HubSpot for Teaching School Hubs – 5 Reasons to Power Up with a CRM

The physical and digital environments are more connected now than ever. Technology and the digital space are a core part of our daily lives, supporting various aspects of our day-to-day activities. And it is also a powerful and critical tool for any company wishing to grow, connect with prospects or customers and provide a seamless, efficient and easy experience for all its clients. 

Thus, CRMs have become a critical and beloved tool for many organisations and industries, but why are CRMs so beloved by companies? And how would HubSpot’s lead CRM help elevate teaching school hubs (TSH's)? Well then, this is the question we’ll explore in this blog!

Why are teaching school hubs employing HubSpot’s CRM?

Teaching school hubs frustrated with the manual, spreadsheet-based processes, and how education-focused tools are limited and disconnected to their highly specific needs. Teaching school hubs are rapidly growing, and demand for training is increasing. THS's need to  showcase their services to attract leads from the hub’s area but also from outside its area, as well as manage an increasing stream of personal and course data. Having the customer journey across multiple systems or on simple spreadsheets fails to put the leads at the heart of the journey and makes it hard to report on success of marketing efforts, and makes monitoring and reporting on KPIs difficult.

HubSpot offers an all-in-one solution with world-class marketing, sales and service features, course application pipeline management and highly sophisticated tools for reporting, communication, automation and AI. HubSpot is able to bring all of your efforts into one place, and for aspects of the journey that may sit separately (website or Slack or Google Sheets for example) these can be connected via API integrations seamlessly. There are currently 1500 off-the-shelf (plug in and play) integrations available and this list grows by the day.

Here are 5 reasons why teaching school hubs are using HubSpot’s CRM to power-up their services

One of the most common pain points of Teaching School Hubs is communicating with all the teachers who are completing various training courses. Regardless if it is a confirmation email after they’ve registered for a course, a reminder for an upcoming module or conference they need to attend or something else, the CRM can make the task of prepping, sending and tracking emails an absolute breeze.

HubSpot’s CRM and marketing tools allow you to craft personalised and beautifully branded emails that you can send to many recipients, without needing to list their email every time. Do you need to tell 100 teachers that their conference is coming up soon? Well, now you will not need to send an email 100 times or list 100 people on an email, all you need to do is create your email, create a list of people who should receive that email and send or schedule it! Even better, by using workflows you can automate all your core course-related communication! Has someone filled in a registration form? Now you have a beautiful email that automatically gets sent to the recipient when they fill a form! Did a teacher complete the course and you wish to send an email saying that they qualified for the assessment? You can now have an automated workflow check their record and send off the correct email whenever they reached the assessment period!

Furthermore, you can also save templates for simple emails, or email someone directly from your CRM, making communication as hassle-free as possible. And even better, all the emails you send directly from the CRM – be it simple emails or branded ‘marketing’ emails – as well as those you log manually from your inbox will be logged for a person’s record. So if you ever need to see if someone received an email, or if you need to revisit a previous conversation, you do not need to search thousands of emails in your inbox anymore, you simply go to the school or the teacher’s record and see all of their emails.

Registering for courses is easy for visitors, as they just need to fill in a form and submit it, but the company needs to make sure the form is prepped, optimised, launched and updated whenever necessary, which makes it harder if you rely on another company to manage this for you.

With HubSpot, you have access to the most user-friendly form builder, which has simple drag-and-drop elements and a lot of available customisation that you can use to craft a beautifully branded form – that you can manage, share and update whenever you wish! Do you wish to feature the form directly on your website? No problem, HubSpot automatically generated embedding codes that you can give to the IT team to add to your external website! Do you want to change the header of the form each year? No worries, this can be done in just a couple of clicks!

But we have not even gotten to the best part yet! Quite often, teaching school hubs will have forms that should stay on their website at all times, such as an enquiry form or subscribing to a newsletter, but registration forms for NPQs or ECFs are usually only launched for a specific registration window. Well then, you would think that just means you need to add or remove the form from your website, no? Not really, there’s actually an easier way to do this!

With HubSpot’s CRM, you can also get access to website pages and landing pages, thus, if you wish to host your website with HubSpot, you can feature the registration forms on their own separate pages, and take them offline whenever the registration period ends. However, if your website is hosted externally and you do not wish to migrate it, then you can simply employ landing pages featuring your registration form to go online and offline in specific days and times.

Keeping track of your enquiries, applicants and attendees can usually be a hassle, especially if you’re doing this via spreadsheets. With HubSpot’s help, tracking customers’ journeys becomes an enjoyable and simple task, as each application becomes a deal that you can track and update – manually or automatically – on a pipeline.

When someone submits a registration form for an ECT training course, HubSpot can generate a deal for them featuring all the information provided, and place it on a ‘ECF Application’ pipeline. Via this pipeline, you can track when someone initially applies, and any other stages which you can customise to your needs: Application Received; DfE Verified; Place Offered; Place Accepted; Place Rejected; Contract Signed; ; Application Deferred; Application Withdrawn. Furthermore, you can also have ‘attendance’ pipelines, so once someone has completed their journey through an ‘application’ pipeline, they can be moved to an attendance pipeline and you can see what modules they are currently completing, track and mark attendance via properties, automatically calculate if someone qualifies for assessment and more!

Setting these pipelines and journeys up clears up your application processes, makes it easier to view new leads as they come in and greatly simplifies and reduces the amount of manual work needed to manage all the applications. This is one of the most powerful and key tools in HubSpot, but also a considerable building base for all TSHs, which is why it is critical to set it up correctly, and where we would step in to help you map out your needs and build your processes as correctly and personalised as possible.

Monitoring your clients and all the training your provide is great, but most teaching school hubs also have another significant focus: reporting. You will need to not only keep track of your own internal KPIs - from general marketing to sales or service KPIs – but you will also need to keep track and report on several DfE-issued KPIs. Well now you will not need to stress and build all these reports in spreadsheets every time – a time-consuming, stressful and irritating process at times – because HubSpot provides a powerful report-building tool for you to monitor and report on any CRM elements you may need.

Apart from being an immense improvement compared to using spreadsheets - making the process of generating, updating and tracking data a breeze – you can also generate detailed and polished reports using your already existing pipeline and property data. No more memorising formulas, testing layouts and trying to build reports within Excel, as HubSpot already has an incredible reporting tool which can pull data into various report styles: bar charts, tables, cross-data scatter plots etc. Not only can you easily log and track your applicants, but you can also report on how many are ECTs or ECMs, how many applicants are from ‘in are’ or ‘out of area’ schools, how many teachers have been assigned to each cohort or provider, to name just a few examples. As a simple rule: if you have a metric for it (pipeline, stage, property etc) then you can report on it!

So far you have a much more streamlined, simplified and user-friendly way of recording and managing your data, as well as a powerful tool to build high-quality detailed reports. But you can also use HubSpot to create external reports for your schools! A popular report for all TSH is the report which allows each school’s leads to monitor their teacher’s ECF courses attendance.

Instead of sending emails back and forth, and reporting attendance just once per term – which may mean action may be taken by schools later than preferred, if that is necessary – you can set up a table report which each school can access and monitor whenever they wish. HubSpot’s own reports are internal only, but the CRM has many incredible integrations, and one would allow you to set up attendance spreadsheets for each school, they would have their own external table spreadsheet/report, which would update in real time whenever you updated a teacher’s attendance, engagement concerns or notes. The school would only need the link to their individual table report, after which they have consistent access to the necessary data.

Furthermore, an issue that may come up for TSH is people missing their scheduled module conferences, training modules or other meetings. When teachers need to juggle and track their own school work, additional class preparation, grading assessments, personal life commitments and additional training, sometimes appointments may slip through the cracks. With HubSpot and its integrations’ help, you can help teachers keep track of all their training by preparing custom event files – personalised with each training, cohort or provider’s session information – and automatically add those to their calendar, greatly reducing the chance of them forgetting a session!

In conclusion:

HubSpot offers amazing tools and solutions, and incredible potential for teaching school hubs who are looking for smarter, streamlined and more aligned ways to work. If you would like to find out more, we would recommend reaching out to our team at hello@hubgem.co.uk

To find out more about all the HubSpot tools and how they can help your teaching school hub, please book a completely free Demo!