The Challenge

Increasing engagement and enhancing collaboration.

Heriot-Watt University is an integrated global university with links across Europe and the rest of the world. It was founded as the School of Arts and was the world’s first Mechanical Institute in 1821. The university’s heritage is rooted in industry collaboration. It continues to deliver education and innovation through knowledge transfer, commercialisation and promoting the value of enterprise through education.

With campuses in Edinburgh, Galashiels and Orkney, Malaysia and Dubai, Heriot-Watt was named International University of the Year in 2018. The University’s 29,000 students have a reputation for being highly employable graduates with a strong professional orientation. Many of the degree programmes include industry placements and projects and are also accredited by professional bodies. The university offers one of the largest cohorts of Graduate Apprenticeship degree programmes in Scotland.

Heriot-Watt is boosting productivity, not only by educating the future workforce. The university is also nurturing specialist talent, advancing R&D, building global collaborative partnerships, commercialising technology and developing new trade and investment opportunities.

The university needed to increase engagement with industry partners, enhance collaboration and give teams a better understanding of the performance of the products and services offered by the university.

The Solution

Starting a CRM Journey.

Heriot-Watt's various teams and projects were running across different systems. They needed to bring all of their industry-facing teams together onto one CRM to achieve their goals. This would support their Partnership Pipeline, Innovation Pipeline, Graduate Apprenticeships and Intellectual Property Portfolio.

In order to help the university achieve their goals, Credera implemented a solution in two phases:

1. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) and Salesforce Lightning (Phase 1): Credera introduced Heriot-Watt to Salesforce Lightning, bringing the various teams together on one system and allowing pipelines to be tracked from campaign to closed won. Credera rolled out training to all teams at once, ensuring complementary, collaborative ways of working.

2. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) and Salesforce Lightning (Phase 2): Credera introduced Heriot-Watt to MCAE for Salesforce, allowing further automation in B2B marketing activity.

The Results

Expected Results.

By aligning working practices, Heriot-Watt expects to encourage increased collaboration and reduce inefficiencies across teams.

By having a single system Heriot-Watt can take a data-driven approach to benefit their various pipelines of activity, with an increased level of understanding they can maximise opportunities and create efficiencies in the process.

The implementation of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) will enable the team to streamline marketing activities, increase the effectiveness of communications and gain deeper insight into user behaviour.

Praise for the project: