CASE ✦ TWISTELLAR PROJECTS
Salesforce CRM and Online Community Portal Implementation for Managing Student Athlete NIL
• Date: October 2023 •
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
CLIENT
Student Athlete NIL
Student Athlete NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) is an industry-leading agency of record dedicated to helping brands, universities, and student-athletes navigate the new era of Name, Image and Likeness.
Founded two years ago in Virginia, the company is now the biggest in its field, specializing in facilitating NIL transactions between fans, donors, corporations, and student-athletes through the Student Athlete Empowerment ("SAE") program. SANIL runs approximately thirty collectives, and that number is expected to triple by the end of the year.
Founded two years ago in Virginia, the company is now the biggest in its field, specializing in facilitating NIL transactions between fans, donors, corporations, and student-athletes through the Student Athlete Empowerment ("SAE") program. SANIL runs approximately thirty collectives, and that number is expected to triple by the end of the year.
Project Length
- July 2023 — [ongoing]
Services
- Salesforce Implementation
- Consulting
- Data Migration
- Salesforce Development
Video Testimonial
Challenges
For the first few years of SANIL's existence, the company utilized QuickBooks and spreadsheets to track business conducted with student athletes and thousands of contracts accompanied by deliverables (like creating content, attending meetings, etc.).
Due to the overwhelming amount of documents, the team needed a solution that would streamline their business processes.
The company was growing fast, so Salesforce was chosen as the most appropriate solution to support SANIL's scalability. The system was supposed to serve both as a management system for internal users as well as a tool for tracking deliverables and managing relationships with sponsors and donors.
Solution
The project was divided into three main phases according to the business goals:
1. Salesforce as a CRM solution that would allow internal users and account managers to create records of student athletes and manage and track contracts with the associated deliverables.
2. A portal for student athletes so that they can log into Salesforce and maintain their information (address, email, tax, and bank account information) to receive payments. It also had to allow the student athlete to login and upload the deliverables.
3. Sales management system where new business could be tracked, such as new deals and opportunities.
Scope and Process
After defining the scope of the project, SANIL got in touch with five companies to receive their vision and proposals, went through the interview process with all of them, and ended up selecting Twistellar.
- Rick KanemasuChief Technology Officer at SANILI had a big deck that had all the business requirements in it. The deck was about 50 pages long, and Twistellar went through every line and documented what they could or couldn't do; they were very detailed. And you could tell that they actually understood the requirements.
During the process, we refined the requirements. Twistellar brought a lot of knowledge and experience which helped shape the solution and our processes.
The project started with the discovery and design phases. During the design sessions, Twistellar's team was working on the data model, configuring the sandbox based on it, and doing the wireframes for what the portal would look like.
After the demos and final adjustments, everything was configured in the sandbox, and the client started doing UAT. Six groups were involved in the UAT process, receiving training and giving feedback that was used to add fixes and changes to the configurations. After having finished UAT, the data was migrated into the system.
Results
The company has grown from two employees a year ago to over twenty today and is trying to triple the size of the collectives by the end of the year. And Salesforce was configured in the right way to support this growth.
Outcomes and implemented solutions:
- Salesforce Portal (Experience Cloud) for student-athletes. This portal serves as a centralized platform designed to cater specifically to the needs of student athletes, offering a range of features and functionalities to streamline their interactions and transactions with SANIL.
- Salesforce solution for Account Managers, which helps them streamline their sales pipeline, communication, and management processes.
- Payment integration through a NodeJS middleware connection with the SFTP server, which allows tracking of financial operations.
- Functionality to send branded emails using Email Templates in Salesforce.
- Improved operational management, including notifications for overdue deliverables for student-athletes, Activity History tracking, and established processes for Account Managers to automatically approve deliverables of student-athletes they're managing.
- Data Migration of more than 10 000 records from a historical database into Salesforce preserving all relation and data consistency.
Testimonial
- Rick KanemasuChief Technology Officer at SANILWe used Twistellar to implement Salesforce at our company. It was a very successful project, and Twistellar is one of the best consulting firms I've ever worked with.
They are very flexible, professional, they always delivered on time, they always did what they said they were going to do, and I have a huge amount of respect and gratitude for all the work that they did for us.