Building a business from a tropical paradise is a fantasy many entertain but few actually live. But this is the reality of GeniusU founder and serial entrepreneur Roger Hamilton, who runs the world’s most successful entrepreneur education platform from his adopted home, Bali.

So what’s the secret to building a successful company that inspires and educates hundreds-of-thousands of budding entrepreneurs around the globe? Create a new conceptual space (in his case, personalised wealth creation) and deliver it on a global scale.

However, to GeniusU, that’s only half the story. “You’ve got to design customer journeys in a very intelligent way to deliver personalised services. And you’ve got to automate as much as possible in the background,” according General Manager & CMO Suraj Naik.

And that’s where Salesforce delivers.

When Naik took charge of the technology in 2008, customers were flocking to new online services and events. In 2015 things got really crazy when GeniusU launched Genius Test – an app designed to help people discover their special talent. When it launched on Facebook, 10,000 people took the test in the first month alone.

Suddenly GeniusU had 150,000 customers on its hands and new customers were signing up at a rate of 10,000 a week. The sheer scale of GeniusU’s success threatened to blow its systems apart.

“It was clear our CRM couldn’t cope with the volume of data or provide useful reporting tools,” said Naik. “So we decided to work with the number one provider in the category – Salesforce. Imagine sketching a design for your business on a whiteboard. With Salesforce we designed a system that worked for our business and scaled as business boomed.”

Naik got down to work with Sales Cloud, migrating the customer database and creating customer profiles based on information captured from online testing. Immediately the company’s salespeople were geared up to chase leads and opportunities, working with flags and triggers to manage customers, promote the right combination learning services, and close deals.

It was a watershed moment that laid the foundations for GeniusU’s core proposition – personalised wealth creation.

Adding Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder to the mix introduced targeted email promotion and broader campaign management that takes customers on a one-to-one journey across channels and devices, through every phase of the marketing lifecycle.

Rich customer data drives smarter segmentation and targeting that pinpoints specific customer interests and preferences, right down to individual styles of learning.

“That’s the beauty of Journey Builder – we design customer journeys in a very intelligent way to gauge individual responses, tweaking things as we go,” said Naik.