With a big win over division rivals Oregon, Stanford, the Ivy League of the West coast, is set to make its second straight appearance at the Rose Bowl. In a recent article, The Wall Street Journal took a deeper look at the unique way Stanford funds it’s athletic programs. Unlike the large alumni bases, ticket revenues, and merchandise hauls that fuel other major football programs, Stanford Athletics relies on an endowment supported by donations. Most of Stanford's donors are from an older generation, but with a bustling local tech community and new internet millionaires emerging every day, Stanford still has trouble identifying and engaging the right potential donors. 

The WSJ article highlighted the story of 26 year-old recent graduate and Saudi-born Salman Al-Rashid, who recently pledged $500,000 to the Stanford Athletic Fund. An interesting comment from former Athletic Director, Joe Karlgaard: "No one at the university knew who he was...he was on no one’s radar." Although he was an unknown to the fund’s outreach group, the signs were there, if anyone would have taken a closer look. Al-Rashid is the son of Saudi Businessman Nasser Al-Rasheed, who has donated millions to his alma mater, the University of Texas, and has his name on their new state-of-the-art strength and conditioning center. 

The lesson here is that every business, university, and fundraising organization needs to have an obsession with knowing and engaging their current and potential customers. For universities, it starts with a better understanding of your students, and maintaining a valuable level of engagement with alumni. Luckily for Stanford, Al-Rasheed likely wasn’t going to take his donation to a rival university—there is a level of loyalty to one's alma mater that doesn’t exist for most businesses. 

The good news is that with the proper strategy for customer obsession, the technology is there to deliver a 360-degree view of your customers and to identify leads before they slip through the cracks. Here are three key strategies your organization should review today:

1. Customer relationship management (CRM)
   
   Does your enterprise CRM solution provide your users the platform to identify, manage, and engage your customers? Cloud-based CRM tools like Salesforce enable users to engage your customers with the right information whenever and wherever those unique customer moments occur.
2. Marketing automation
   
   Are you utilizing a marketing automation tool (Marketo, Eloqua, ExactTarget, etc.) that is tied to your CRM to better market, nurture, and capture leads? Through tracking, scoring, and segmenting leads, your team can engage the right leads at the right time. Harnessing the power to understand what prospects are viewing on your website and engaging with your digital brand, prevents that next big deal from slipping through the cracks. Nothing is worse then having that potential customer who wants to invest in your product or services take their business elsewhere because no one engaged them.
3. Social
   
   Actively listening to what your customers are saying on social channels not only helps you better know your customers, but also gives you the opportunity to engage them via their elected communication channel. With the massive amount of leverageable information on Social, it’s impossible to have a true 360-degree view without incorporating Social data into your strategies. See how the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud is integrating social listening, publishing, and tracking into customer engagements.

Don’t lose opportunities to discover & engage customers. Learn how to better engage your customers with Bluewolf’s Essential Guide to Customer Obsession.