as valuable to the student experiential learning, to faculty, staff, to the community economic development. We have just as valuable, but maybe there's not a dollar amount to that. So We've categorized those with some guidance and some advice from a lot of folks, including Redpath and Salesforce, that we're calling those non-monetary partnerships and collaborations, and so we have kind of two buckets that certainly partnerships fall into. But being able to track those, because I think we were all sitting around the room in terms of what our strategies are about not shying away from those non-monetary types of engagements, and that could be

you know, board representation. They want to be on our business board, or we're asking them to be on an advisory board. Is there an on-site visit to the company? Is there an on-campus visit where we have executives hosted on campus to visit and to our facilities? Is that just research Participation. Hey, can you provide a data set for us on this? So we have a bucket of non-monetaries and the thought inside our four walls was we think that these types of non-monetary maybe relationship building engagements, we think they will translate ultimately to those more monetary philanthropy-sponsored research, those types of things. But we don't know. And everybody said, we think they will, we think this is good for us in terms of the relationship building for the engagements to be getting building a long-term relationship with a private company And what we've seen very quickly is we're able to really see that in the metrics itself. So we're able to see what non-monetary partnerships have converted to another opportunity that potentially was a monetary opportunity. And that has been phenomenal to see what conversion rates that we have. So because You know, we've established, hey, we're not wasting time by doing some of these non-monetary. These are business building, relationship building, you know, partnership building, collaborations. And we've already seen that to be able to pull those metrics, and I think I just pulled the numbers this morning. So, the last two quarters, we've had 50 non-monetary type of collaborations Our partnerships across that spectrum of maybe it's advisory seats, or it's speaking engagements to students, on-campus visits, you know, those types of non… out of the 50, 7 of those have converted to another non-monetary type

Maybe that's an advisory board, a speaker's conference, or on campus tours. And then four of those have converted directly over to monetary types, whether that's philanthropy, sponsored internships and sponsored research and Of those four that have converted from non-monetary and have had a subsequent monetary partnership, three of those four have come from the on-campus visits. So that's the exact kind of data that we wanted to see, so that we can streamline and right-size our efforts to go, hey We see in the data that maybe it's those on-campus visits and maybe, and this is early, small data set since January, so bear with us. This could this could evolve, obviously, over time. So a little noisy on the data, but But right now, it's great to see. That's one of the things we were desperate to see which one of the non-monetary types of partnerships ultimately lead to monetary types of partnerships. And so we're able to see that in real time and go, oh, well, the on-campus visits That makes a lot of sense because a lot of executives are super excited. They love engaging with the students. And out of those, you know, 15 to 20 on campus tours and visits, you know, four of those have been converted into sponsored research or philanthropy or sponsoring this consortium or this seminar So it's just super valuable, and we don't want to get tied up too much

on maybe administrative. Hey, are you busy? You know, how many new meetings are you have? We could care less. You know, put those contacts in and talk about that into the into the system. But we're really looking forward to what are the outcomes? What are these conversations have? What are the non-monetary, and what are the monetary type Things that are accomplished. And so being able to see that's been Wonderful. It helps us strategize, helps us pivot. And as the data sets grows larger, right, we can we can strategize on how do we tweak? Do we maybe seek one type of non-monetary opportunity in preference of others if we are seeking to achieve maybe moving to a monetary. So that data is just going to be helpful to that strategy. It's been very helpful. That's awesome. It's very exciting for you to be in this place where you can move past anecdotal or old habits or, you know, traditional models and start to assess that, like, or affirm sometimes the traditional model works, or there might be a pivot in strategy. So you're at a really exciting point, like you said Early data, but

Exciting to be able to use it in that way. Sure. I want to pivot a little bit towards compliance and process rigor. It's something we're hearing a lot from our clients, especially as the landscape is continually changing and changing fast around requirements with research agreements and different ways that we're working with external partners in the space. To Tracy, compliance often requires massive organizational change. To you, why is it so critical to get the humans, the people, and the process side of compliance right before you try to solve it with technology? Yes. So at UB, we're in the middle. As you know, we're all trying to increase our revenue from research expenditures, increase those. We're also trying to increase the compliance of that of that model, and maybe operationalize it a little bit differently. So change management is hard, even when you have a great system, and it's nearly impossible if the underlying processes aren't established first. So

Right now, we're in the middle of centralizing our research compliance model, and we've learned that the technology can't fix those unclear processes besides also with maybe hiring a larger amount of support systems. So I think that those roles and steps, if they're not clearly defined first, it really puts a roadblock in your way. And I can reflect back to our original Salesforce project with Redpath The real breakthrough wasn't a feature, it really was getting departments to agree on a shared set of opportunities from stages to handoffs And then we built the system around that. And I think, you know, we're applying that same playbook to compliance now, and it's really about aligning people and processes first and reinforcing that But technology will reinforce that harmony instead of really trying to automate the chaos that can happen. So, you know, everyone has this patchwork of local practices, right? And it is sometimes really personal. And we're trying to centralize and do a shared university approach that really gives our investigators and our partners consistent predictable experiences. And you know it's it's the work is really is less about turning out a new system and really more about agreeing and getting approval so we can move it forward in a very positive manner

So we never wanted to automate anything that was unclear or inconsistent, because then that just creates confusion. And, you know, you want to make sure that you have that human workflow and the ownership right before you really put that technology in place, because they won't use it, and the adoption rate will really suffer, which will then derail. And I think that we saw this dynamic really clearly in our first project with Redpath. And, it wasn't a compliance build at that time, but we had similar challenges with those different groups at different stages and different definitions of what they thought opportunities were. So honing in on that across departments was really helpful from, you know, how are we going to get information in? How are we going to qualify if that's the right information? How do we know it's going to move to the next Phase, how do we negotiate that with the groups we're working with? And so I think it's similar to that two curve maturity model, and it's really an action is really closing that organizational lag. So we don't sophisticated tools sitting on top of misaligned processes. And that is really a tough piece, and I think that's, you know, we often don't have enough people to help with change management, but compliance is so important now, and as Jane said, it's increasing in importance As finding different ways to bring revenue in. It's really all in our best interest. It is always an exciting time when you're implementing a system and the individuals are involved.

Yeah, it brings me back. I got to work with Tracy in March of 2020, so we did that whole project virtually. And at the time when I think about that experience of working with the team and reprocess designing, I think actually having some of the technology decisions made already did help, because we could prototype a little bit to help people conceptualize it and understand how it could work if we changed processes, because the tool can adapt to the way that they work, rather than starting with a blank whiteboard and trying to figure it out. So it A cool experience working with your team, refining that together John, as a newer Salesforce user, you intentionally left some complex some of the complexity of compliance out of your initial rollout. Looking back, what did you learn about your users' readiness for process rigor? Yeah, I think, and it was the mentality of walk before we run, right? And so I think we… I shied away from some of the more complex processes and then looking back, I realized that our team was probably more ready for some of those processes You know, we had some folks in our office with experience with Salesforce and other CRMs in sort of the processing part of that. So I think looking back and as I

It was we got more familiar with our own processes and realized, like Tracy's point, you know, there are some some processes along, especially the sponsored research route and the vetting process, because we have some new pretty strict laws in Georgia in terms of vetting the university partners, lots of specificity there now, and realizing that those sops were really kind of set up in a well-oiled machine, and that we could have very easily brought in a couple of those processes to do again, probably the first third of those processes that would have cleaned up and been really functional for us. So I look back and go, okay, well, we were probably ready for more sophistication in more process, rigor than we had started with. So, Yeah, looking forward to kind of phase 2 on what we're able to incorporate and kind of automate several more of those systems. So ultimately, it really does, you know the goal would be now to see You know that admin of certain projects and certain certain processes would touch a person's hand much later when a lot of the simpler processes, but critical can be achieved through Through the Salesforce.

Yeah. Keeping an eye to time, I'm going to move ahead to our fourth trend analytics and observability, Ryan. You talk a lot about this, about observability. What does that mean in the context of these partnerships? I go back to my non-tech side of things and the old mantra of what gets measured gets managed. And I think it's really important to think about it from a KPI standpoint that we talk about KPIs as the those are the outcomes we want to drive. As we automate more of the tasks along the way The KPIs, the outcome, but the observability is all the steps along the way. And so I think as we're thinking about these puzzle pieces, being able to see the different steps that are being taken along that path Allow that observability. When I used to work in retail as a kid, I could walk up and down the aisles and see where the people were looking on the shelves and whether something was there or not there, that sort of a thing. As we get into this technology world, sometimes we don't have that same ability to see because

Those processes are automated, and it almost feels like a little bit of a black box. So the opportunity To be able to observe what's going on in using these digital tools and allowing for that to happen, so it's not just a, trust me, it's trust and verify, it's making sure that you're able to observe along the way, because when Tracer John sees the outcome, they want to be able to go 3 steps back and see, okay, what happened here? Okay, or halfway down that path of that engagement We're not where we want to be just yet, and be able to have that observability. So to me, KPIs are the outcomes that drive the success to Tracy's point earlier about getting investment, and that's really what we're doing, is driving towards those outcomes. And at the same time, that opportunity along the way, as we increase our automation and those capabilities to be able to see what's going on With observability, Salesforce has Agent Studio that does that. There's a lot of different things that are there for it, but just the opportunity to see what the heck is going on and not having to be a super geek to do it is really, really valuable, because at the end of the day, the people that have the criteria may not necessarily be technical, they may be the business people, and they need to be able to see what's going on to know when to go left and when to go right.

Well, Tracy is not a super geek. How do you make this concept of observability simple and actionable for your teams? Yes, we purposefully made our dashboards really deliberately simple. We use big numbers with clear color codes, green. If we're pacing ahead of last year and red if we're behind We even have put in a yellow in there to say we're close, but we're not there yet. Then anyone can glance at that screen and instantly see the health of our KPIs or pipeline or engagement closure. They don't have to run a report. They don't have to email anybody. It's really helps us do that observability in a way that Making how is our performance obvious. And what is What are we doing every day in our decision making? So I think that just being open and visible so that everybody can do a quick health check is really important, important And that really helps us all keep on track and honest because it's not all about revenue, it is also about the KPIs and the key performance indicators that are moving you toward that outcome that you foresee. So, and it also helps you to address quickly

If you might have a problem and where you might have to step in. Just looking at the time, if you do, if anyone does have questions, a reminder that we have the Q&A, you're welcome to drop some questions in there, but maybe just a couple more or one or two more, depending on the time for the panel, before we pivot to the open Q&A. Tracy, again, I want to talk about AI. AI is the topic at hand in technology, in higher education, in every industry and facet of our lives right now I'm curious to hear from you how you are applying AI to improve your external partners experience. Yeah, I think one of the things that I mentioned at the beginning is that we were trying to find a way to make us really the university be a front door to industry partners And so we also treat our website as a front door. It's very clearly marked by user. So they know who they are, they self-identify, they can get through it. And really our website is really not a brochure. We have kind of flipped it on its head instead of using the organizational speak that higher ed uses We're using it in ways that speak to the person that's arriving at our site and we help them do what they need to do. So we're deploying the AI agent across key web assets that really act as a smart intake desk

You know a partner or a visitor can describe what they're looking for on their own. They can use these… the key words, you know, talent, maybe research, collaboration, IP, funding, and that agent interprets that intent and answers some common questions And then routes them to the right area of focus, which really helps reduce friction for those partners. And I know everyone here understands websites can be kind of a kitchen sink for higher ed and You know, it's gotta be on the web, and we have to put it up there, and it's very confusing. Some things are internal, and some things are external, and it confuses our visitors. So the agent really helps shorten the time from that first click to the right conversation. It's really, like, taking away those obstacles and Then it creates a structured intake channel for our teams, and that agent, we have vision to map those inquiries to our focus areas, but then hopefully we also will learn the areas that we might not be addressing. You know, you can do that some of those things in a standard form But this is also trying to be a little bit more nimble and meeting the partner where they are at that moment. So it's not that we're taking away some of the old-fashioned traditional ways to contact us, but what we're doing is really trying to say, you know, we honor your time, we respect you as a partner And we know it's difficult to navigate a university website. So let us help you.

Awesome. I'm going to jump to the audience questions. We have a few we'll get through what we can. And maybe I would love for if we have time, all three of you maybe to answer this question. Ryan, harkening back to your time at an institution, but maybe John, we'll start with you The question is, our institution is large and very decentralized. How did your institutions get initial buy-in? Was there a central leader demanding it? Yeah, so quickly, there really wasn't. I think there was collectively across the university, everybody said, we need our CRM, but every unit was like, we want this one, we want this one, we want this one. Oh, goodness, so great. We're never going to get consensus here. I'd rather just do it with our division with support from Central saying, hey, yeah, if you guys need a CRM, you set it up And with some conversations of, well, we only need 4 licenses, let's get 15. And you know what, head of advancement? They get a license enrollment, alumni affairs get a license, you know, career and professional development get a license. the deans, the research department, they'll get a license, and so that they're they're in the mix, although they weren't a part of setting it up. I said, hey, this is just a snippet of what Salesforce can do and what Redpath can do for us. If you have access, you know, even if it's just for a big Rolodex, you can see the companies we're talking to, you can see the opportunities, you can see contacts, you can see emails, you can use that as kind of a reference letter. That has been helpful to generate secondary questions from most folks, for many of them that have access, are

Hey, can we talk more about Salesforce? What would it look like if If alumni did this or if foundation and development did this, would we have our own app? So they're asking the right questions like it would be great to maybe start small and then grow. That was our strategy, and that's Well, we did Thanks, John. Tracy, you're right Yeah, I'd say the way that we approached it was we had an opportunity like Ryan did or John did to, there was a new formation of an organization. There was a heavy amount of revenue that was being brought in by many different units that were very much around economic development and research collaborations. And then we kind of also had leaders that really respected the customer service aspect, not only to your internal folks, but also to your external folks

And so I think that helped us a lot to say, based on that, we're going to stand this up and then reach out to advancement and reach out to others that might not be part of this. And that is created this fabric, and that I think that you know we put a value on a contact. We put what a value is to the organization as a whole. And we also said that the data is owned by everyone. We also made it a lot of part of our performance reviews. So we are a large decentralized organization But right away we had 60 users that all were held accountable. And so it was very unique time, but it really helped us quickly stand something up, I think, in nine months maybe or a year, I forget our timeframe red path, but we did it quickly with quite a few Areas of focus and users on day one. All right, I am unfortunately, we are so close to the end of the time that I don't think we'll have time for more of the questions, though we do have a few more. So I will do my best to see what I can ask for from Tracy and John to help us follow up with some of your questions over email

We would love to chat with you, too. If you are looking at this and thinking, I don't know where to get started, as I said, these are conversations I love to have. I love the strategy part of this. I think it's a lot of fun. You are more than welcome to reach out, and we can just talk through what it looks like and where you might start and think about it We'll be at NACRO. If anyone will be there, we have a panel with another set of our clients, University of Wisconsin-Madison, UW-Stout, and Georgia Tech, so we'd love to see you there. John will be there, too, if you want to pick his brain. So I'd love to see you, and again, we'll follow up over email. Thank you so much for your time, and thank you so much, Tracy, John, and Ryan, for giving us your time today and sharing with our peers across the higher ed industry. Thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you.