Vadim Gorlick, CEO of Tondro, a Salesforce implementation partner with extensive higher education experience, demonstrated how CRM systems can transform campus operations by serving as a central data repository and streamlining many processes. He showcased Salesforce's capabilities in handling academic and financial operations, including flexible term structures, course registration, and payment plans.

Seven months into a critical Salesforce implementation, Flagler College's admissions team faced a failed project with their launch deadline weeks away. Their concerns had been dismissed by their vendor, forcing them to scrap the project and revert to their old system for another year. The experience revealed a non-negotiable requirement for their next search: a partner who already understood the high-stakes nature of admissions operations from day one.

In a recent webinar hosted by ListEdTech, industry experts Charlie Moran (Moran Technology Consulting) and Justin Ménard (ListEdTech) offered one of the most candid data-informed perspectives we’ve seen on the current state of the Student Information System (SIS) market. Their candor, grounded in decades of analysis, made one thing abundantly clear: for many institutions, especially mid-sized colleges, the status quo is not sustainable.

San Francisco Bay University (SFBU), a small nonprofit university near Silicon Valley, serves a mission-centered population of first-generation and low-income students. But like many smaller institutions, SFBU struggled with disconnected systems and paper-based processes that slowed operations and limited growth. To support domestic enrollment expansion, the school adopted Salesforce not just as a CRM—but as a full Student Information System (SIS)—bringing together recruiting, admissions, financials, and student records on one connected platform.