TargetX has been serving college and university enrollment offices for over 20 years. Today, we’re known as a market-leading recruitment, admissions, and student success solution built on the Salesforce platform, but our technology wasn’t always built on Salesforce. Like most startups at the time, we started as a proprietary “off the shelf” marketing solution in the late 1990s to address challenges that admissions offices were facing with the growth of email marketing.
As online marketing started to mature, we quickly realized that the best way to help schools reach prospective students was to help track the information schools were collecting about students, and to record all of the engagements they were having with that student and their family. The TargetX roadmap of 2007 quickly grew to what is now known as a CRM solution.
When we started to research and design the optimal solution for admissions offices, we had three aspirational requirements:
1. We needed to provide the flexibility to meet the unique requirements of all types of schools: traditional undergraduate programs, decentralized graduate schools, community colleges, etc. Many of our employees are former admissions leaders and come from diverse types of schools, so we knew there wasn’t a one size fits all solution.
2. With the start of online marketing and early signs of social media, we needed our solution to be “future proof.” Because a core population of prospective students are teens and young adults who are early adopters of technology, we needed to make sure our products resonated with this audience.
3. We needed a complete solution. Admissions offices engage with students across multiple, diverse touch points and we needed to ensure we could deliver solutions to help with each type of engagement.
The decision to partner with Salesforce
As we considered our options, Salesforce had taken the innovative step of opening their CRM platform and allowing partners to build on top of it. This provided us the opportunity to move our solution to what is today the #1 CRM platform on the market. As a result, we were able to achieve and exceed the requirements we set out to meet.
Today, TargetX partners with hundreds of colleges and universities across the globe to provide the most innovative solutions on the market. With TargetX, schools get the benefit of both the TargetX higher ed expertise and the power of the Salesforce platform. Here’s what that means:
1. Salesforce offers infinite flexibility.
In addition to the comprehensive features available through TargetX, our customers can extend functionality by adding any of the thousands of apps available through the Salesforce AppExchange. These solutions integrate with TargetX and function similarly to apps on your smart phone. In addition, the Salesforce platform offers deep configurability so you can extend it beyond the admissions use case, or customize it to meet unique business requirements that no “off the shelf” solution would be able to meet.
2. By partnering with Salesforce, TargetX can remain “future proof.”
This is because we can focus exclusively on what we’re good at: recruiting, admissions, and retention, and ensure we continue to have an innovative product roadmap. Salesforce has hundreds of thousands of customers, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, and top financial institutions. As a result, they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D that our customers benefit from, which includes everything from Outlook or Gmail integration to infrastructure and security.
3. The partnership allows us to provide our customers with the most secure solution on the market.
The platform allows an almost infinite amount of security features that can help restrict or limit access so that users are only able to access the information they need to do their jobs. This means that decentralized admissions groups can meet the unique requirements of each of their admitting offices within a single platform. Access can be refined to where work study students can be prevented from accessing information while off campus, during off hours, or from their phones.
In addition, all of the sensitive data that our customers keep about students are housed in the most secure data centers on the market, with the same security used to protect data for Salesforce’s corporate customers. More information about Salesforce security, as well as real time status monitors are available on their website.
Ultimately, TargetX is committed to the Salesforce platform because we believe this provides the best solution to our customers today and into the future. We have seen that as CRM needs change, Salesforce has and will be on the leading edge of innovation.
Interested in learning more about TargetX and Salesforce? Download our CRM Buyer’s Guide below:
