The last two weeks students have audited their campaigns and made strategic decisions to improve performance in any of the four categorical areas where they may be weak. Students examine 16 different variables through their InGen Analytics report to determine where they may need to spend extra time to improve their brand awareness, brand acquisition, brand engagement, and/or brand retention. Additionally, students are in the final weeks of their live 8-week campaign, so they are pushing hard to generate as many leads as possible.
Over the final two weeks of this course, students learn how to transfer those leads into a customer relationship management database. Using Zoho CRM, students learn how to import their leads into our CRM database, then learn how to establish contacts and deals to establish a sales plan for these newly generated leads. Using Zoho, students set up deals and then learn how to track leads through the deal/sales cycle towards the closing of each deal. While there is not a product to sell in this class, this is a great skill set to learn as students will soon be applying for internships or jobs in the digital marketing arena. Upon the completion of this class, not only do students have digital inbound marketing skills, but they understand why and how these skills connect their marketing abilities to a firm’s sales cycle.
Within Zoho, students also learn how they can automate the import process in the future. Using additional plugins in the future, students can connect the online web forms directly to their Zoho account, so that whenever one of their website users completes an online web form, their contact information is automatically stored in the Zoho database as a potential lead. Once these leads are acquired, then it would be the sales manager’s job to assign a lead to an individual sales associate, who would then follow up on the lead. As a brief introductory to a course like personal selling or sales management, our students take a quick glance into those courses by creating a deal for one of the leads they acquired during their campaign. Moving that lead through a series of sales tasks, which they design within one of their assignments, students learn how to move that lead through the sales cycle and then close out the sale. Although it is a fictitious exercise, Zoho awards them by sending an email that congratulates them on closing their first sale through their website lead.
For institutions that have a strong sales program, this curriculum is a good intro level course that connects digital marketing and sales in the minds of your students. In fact, some universities using our curriculum have added some additional CRM and sales content at the end of their courses to create a smooth transition into their sales programs. If this type of flexibility interests you for your marketing and sales curriculum, reach out to us through our contact us form at http://thedigitalengine.net/contact-us.
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