The amazing trait of every salesmen / saleswomen is – drive. They’ll go to any length and push as hard as they can to make a sale. Another interesting thing about sales today is how easy it is to manage potential clients and follow up with them through CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. Such systems have proven to be highly advantageous for sales people and oddly enough, there’s a lot that educators can learn from them. “What can they possibly teach us?” you ask? Read on to learn more.
Organization is Key
A salesman (or woman) needs to have all kinds of juicy information about a potential customer (a lead as they are most often called) right on tap while making a sale for it to be more compelling. CRMs have long helped them do just that. Leads are stored in the system and when a salesperson contacts them, they have everything they need to make sure they sell. This level of access to information and organization is key in the sales cycle. Without this information, making a sale would be harder and you wouldn’t know the client.
In education, think of customers as students and sales as performance. Of course, you can choose your own metric although, performance is a very important measure for any teacher. Teachers here are sales people. With access to a student’s or entire class’ performance report or other information, the teacher can make changes to her lesson plan or assignment / tests to ensure performance improves. To ensure such information is available, the education industry has to move away from using email as a standard of communication and sharing information to an efficient, online system built specifically to provide such data. Learning Management Systems are ideal and at Eduora, we take it a step further with social built-in.
Access to Everyone
A salesman probably has the most expansive phone book within their CRM. CRMs also allow a salesman to contact a lead with one tap by email etc. without having to leave the system at all. The focus here is to allow the salesman to reach his lead without having to do a lot of work. For a teacher, communication is very important.
It’s essential for an educational organization to integrate a solid communications system to connect every teacher and student and facilitate easier discussions. With better access to people, teachers and students can learn faster, solve problems faster and learn collaboratively. Humans are social inside the classroom and outside too. The tools we offer must be in tandem with the pace of such communications.
Conversion is a Key Metric
In sales, conversion is a key metric. Of all the leads, how many purchased your item? This helps a salesperson understand if they are being effective salesmen / saleswomen and if required, change the way they sell. It’s a very important measure of how good they are at what they do.
In education, performance is often the key measure. With the right tools, a teacher can access historical data on her class to understand if she’s improving the class average. Such information can be used so the teacher can tweak their lesson plan and assignments to engage students and enhance their scores. The idea here is that a teacher must be as motivated about his / her own performance (of how well the class average is) against their own historical performance. It’s a measure of how effective they are at their profession.
You’ve read a lot about the similarities but, how can we make this level of information available to the education community? One way is to use a good Learning Management System. At Eduora however, we’re going miles ahead by implementing other social indicators and individual appraisal systems to help a teacher. We absolutely urge every institution that is dedicated at improving the overall coaching and performance of their students to consider integrating technology into their organization. As always, we wish you’ll give Eduora.com a go and learn the importance of integrating technology yourself.
