In the spring of 2023, TDigital founder Moyez Thanawalla began teaching a graduate-level course in Corporate Management using CRM systems at the University of Texas at Dallas. Salesforce was the tool of choice. Both sections filled before the semester began.
Not your typical admin class.
This course is fundamentally different from a standard Salesforce admin training. While many admin skills are woven throughout, the focus is on something broader: preparing tomorrow’s business leaders to understand and apply the tools they will actually need in the field. The curriculum is built around intense business processes, case studies, and Socratic interaction. The pace is fast by design.
UTD’s MIS students arrive with strong theoretical foundations and sharp critical thinking skills. Moyez’s course takes those existing capabilities and pushes students to go the final mile: translating their solutions into implementable, concrete plans within a real computing platform. The language of CRM becomes the shared vocabulary that allows complex ideas to move from discussion to execution.
How a typical class session works.
Each class is structured as a mini business challenge. Students arrive having already studied that day’s mechanics, most often using Salesforce’s Trailhead learning system. The day’s challenge might be as straightforward as designing a database architecture to capture customer data, or as complex as managing sales territories across multiple divisions of a large enterprise. Complexity increases steadily as the semester progresses.
The first half of each session is devoted to a business case study that presents a real-world problem. What follows is a lively, spirited debate. Moyez is deliberate about the rules of that debate.
“I encourage the students to NOT seek a solution during this discussion, but to use the new language of CRM. This takes extreme discipline because the human tendency is to simultaneously try to solve the challenge while we are discussing the problem.” — Moyez Thanawalla
Finding the simplest solution that fits.
When the class moves into building a solution, every student’s approach is discussed openly. Moyez calls this the “if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail” conversation. Students who arrived ready to build custom objects and complex processes often discover that an out-of-the-box Salesforce capability already solves the problem cleanly. The discipline of finding the simplest solution that actually fits is one of the most practical skills the course instills.
This layered, Socratic approach produces something rare: graduates who can think in CRM natively, communicate complex requirements with precision, and arrive at executable plans without getting lost in unnecessary complexity.
The goal is not to produce technicians. It is to produce leaders who can build.
What industry recruiters are finding.
Students leave the course feeling genuinely empowered. Industry recruiters are noticing. Graduates who combine traditional management foundations with real CRM proficiency are entering the workforce ready and enthusiastic to take on real-world challenges at scale from their first day on the job.
At a time when many are questioning the value of a post-graduate management degree, the students coming out of this program are answering that question with confidence. The combination of foundational business knowledge and hands-on CRM fluency is exactly what modern enterprises are looking for in their next generation of leaders.
The same methodology that powers this graduate curriculum is at the core of how TDigital approaches every client engagement. If your team needs to think more strategically about CRM, or if you are ready to build solutions that actually match your business complexity, we are ready to help.
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