Project Overview

A leading online education platform delivers professional certifications, courses, and workshops to students and organizations globally. To support rapid growth and streamline student acquisition, enrollment, and financial tracking, the organization implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud and Account Engagement (Pardot) along with Salesforce Flow, Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), and integrations with its website, payment platforms, accounting systems, and learning platforms.

Business Challenges

Lead Capture & Marketing Attribution

 

  • Leads were generated from multiple sources – Self-enrollment via the website by individual students & Account Engagement (Pardot) forms for course brochure downloads.
  • Manual lead qualification and inconsistent attribution made it difficult to measure marketing effectiveness.
  • Limited visibility into the lead-to-enrollment conversion journey.

 

Enrolment & Opportunity Management

Student enrollment involved manual steps to:

 

  • Convert Leads
  • Create Opportunities
  • Associate students with courses and intakes
  • No standardized enrollment process across certifications, nano courses, and workshops.

 

Payments & Financial Tracking

 

  • Payments were processed externally using Stripe, with limited synchronization back to Salesforce.
  • Accounting data was managed in Xero, requiring manual reconciliation.
  • No unified view of student payments, invoices, and enrollment status across systems.

 

Course & Workshop Enrollment Complexity

 

  • Different enrollment paths existed for: B2B, B2C
  • Nano course enrollments occurred in an external learning platform (Coursebox), with no real-time synchronization to Salesforce.

 

Operational Visibility & Reporting

Limited reporting on:

 

  • Enrollments by course type
  • Revenue per program
  • Marketing campaign ROI
  • Teams lacked a single source of truth for tracking the student lifecycle.

 

Solution Approach

A scalable Salesforce-based solution was designed using standard Salesforce and Account Engagement capabilities, enhanced with Salesforce Flows, integrations, and custom components.

Lead Capture & Marketing Automation (Account Engagement)

Integrated the public website with Salesforce to:

 

  • Capture self-enrolled leads directly into Salesforce
  • Sync Account Engagement (Pardot) forms for brochure downloads into Salesforce Leads

 

Enabled sales and marketing teams to track:

 

  • Lead engagement and activity
  • Conversion paths from inquiry to enrollment

 

Automated Student Enrollment Using Salesforce Flow

 

  • Built screen-based Flows to Enroll students by automatically associating them with the correct course and intake.
  • Reduced manual effort and ensured consistent enrollment processing.

 

Payments & Accounting Integrations

Stripe Integration

 

  • Integrated Stripe to Securely capture online payments and Synchronize payment status back to Salesforce Opportunities.
  • Automatically updated payment completion status and enrollment confirmation.

 

Xero Integration

 

  • Integrated Salesforce with Xero to synchronize Accounts and Contacts and automatically create and track Invoices.
  • Provided finance teams with accurate, near real-time accounting data while maintaining Salesforce as the system of engagement.

 

Custom Workshop Enrollment Component

 

  • Developed a custom Lightning Web Component (LWC) to enroll students into workshops directly from Salesforce.
  • Manage limited seats, session dates, and workshop-specific pricing.
  • Enabled administrators and operations teams to manage workshop enrollments efficiently without manual data entry.

 

Nano Course Enrollment via Coursebox & Zapier

 

  • Integrated Salesforce with Coursebox using Zapier to capture nano course enrollments from the learning platform.
  • Automatically create or update accounts, contacts, opportunities and enrollments.
  • Maintained existing Stripe and Xero integrations to ensure consistent payment and invoicing processes.

 

Reporting, Dashboards & Operational Visibility

 

  • Built Salesforce reports and dashboards to track Enrollments by course, program, and intake, revenue by product type, marketing performance and conversion rates.
  • Enabled leadership teams with real-time, actionable insights.

 

Results & Business Impact

 

  • Increased Enrollment Efficiency – Automated lead-to-enrollment workflows significantly reduced manual processing time and faster student onboarding and enrollment confirmation.
  • Improved Marketing & Sales Alignment – Clear attribution from Account Engagement campaigns to enrollments and improved visibility into high-performing marketing channels and ROI.
  • Financial Accuracy & Transparency – Seamless Stripe and Xero integrations eliminated manual reconciliation and real-time visibility into payments and invoice status.
  • Scalable Enrollment Architecture – Standardized enrollment flows across certifications, nano courses, and workshops and easily extensible to support new programs and learning platforms.
  • Enhanced Data Quality & Reporting – Salesforce established as the single source of truth for students, enrollments and revenue and leadership gained actionable insights through dashboards and reports.

 

Conclusion

This Salesforce implementation transformed the online education platform’s student acquisition and enrollment operations into a fully automated, scalable, and data-driven process. By combining Sales Cloud, Account Engagement, Salesforce Flow, Stripe, Xero, Zapier, and custom Lightning components, the organization streamlined marketing, sales, finance, and learning platform integrations. The solution reduced operational overhead, improved the student experience, strengthened financial governance, and created a future-ready foundation to support continued growth in online education.