Training provider CRM solutions - what about Hubspot?

  in  Training Management Systems

A small training company needs a strong marketing strategy to connect with a target audience and grow the business. You want to track enquiries from potential clients, run email campaigns to promote courses and make data-driven decisions when planning a new course offer. HubSpot can help you achieve that. It is a powerful online customer relationship management (CRM) platform with low cost options that puts it within reach of even the smallest training provider.

HubSpot is actually more than just one application. It’s a suite of products that can work independently or together. You can start with one product in the HubSpot family and then add others later as your business grows.

The products in the HubSpot family are:

  1. Marketing Hub - email marketing, landing pages, online ads, blogs etc.
  2. Sales Hub - contact management & CRM, pipeline management, deals and quotes.
  3. Service Hub - issue & ticket management, knowledge base, helpdesk automation.
  4. CMS Hub - content web pages, website development and management.
  5. Operations Hub - programmable automation, data sync, data curation, and data quality tools.

We’re going to try to answer some of the questions you might have about HubSpot - how it works and the benefits it could bring to your training company.

What exactly is customer relationship management (CRM) and how does it work in HubSpot?

Customer relationship management (CRM) means using a system (usually software) to track information about interactions between your company and your customers (and potential customers).

You can do CRM with spreadsheets - that’s how a lot of small companies start - but you’ll get to a point where you’re struggling with data stored in multiple spreadsheets. Data about contacts - learners and client organisations - becomes inaccurate, hard to search and difficult to keep up to date.

CRM is a core capability of the HubSpot Sales Hub. With the Sales Hub you can build a single, integrated database of information about contacts and customers that will underpin email campaigns, sales lead follow up, quotes and deals. You can see contact history, identify contacts who are a good fit for new campaigns and keep an up-to-date record as a new contact moves through the sales pipeline from initial contact to new customer.

Can I use HubSpot to send out emails to organisations that might be interested in my courses?

Yes. Email marketing is another core feature of Hubspot. With tools in the Marketing Hub you can create templates, design different kinds of emails and then schedule them to go out at different times. And of course, you can then track and save data about interactions when people click on the links in your emails.

What are landing pages? How can they help me enrol more learners into my courses?

Landing pages are another feature in the Marketing Hub. They are often associated with email marketing campaigns. You send out the emails and the recipients can click on a link that takes them to a dedicated, standalone web page. What you really want people to do next is click on a call-to-action in the webpage - “Find Out More”, “Enrol Now’. You might ask them to fill out a form in return for a discount code or a white paper.

With HubSpot you can create Landing Pages and link them to your emails. HubSpot’s tools make it easy to create a more polished, sophisticated marketing campaign.

And here is a key point - you (or your marketing team) can create the landing pages as and when you need them. That can be a lot simpler and quicker than adding new temporary pages to your company website each time you want to run a short email marketing campaign.

What about data, reporting and analytics? Can I use HubSpot to find useful insights in all that data I collect?

Each product in the HubSpot family includes reporting. It varies from product to product. For example, in the Marketing Hub, you get Landing Page reporting in the Starter tier ($45/month). More sophisticated custom reporting comes into the Marketing Hub Professional Tier at $800/month. In the Sales Hub on the other hand, there are reporting dashboards included in the free tier.

How easy is it to get help with HubSpot?

A HubSpot strength is the depth and breadth of the online support. There’s a big collection of tutorials, resources and other support on the HubSpot website.

HubSpot is a well established online platform (you don’t have to use everything at once) and it is definitely a good thing that you can tap into various online communities, webinars and other users when you need help. Tools are well documented and there are lots of YouTube videos that show you how to get maximum value from your HubSpot setup.

What does HubSpot cost?

Each product in the HubSpot family has a free starter tier. The Premium Editions are where you find the full suite of tools. Pricing depends on exactly which Premium Edition you use and also the number of users. For example the Professional Edition is almost £5k a year (at time of writing). That gets you 5 paid users. 10 users and you’re up to almost £10k a year.

It’s certainly possible to There are other pricing configurations. For example, the Enterprise CRM Suite for 10 users is almost £50k per year.

HubSpot has a handy price calculator that we definitely recommend you play around with to get an idea of how costs can change if you add in more products and users as your training business grows.

https://www.hubspot.com/pricing/bundle

Conclusion

HubSpot could be a good solution for a small training company that wants to improve its marketing. HubSpot’s powerful marketing tools and features can help you to reach your target audience, grow your business, and achieve better results.


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