Top tips for Training Providers using HubSpot CRM

Training providers are embracing the power of HubSpot's CRM, Marketing and Sales tools to align teams and supercharge their growth, here are my top tips for providers looking to get the most out of HubSpot.

Let's start with the basics:

What is a 'Training Provider'?

There are a wide range of providers out there across all sectors and niches! We work with lots of apprenticeship and workplace learning providers, as well as online training providers and industry providers. For this blog article I would simply define a Training Provider as any company whose core focus is to provide training.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, improve sales (or admissions) enablement, boost ROI and optimise your inbound marketing strategy to generate more qualified leads. It includes a wide range of powerful tools that enable organisations to implement an inbound approach to marketing, improve internal processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, all in one user-friendly platform.

How are training providers using HubSpot?

From building out end-to-end deal pipelines to track prospective learner journeys, to prospecting to build new employer relationships, there are a wide range of tools perfect for sales and marketing teams.

For the training providers we work with, attracting and engaging with employers and learners is a huge priority but they typically struggle with the limited functionality of their existing systems that are designed more for learner management and less for communication and marketing. Often training providers are operating in a competitive landscape and funding relies on effective engagement with the companies they serve, as well as with the learners they attract to their programmes - and need to retain.

HubSpot offers training providers an all-in-one customer relationship management solution that easily handles relationships with employers, learners, and indeed any other stakeholders.

Here are our top 5 tips for training providers using HubSpot:

1) Use the Target Accounts features

'Target Accounts Home' is the perfect place for monitoring your sales outreach and looking at the latest updates from HubSpot across all of the companies you are targeting, for training providers this is where you can see all of the employers you are engaged with are actively selling to.

Having one central place to monitor who is in regular contact, who has deals in the pipeline, and who is lacking key buying roles like 'decision maker', is very popular with sales and account managers.

Target accounts home

2) Embrace the marketing tools

Marketing and Sales alignment should be top priority for all organisations, and is especially important for training providers who have both B2B marketing (attracting and engaging employers) and B2C marketing (attracting and engaging learners).

Using the marketing tools in HubSpot effectively will enable your teams to attract more of the right people to your brand, communicate with them effectively and ultimately drive more sales. HubSpot's marketing tools cover all of your main channels, so make sure you are making the most of them, key tools you should be using include:

Social media scheduling - even better if your posts are linked to Campaigns in HubSpot
Marketing emails - even better if you are embracing automation and smart (dynamic) content in your emails, and are running A/B tests.
Ads - ensure that all of your incoming leads from LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and Google ads are coming straight into your CRM.
Forms - ensure that all of your web forms are pulling data directly into HubSpot, reducing manual data input and increasing visibility of your prospect's website activity. Even better if you are using pop-up forms to convert leads!
Workflows - marketing automation is crucial for busy teams, from nurturing your prospects with keep warm email or WhatsApp campaigns, to alerting sales when a new lead is generated. The possibilities with workflows in HubSpot are endless.
Campaigns - track the performance of all of your marketing assets and report on the impact of your efforts, make the most of the ROI insights and attribution reporting features!
Landing pages and blog tools- even better if you have mapped out and built persona-specific conversion paths
SEO tools - build your authority in search with tools that help you plan your SEO strategy, optimise your content, and measure ROI.

3) Use deals and pipeline automation effectively

Training providers often have complex or long journeys to track, from building a relationship with an employer and starting employer checks, to recruiting for a vacancy, then onboarding a learner and getting various approvals. By using HubSpot deal pipelines and deal automation, teams can ensure no opportunities slip through the net, and can benefit from best-in-class reporting.

Training Provider deal pipeline

4) Keep data hygiene front of mind

By far the biggest challenge we come across in our customer's HubSpot accounts is data hygiene, often this is left as an afterthought and after a few years in a busy CRM data can become messy and make reporting challenging.

Clean data is one of my favorite things! And with a small amount of effort, and clever use of HubSpot automation tools it is easy to keep your data squeaky clean. We recommend designating someone as your Data Hygiene Champion and allocating them at least a few hours each month to focus on data cleaning projects. When it comes to data hygiene, prevention of messy data is cheaper than the cure, so being proactive is key and having good automation, consistency of forms, and making certain fields mandatory on internal forms is important.

A good starting point for Training Providers is to identify which properties to focus on, and set some targets on how you want that data to look, then once you have a Data Hygiene Champion in place, start with a data hygiene dashboard which will help you review where you are currently and to review your progress in cleaning up your data.

And remember, CRM hygiene is everyone's responsibility!

Deal data hygiene dashboard example

Data hygiene example

5) Map out your journeys and review this yearly

When faced with a new CRM it can be daunting to know where to start and we always advise mapping out your core customer journeys as a starting point, in particular any key conversion points. For a Training Provider, this may be the journey from website visitor to lead, from lead to event attendee, from sales prospect to customer or from prospective learner to enrolled on a programme.

Start off with mapping the fundamental elements, such as how the data gets into the CRM, which fields it populates and what happens next, we recommend doing this in a visual flowchart mapping tool such as LucidChart.

Example:

Employer contact completes 'register interest' form on website > create contact in HubSpot with these properties [name, email, phone, job title, sector and company name] > rotate lead to a sales owner based on their sector.

Then build this out further by adding in key emails, tasks for team members and then use this to build out your workflows and other assets within HubSpot.

Training provider example sales lucid chart

In summary...

HubSpot offers huge potential for Training Providers, implemented successfully it can give you the tools you need for aligning your marketing and sales teams, prospecting for new business, tracking all of your relationships and communications, marketing effectively, managing your sales opportunities, reducing manual tasks and reporting on all aspects of your marketing, sales and recruitment efforts.

If you want to learn more, please do book a tailored demo with us, or if you are already using HubSpot, we can help you get the most from the tools. Contact us here.