YourTutor takes the hassle out of accessing quality private instruction. It not only selects qualified and charismatic tutors, but also makes them available to students via an intuitive online platform for an affordable monthly fee. Students can also use the ‘Check Mate’service to receive individual feedback on essays and papers within 24 hours

Michael Larsen joined YourTutor as its COO in January 2014 and his first impressions of the company were extremely positive.

It quickly became clear to Larsen that the company’s growth was being restricted by several challenges. The company was using a simple CRM system that made it difficult to capture information about customers and scan the market for promising new opportunities.  

Larsen hoped that, by moving to a more sophisticated CRM system, YourTutor might understand the market better and accelerate opportunities more efficiently through the sales pipeline. He began looking for a new CRM solution that would help YourTutor achieve its growth goals.

"We looked into several alternative CRM products but, while some of them might have improved upon our pre-existing system, only Salesforce promised the sort of great leap forward we were after," he says.

YourTutor migrated its customer database to Salesforce Sales Cloud. The process took less than three weeks, with the YourTutor team carefully scrubbing legacy data before transitioning it to the new system.

According to Larsen, Salesforce transformed the company almost immediately. "We were suddenly able to see exactly where we stood in terms of sales," he says. "Our sales pipeline, our current customer profiles, our new opportunities – all these things, which we’d been managing with a certain vagueness, became easily comprehensible overnight."

As a result, sales staff were able to begin pursuing opportunities more strategically. "We use Salesforce to manage our institutional clients," says Larsen. "We sell the products to schools and universities that make it freely available to students." With Salesforce, YourTutor is able to develop an ‘ideal’ customer profile and prioritise the new opportunities that most closely match it.

"This approach has had a dramatic impact on our sales performance," says Larsen. "During the second half of 2014, we generated more new business than during the previous 18 months.

YourTutor is currently collaborating with the University of Western Sydney on a study that will quantify the academic impact of its virtual classrooms. The results aren’t yet available, but the company knows this much from internal surveys: 92 percent of YourTutor students feel more confident of their academic strengths after using the service. And 91 percent would happily recommend the service to their friends. 

With tutors and students located across the country, Larsen is frequently on the road. "The Salesforce1 mobile app has become indispensable," he says. "It doesn’t matter if I’m in a taxicab or an airport lounge – I can access the Salesforce dashboards in seconds."

"It’s really allowed us to become more mobile and proactive," says Larsen. "And the results speak for themselves – over the past 12 months, our business has grown by almost 40 percent."