Five questions to ask about your enrollment CRM

There are many reasons enrollment leaders keep a CRM longer than they otherwise might. A CRM transition can be highly disruptive, especially when the current system is tied to communications, application management, reporting, and workflows. But my recent conversations with VPEMs reveal that more institutions are starting to evaluate if a CRM switch is in their best interest. 

EAB’s benchmarking survey of 180+ enrollment teams found that 17% of institutions adopted a new CRM system in 2024-25. And this move isn’t unique to higher education. 22% of marketing leaders across all industries reported they replaced a marketing CRM in 2024, and nearly two-thirds of the replaced platforms had been in place for five years or less. In other words, organizations are willing to accept the switching cost of moving to a new CRM if the current version is not meeting their needs.

Here are five questions to ask yourself if you are considering a CRM change.

1. Are you designing your processes around your CRM?

Many enrollment teams selected their current CRM under a very different set of conditions, and it was likely the best fit at the time. But over time, student needs change, teams turn over, and expectations rise. What may remain is a system that technically works, but only if staff are willing to build their processes around it. If this is the case at your institution, you may recognize some of these common workarounds:

• Counselors maintain a separate spreadsheet to manage outreach and follow-up
• Before every email send, staff manually build suppression lists so admitted students do not get “complete your application” reminders
• Leadership views funnel metrics from an Excel or Power BI shadow dashboard because no one fully trusts the CRM reports

These workarounds are not only inconvenient, but inefficient and costly to maintain. Our benchmarking survey revealed that enrollment teams have between 1.1 and 2 CRM Specialist FTEs, or about 5% to 8% of total admissions staffing depending on institution size. That is meaningful capacity and spend. Your team should move beyond asking whether your CRM still functions and evaluate whether it is still producing the results you need and worth the time your staff spend on it. 

2. What does it really cost to stay put?

Many enrollment teams are being asked to hit bigger goals without additional staff. In this kind of environment, the annual cost of a CRM deserves more scrutiny than it often gets. That scrutiny should start with annual fees, but it should not end there. Implementation costs, license fees, hidden customization fees, consultant fees, or prices that increase each year can make platforms that once seemed cost-effective too expensive today. 

While some systems cost more because of the contract, others cost more because of the people required to keep them running. The “CRM Captain” is no longer a small side role. Recent higher education job postings for these CRM-focused roles range from roughly $70K to $150K+. In other words, the person keeping the CRM functioning may sit squarely in a director-level pay band. 

That is where total cost becomes more important than sticker price. It includes dedicated FTEs, consultant time when your team cannot make a change on its own, staff hours spent maintaining workarounds, and the opportunity cost of moving slowly when students expect quick answers and leaders need fast, trustworthy data. This is how even a lower-cost system can still be expensive, absorbing scarce technical talent and leaving your team building manual processes outside the platform. 

3. Does your CRM empower your current enrollment goals, strategies, and tactics?

In EAB’s benchmarking survey, 99% of VPEMs reported overseeing admissions, 84% oversaw financial aid, 79% oversaw recruitment marketing, and 78% oversaw enrollment analytics. Many also are responsible for recruiting student populations beyond traditional first-year students and transfers, including adult learners, graduate students, international students, and non-degree students. And some have student success and retention in their portfolio as well.

That matters because many institutions are no longer operating with a narrow admissions-only recruitment model. The enrollment office is often more integrated, more cross-functional, and more responsible for multiple student populations than it was a few years ago. If your CRM was built for a simpler structure, it may not be a good fit for the operation today. 

4. Would you choose this vendor relationship again today?

Choosing a CRM also means you’re signing up for a long-term provider relationship. 70% of institutions manage their admissions CRM fully in-house, so if your vendor relationship is weak, inconsistent, or non-existent, a whole host of pain points can emerge for your team:

• Support tickets vanish until your team has already invented its own workaround
• Integration problems take weeks to fix while students keep getting the wrong messages
• Training is limited or generic, so one power user becomes the unofficial trainer for the entire office—creating a major gap if this individual leaves
• Roadmap answers remain vague so leaders never know whether a product issue will be fixed

In EDUCAUSE’s 2024 QuickPoll on solution provider partnerships, the qualities respondents most often said were missing in provider relationships were transparency and communication, commitment to integration and interoperability, and higher education expertise.

It may be instructive to ask yourself the question plainly: if you were making the decision again today, would you choose this vendor again?

5. If you decide to change, are you clear on what a better-fit CRM needs to do?

Enrollment leaders are juggling a wide range of priorities, not just enrolling enough students, but increasing net tuition revenue, enrolling more students with the right profile, adopting AI, and more. In this environment, enrollment teams need to ask themselves whether their next CRM can help them execute the right strategies and whether it has the right features to do so.

That is why I encourage leaders to get specific before they get deep into vendor evaluations. What, exactly, would a better-fit CRM need to do compared to their current one? Reduce reliance on workaround processes? Give marketing and admissions a more connected view of the funnel? Better support transfer, adult, or graduate recruitment? Make it easier for nontechnical users to launch campaigns or adjust workflows? Expand staff capacity through AI and automations? Provide clearer visibility into yield, aid strategy, or application progress?

In conclusion

A CRM review will not always end in a migration. Some institutions will conclude that their current platform is still the best fit. But if your honest answer to several of the questions in this blog post is “not really” or “only with a workaround,” that is useful information. In a market where more organizations are willing to revisit critical systems earlier than they once did, the bigger risk may not be change itself. It may be assuming that familiar still means right.

Erica Johnson

Senior Consultant and Principal

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