How to get your team to embrace a new CRM

There are lots of ways that a CRM can help education organisations, from streamlining your processes, improving the collaboration between marketing and admissions, improving your insights and reporting - and more.

Across sectors, CRM is one of the most popular tools for sales and is one of the best ways to create personalised communications, to improve customer loyalty and get better results from your marketing efforts.

Using a dedicated CRM in education can be a big change for marketing and admissions teams, here are some ways you can encourage your organisation to embrace a new way of working:

Explain the CRM's value

Focus on the main problems that a CRM will solve for your team to encourage long-term adoption of the new system. Benefits may include:

• Tracking prospective student/parent interaction in one location 
• Storing notes about prospects that your team members can refer to and update
• Visualising admissions forecasts and marketing conversion metrics
• Streamlining communication and automating some of your most time consuming
  processes
• Aligning your marketing and admissions teams - everyone on one system working to the same goals

Choose the best CRM to suit your requirements

Find the best CRM to help your school, college or university meet your goals, and that also offers the best user experience. There is nothing worse than a new system that is overcomplicated!

We recommend that you look for a CRM that integrates with your organisation's other software (email, social, video conferencing/meeting, calendar, digital advertising...). As a minimum your CRM should be able to automatically log interactions so your team do not have to manually add each email, it should be customisable to suit your needs, be simple to navigate and have reporting capabilities to make reporting and data analysis as simple as possible.

Provide comprehensive training

The best way to ensure your marketing and admissions teams use your new CRM is to provide in-depth training from an expert, someone familiar with implementing the software in your sector. 

If you opt for in-person training, make sure everyone who needs to be involved can keep their diary clear and prioritise their attendance. If you choose remote/video training delivery, we recommend sharing a schedule to your team with the series of sessions visible to all with an overview of each session's agenda.

Whilst not all elements of CRM training will be relevant to all individuals, it can be helpful to encourage everyone to attend as many sessions as possible. Incorporate CRM usage and training into your team's professional development plans and appraisals.

Encourage wider team collaboration

Your CRM is not just a tool useful for marketing and admissions teams, by bringing wider teams onboard you can make the data in your new software even more valuable.

It can be a good idea to encourage front-desk admin teams to get involved, also anyone who may be interested in incoming student data or communicating as part of the admissions journey - Subject Leads, Tutors, and Heads of Years are popular choices.

Get your whole leadership team onboard

Management teams using the CRM has a number of benefits, it demonstrates the importance of the software for your organisation's success. Having senior leaders actively promoting the CRM will help to encourage adoption from the wider staff community.

Senior leaders will also gain a much more detailed insight into prospect data by using the CRM, they will be able to easily see high-level reports and more granular reports, for example that look at conversion rates at each stage of your admissions journey.

Find out more about HubSpot for Education.

Find out more about HubSpot CRM with an education-specific demo for your school college or university, book now: