Spark Academy 2X their Conversion using Corefactors AI CRM

"With Corefactors AI CRM, we were able to automate the entire journey from prospect reaching us for an inquiry to them becoming our student and further on. This helped us keep the leads engaged and also helped us improve our efficiency significantly. We were able to double the number of leads we used to manage, and last year we enrolled more students than we had done ever in the last 20 years since inception".

-Yasavi Santosh
Owner and Founder, Spark Academy

About Spark Academy

Spark Academy, a renowned competitive coaching exams center, has been making a significant impact on the education landscape since its inception in 2004. Founded with a focus on after-school classes for students, the academy later recognized the potential in the competitive exams space. This realization marked the beginning of an inspiring journey, where they expanded to cater to engineering and medical students' competitive exam needs.

Over the last 12 years, they have grown to four centers in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, along with a strong online coaching presence, serving more than 8000 students. With a qualifying percentage of 85%+ across various competitive exams, they have cemented their position as one of the top coaching institutes in the region. This outstanding performance has been acknowledged by numerous third-party platforms, ranking Spark Academy among the top five institutes in the coaching segment.

Challenges

#1 Manual Inquiry and Lead Management

Spark Academy had a vision of providing top-notch education services to their community, but manual processes were hindering their growth. They relied on cumbersome spreadsheets and paper-based methods to manage student and inquiry data, leading to data discrepancies and data traceability issues.

#2 Lead Leakges

Spark Academy has adopted a customer-centric marketing approach, relying primarily on word-of-mouth marketing. They leverage various platforms, such as YouTube, GoogleMyBusiness, and Instagram, to share valuable content and connect with their target audience effectively. And with the help of organic marketing, they generate inbound inquiries that they nurture and eventually convert. However, with the manual process, it was very difficult for them to engage the prospects at the right time and maintain a regular timely follow-up. Because of this, valuable leads were slipping through the cracks, causing lead leakages.

#3 Inefficient communication system and low conversion rates

Even though Spark Academy was generating a good number of inquiries daily through its online content on social media and word-of-mouth, they were missing its revenue targets from its competitors. This was happening because there was no systematic communication and engagement with prospects. It was observed that multiple inquiries were not acted upon for several days, the average speed of conversion of inquiries to leads ranged from 5-6 days and sometimes some leads weren’t touched at all. On the other hand, competitors were sending personalized emails and SMSes and regularly keeping them updated about upcoming batches, prices, offers, events, etc. This adversely affected conversion rates.

#4 Inability to track student journey, team performance, and sales metrics

Last, but not least, there was no way to track and ascertain the stages of the leads and engage them based on past interactions. Often leads complained about receiving the same call and messages again and again. This increased dissatisfaction among the students.

Also, the inquiries were distributed randomly to the sales team, and it was difficult to measure the performance of the sales agents. There was no way to track the productivity of the calling team, check out the call log, call duration, and call recording. This dearth of insights hindered their ability to make data-driven decisions and optimize their operations for growth.

Researching and Evaluating Solutions

Amidst Covid-19 and the vision of scaling, Spark Academy started looking into and comparing a few CRMs after realizing how crucial it was to connect with prospects effectively and keep track of interactions to better qualify leads and cut down on the sales cycle. That's when they discovered Zoho, Corefactors, and a few more CRM SaaS solution providers. Following the Corefactors AI CRM demo and 15-day Free Trial, they were convinced that Corefactors AI CRM is the perfect solution for their challenges and that it is the most cost-effective CRM for education businesses when compared to the capabilities and features that it provides.

Solutions

#1 Automated Lead Management

Spark Academy generates a majority of its leads, almost 90-95% from the organic content that they post on social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram and offline word-of-mouth. Also, they have a limited sales force and hence wanted to reduce the time taken by their sales agents in manual data entry in Excel and spreadsheets. Also, different team members were using different sheets which required quite a lot of time in data correction and preparing any report, if and when needed.

With automatic lead capture and assignment, custom fields with easy drop-down options, AI-based lead scoring, automatic lead stage change record, individual and team revenue target tracking, and more, Corefactors AI CRM makes selling super easy and systematic.

“Now we do not need to manually enter customer contact information, it is captured automatically by Corefactors AI CRM. There is very minimal manual data entry now. Also as the entire customer details are all in one place, from their contact information to all the tasks and activities related to a particular lead. This makes our work very easy and saves at least 2 hours of work every day”