CRM & Marketing Automation
Convert more leads, coordinate teams, and stay top-of-mind without laborious follow-up.
Convert more applicants with workflows that keep prospective students informed and engaged from inquiry to enrollment.
Free up staff time with automation for follow-ups, confirmations, reminders, and data syncing—no more spreadsheet chaos.
Use automation to deliver personalized outreach triggered by real behavior—not by guesswork or generic schedules.
Connect marketing, admissions, and advancement teams with shared systems that improve collaboration and reporting.
Discover your potential in days, not months.
Need to move fast? Consider potent consulting. We can help research a critical issue, uncover quick wins, and provide a fresh perspective to help you get unstuck fast.
These short engagements range from a day to a couple of weeks and are led by our founder. You can expect a burst of ideas and insights, tailored to your needs.
CRM & Marketing Automation for Colleges
Audit your existing workflows, data sources, and communications to determine what you need from a CRM or automation system—and what gaps to address before implementation.
Compare tools like HubSpot, Slate, Salesforce, and others based on your goals, team size, data complexity, and student lifecycle needs—so you choose the right platform the first time.
Create a phased rollout plan with clear milestones, user roles, and data migration strategies to help your team adopt new tools with confidence and clarity.
Build automated journeys for inquiries, applicants, event registrants, donors, and new students—based on platform behavior and timing.
Identify and prioritize high-interest contacts using scoring models tied to engagement and conversion likelihood.
Ensure forms, landing pages, and tracking tools sync cleanly into your CRM—with deduplication, tagging, and field mapping best practices.
Design multi-step communication sequences that trigger based on actions like form fills, downloads, event attendance, or inactivity.
Customize automations within the tools you already use—HubSpot, Slate, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and more.
Set up smart rules to deliver the right message based on web behavior, email engagement, or stage in the student or donor journey.
Create internal alerts, task assignments, and workflows that keep counselors and staff aligned on lead follow-up and stewardship.
Track automation impact on opens, clicks, funnel progression, and conversions—then refine based on what works.
Establish user roles, access levels, and workflows that support secure collaboration across marketing, admissions, and advancement.
Empower your staff with user-friendly guides, training sessions, and ongoing support for managing automations with confidence.
Why Choose Potent?
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Experience.
We’ve been helping higher ed clients since 2001. In that time, we’ve enabled colleges to leverage the Web, adopt Social Media, and navigate AI.
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Reliability.
We keep our promises. When you ask us to do something, you know it’s getting done.
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Results.
We know how to get the most from your budget, regardless of size.
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Team.
We have an exceptional team of professionals who wake up ready to solve your toughest problems.
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Transparency.
We will always give it to you straight, from strategic recommendations to performance reporting.
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Longevity.
We’re here to stay. We’ve been serving some clients for over two decades.
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Exclusivity.
When you work with us, we’re not working with your competitors.
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Curious.
We approach every new client with a fresh perspective, ready to dive into the details and imagine your greatest possibilities.
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Attention.
We are not a volume agency. We invest our time in a small roster of clients whom we believe are ready to grow.
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Partnership.
Like our parent company, Partners Marketing Group, we’re committed to building trusted relationships.
Case Study
Unlocking the Potential of a Historic Brand Marching to Their Own Drum
Learn how this historic institution reversed enrollment decline through digital strategy, upgraded web experiences, and automation—driving growth, reducing costs, and renewing the brand.
Case Study
Science + SEO: A Powerful Reaction
Emory’s Pharmacology graduate degree program had the research credentials, but not the national visibility. Learn how targeted digital marketing helped them reach elite applicants across the country.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. We guide colleges through a platform evaluation process based on your goals, budget, data needs, and team capacity. We regularly work with tools like HubSpot, and we’ll help you choose the one that fits best.
Costs vary depending on the platform, specific features, and the volume of communication. The more applicants, students, or contacts, the higher the cost. For example, HubSpot for a small college with up to 5,000 contacts may be less than $20,000/yr, but Salesforce for a large university could be many multiples of that.
For most institutions, initial setup and workflow builds range from $20,000–$50,000, with ongoing support structured as a monthly retainer or on-demand services.
Not in the long run. While implementation requires collaboration, the goal is to save your team time and reduce manual effort. We handle most of the technical work and provide training so your staff can manage automations confidently.
Absolutely. We can design separate workflows for prospective students, parents, donors, alumni, and event attendees—all within a single CRM or integrated systems.
We often work with colleges who have CRM tools in place but aren’t getting the value they expected. We’ll audit your current setup, recommend improvements, and rebuild or refine workflows to align with your goals.
Yes. We ensure your landing pages, pop-ups, and inquiry forms sync properly with your CRM—so every lead is tracked, tagged, and nurtured automatically.
We build dashboards and reports to track email engagement, workflow performance, and funnel progression—so you can see which automations are delivering results and where to optimize.
Yes. We offer live training, video walkthroughs, and written documentation so your team can maintain workflows, build new ones, and make edits without outside help.
Let’s Talk
Ready to explore how working with Potent could solve the problems that keep you up at night? Drop us a line and we’ll coordinate a call.