Empower your Education Sales with Digital Transformation Sales for Education

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so hello and welcome to Beyond The Hub where we talk about everything from sales to marketing to your business as a whole and today we're going a bit more Niche with the education industry so whether you're an online owner University or you're a multitrust Academy you'll want to stay and listen so today to help me dig into it a bit deeper is James Murphy principal inbound growth specialist at HubSpot who's got over seven years of experience helping educational businesses grow the HubSpot way so let's dive straight in James use spent countless hours talking to people in the education industry about digital transformation what are the challenges that people are facing right now hey Bridget how's it going nice to meet you and nice to be on the podcast thanks for inviting me along yeah I guess the first question you're asking me uh I think probably a prease two would be to say that the education space is a pretty broad Church there's a lot of diversity within it and I think probably each of those different areas has been facing different challenges uh Let's Take One For example maybe the online learning or adult development kind of professional development space it's been a lot of Acquisitions and mergers in there and I think one of the biggest challenges those organizations are facing is how to consolidate their teams and their operations in technology CRM being one of that one of them uh so that's something that I would speak to a lot of organizations about uh currently over the last say year or so I think Co kind of accelerated uh you know movers and shakers in that industry uh maybe more traditional red brick style uh education organizations your schools your further education colleges your higher education colleges I think a challenge that they're facing would be the kind of a there's a multitude of disperate you know very specific systems that these teams use and there is not one central place that can kind of give them that Central view of the student uh and while all of those tools are quite good at a very specific function they're not really designed to help uh provide a best-in-class customer experience or student experience that a lot of these organizations want to do so there are some of the challenges that uh my my clients my customers would would face the moment I like what you said there about um like a central view of the the student because that's what this is all about and I think you kind of touched on it there where um the systems are are built maybe for the people that are using them not for the end user and that's that's what they need to be focusing on is the student and and and that's the kind of end point right yeah in in a way you're correct I think a lot of them are if we think about say front office and back office probably a good way to explain it right so a lot of these systems that say let's just take a university or college use they're really good at what they do but they're backend operational systems they're when the student is enrolled how to schedule classes how to manage their grades and while that's absolutely fundamental important I think there's an awareness over the last number of years that there's a hell of a lot of stuff that goes on before that right uh potential students have a lot of choice it's a very considered decision to make an investment in your education especially you know let's take exec Ed you know it's a lot of money to do an NBA so there's an awareness that you know the business does not start at application it's actually happening a year or two before that and those operational systems while they're excellent what they do they are not cut out to be an nom channel uh nurturing uh alignment tool for your marketing recruitment admissions teams and that's where you know CRM that's where HubSpot comes in uh and really a big part of it is helping teams understand how to connect those systems and how to map their processes and kind of slim down the work that operational system does make keep doing what it needs to do from a kind of backend system but allow much more of that journey be managed and enhanced in a you know a modern easy to ous CRM such as HubSpot and I think we we can't really talk about Systems and Technology and the CRM without touching on AI so it's a big topic but what is the the the feeling in the education industry about its use um especially considering that digital maturity is a is a big issue in the sector yeah I was waiting for AI to come up right five minutes it has to come up yeah so look it's education is the same as any other industry I think that there's probably an acceptance that last year was the year of a I hype right and it was fantastic and we're all using chat PT with our families and it's great but I don't think that it's fair to say I know for a fact in the education industry hasn't really been absorbed uh in the workplace just yet now I believe that this year will be a change to that uh I would say fair that there probably is some maybe resistance uh to technology or developments in some sectors of the education space but I was at a workshop recently I was presenting to a to a uh an association of marketer marketeers that work in the UK College uh Network and uh I do think marketing would be the way in for AI in say education I think they'll be first to grab it and I was giving a demonstration of little plug for our tool campaign assistant uh but that's that went down really really well and I think that kind of speed to produce content for marketing teams by using AI will be probably the way in h and later on things like call transcription might be taken up by admissions a long way down the line but I think Mark Mar will will will leverage some of those tools just to give you an example of why I think that would be the way in think of a common um you know start of a recruitment funel for a college or an fe uh College might be an open dat campaign right and as part of that the marketeers that need to spin up a landing page they need to create it they need to put some content in uh they'll need to publish that online they might need to then create an email and send it to a segment of their database and then they might want to create a an ad campaign to promote the landing page for example so there's your bare bones of of a pretty you know standard campaign the campaign assistant that I demoed to this Association of uh marketeers uh involved just using our campaign assistant tool which has AI baked in you just tell the tool what you want to do what the team of the landing page is a little bit of blurb about what you want to do a couple of uh kind of you choose whether you want it to be a witty or humorous or confident tone and you pop in your call to action you press a button and while it then mocks up what that looks like and that's not exactly revolutionary because we were all using AI last year the pretty cool thing is with the next click of a button the a AI tool will map that into HubSpot and map it into a perfectly modulized uh landing page it'll create the email templates and then with a little bit of editing you've got a campaign up and going in in a matter of minutes half an hour an hour you can have a pretty pretty effective campaign whereas before it might take you a date do something like that so that's just one example of how I think education marketeers specifically will grab AI this year it's pretty exciting for them I love that and and as a marketer I obviously use those tools a lot and it saved me a lot of time but what I think as well is really interesting and I wonder if it's got an application to the education industry is the new um the forecasting AI so would that would the recruitment teams in the education industry do you do you see that making a dent there so being totally candid I probably see again it gets into the I suppose the specifics of the industry broadly I don't see a school or a college or university using predictive forecasting for student recruitment anytime soon what I what I do see is maybe at the top end of Executive Education where there is really a weighted kind of uh very clear uh uh value to the course that they're managing through and and recruitment Journey that might be something that would leverage it but the other side of the industry your e-learning company your your online company where it's much more e-commerce e uh they would definitely have applications for it and yeah I could see that being uh be being a being an exciting uh development for those type of works so I guess so ai's been the big conversation the last year but let's look back a little bit further how have conversations changed I know you mentioned already covid and that's probably going to that's going to be another big one even though it's 3 years later but has it remained static what priorities have changed what kind of goals have changed yeah that's a good question uh I think if I think back of it maybe book ending maybe let's just take five years ago right compared to now I think five years ago again the overwhelming majority of my conversations were with marketing teams I think that probably goes into the maturity of our product we were definitely marketing first six seven years ago where we're CRM first now uh marketeers when I speak with him what the Holy Grail was the phrase better view on the student Journey understanding the student journey and I think that came out of maybe a reality that they were probably using a bunch of different tools that weren't speaking to each other and then student Journey can be quite long they could not really effectively or confidently understand what was you know contributing or not to that Journey so our marketing Hub was a pretty nice uh proposition to them as you can appreciate right all the tools in one place and you can really understand the different touch points that bring people from A to B or from downloading your perspectiv to signing up to an enrollment uh fast forward five years while that's still you know a great thing to have I think it's the flip side of that now that people want and the phrase I hear an awful lot from people and it could be across uh teams is uh delivering a better student experience so it's it's the other side of that coin right you you're able to do that by understanding the touch points but if you think about it it's no longer just marketing's remit it's Omni channel it's it's making sure that the voice of the institution is aligned whether you're an admissions person a recruitment person or a marketing person so now my conversations are multi-stakeholder multi-team and yeah that's uh that's probably been the biggest uh change over the years that I've noticed and just touching back on on that when you say multi- team so what what kind of teams are is it important to now yeah so again you've got your kind of if you think of the again going back to front office and back office I speak to front office people are the people who would be engaging with people along the candidate Journey primarily so that's your marketing folks your recruitment SL admissions some Cals people in there uh and yeah I'm having conversations with with with more admissions directors more directors of recruitment now and they're encouragingly you know wanting to assess our sales tools and again got to try and balance that sales can be considered a dirty word in education because uh no one in education likes to think they are in sales but uh they kind of are and uh we do have uh sales Hub that more and more teams are beginning to to to leverage because they see the benefit of having uh those productivity or engagement tools that fit in with how they work that is part of the same systems of the marketing uh the marketing Hub uh so yeah we need to make sure that there requirements have being met uh as well so that's where the multi teams come in you kind of touched on it again there but specifically with all these unique stakeholders I think education is one of those ones that is very unique but what are their specific challenges and concerns I suppose when it comes to to CRM yeah some of it is like uh getting used to the terminology of of like how data is stored or structured in a CRM like UPS spot is not I say this to all my my my my perspective clients we're not an educa education specific platform and I think the more that we explore it with them you see that that's a benefit it's highly customizable uh but with that becomes NE with that requires a little bit of uh I suppose how can I say it a little bit of uh flexibility from some stakeholders to maybe change the terminology they're using be comfortable with the word deal perhaps small little things like that but you'd be amazed how how that can be a little bit challenging to some teams to to to make that change uh you asked again another kind of preference or another kind of uh uh another important consideration clearly would be you know data security data Integrity uh that's also something that is a lot is is really important at the moment and then I think commonly one of the biggest challenges these teams face is like shelfware having a system that is not easily adopted by team so really having a system that can be you know set up easily quickly it feels intuitive they're kind of the things that when you get into it are going to be more important for successful implementation in my experience I love that and we talk a lot about adoption uh internally because it is just if you don't get that right at the start you're not it's not going to go anywhere it's gonna the system will die um but and you you've touched on sales and marketing there but not really the support side of things um so what what are the kind of benefits and and concerns that the support team might have with the with the CRM yeah it's it's it's a good question uh I would say that if I look at my customer base service Hub our support offering is frequently used by lots of those organizations that are kind of more commercially focused your e-learning company your online training company they love things like knowledge Hub knowledge base they like uh chat automation to help I suppose service those high value low volume sorry high volume low value qu so they're using it quite a bit uh some of my larger University customers would also use it in that way but it's not as commonly taken across maybe my school college customers just yet so uh I don't think many of them have has developed a uh support team uh some of the larger ones have contact centers so there is a play there of having service Hub but uh yeah the definition between sales up and service H isn't is clear for some of my clients but the further further up the food you go they do have uh student supports teams that that that that are perfectly fit for service hope and and if they're not using HubSpot what other platforms are are typically coming up either against HubSpot or that in what way does HubSpot have an edge on them would you say yeah uh good question again uh there are some like some of the you know the big beasts are are are constantly uh in and around in and around and uh the customers that we work with so you know M Microsoft is in a lot of universities already you know it teams are using them for lots of different tools across the campus so CRM is a natural fit for them uh but and again sorry I would say s the likes of Salesforce is in there as well um we don't see as much of Zoho and pipe drive and things like that uh again I referenced earlier on there's lots of you know I wouldn't really call them crms they're more like student information systems that are in the back end and they're they're for serving a great purpose but I think HubSpot really has an edge in terms of it can act as that kind of nice balance of as powerful as your Salesforce or microsofts which are fantastic platforms but admittedly we're a lot easier to use so that is a bit of a attractive proposition for teams that are maybe a little bit digitally resistant or hesitant are not as CRM you know Savvy as maybe other Industries so hubspot's a nice proposition with our you know learning and support tools and just that quick time to value and we're seeing it being kind of we're seeing a lot of uh referrals from from colleges that start using HubSpot and then they meet at a conference and uh you know explain how you know well they did with HubSpot so yeah that's that that's kind of where we fit in amongst uh a multitude of players I guess in any industry That Word of Mouth referral that's always going to be a big a big player in that but um the I think what's interesting what you you spoke about the it teams there and we are as a as an agency we're increasingly seeing it teams come up as one of those stakeholders they've got big say in education they've got a lot to say would you do you think absolutely you know the success of I suppose my job and and and and let's call it a Deal's uh you know a Deal's success can liveing die by the Buy in our support our openness to an IT team uh being involved with the stakeholders that work with for sure they're they're fundamentally important uh typically they have you know a list of quite often nonfunctional requirements and you either meet them or you don't and thankfully uh we we generally tend to meet them which is really which is really great and once you can kind of uh make sure they're reassured about certain fundamentals they can be quite uh an important Ally to help your Champion which is generally marketing or student recruitment Focus to to to to to to bring the uh the project to fruition and I would also say if you think about it like sometimes it can be sometimes being being uh you know digitally uh I suppose what's the word digitally no sometimes being digitally curious are being assertive to make a change in a university environment can be a bit of a risk to the stakeholder these institutions have been around for two three hundred years you know what I mean they're they they they've been they've been doing what they've been doing really really well for a long time so you know you've got to bring people with you to make that change uh to to implement a system so I really respect a stakeholder that's coming in to try you know put themselves out there to make it happen uh because it's very easy to just not do that you know uh and quite often the compelling event to a successful implementation or a successful project can be that senior leadership change someone who's coming in and part of their brief is very clearly to help the institution digitally transform and uh that that stakeholder is key then to bringing the IT team with them and it's two-way street they can then reassure them that everything will be will be all right and that's Partners like yourself come into that picture but yeah it's it's not surprising that some institutions are still hesitant because it can be uh it can be a kind of a a vulnerable place for someone if you're trying to do it and people aren't coming with you in in a in a large institution totally get that and it's not going to be overnight either which is also of it's never you know as easy as just turning it on it takes weeks months to to to get it right especially when I guess with these um education businesses that they they they will need to be lots of Integrations it's not stand alone it will integrate with those would student information platforms you you called it yeah that's just one piece of technology that hopspot would need to uh to integrate with and you'd need to map your processes and journey and understand which part of the journey which information should be passed from one system to the other H there could be learning management systems a lot of organizations will have an LMS yeah that yeah it's a really attractive proposition to have that integrated with HubSpot as well and use behavioral based triggers for upsell or cross sell or nurturing so let's just say someone hasn't logged into their LMS in a couple of months but maybe they need a bit of a nudge automatically from HubSpot or maybe someone's raced through level one and got a great grade well the LMS should tell us about that so we can then nurture them with the next product so yeah that's just two examples a lot of e-learning companies will have e-commerce functionality that needs to be incorporated so yeah that's just touching on on a couple Event Event organizations event technology is key to education as well so your Eventbrite and the likes of that need to play with hpot so yeah now thankfully we've got uh a really extensive App Store with over a thous a thousand of those applications that they can plug in uh and then we have uh API uh documentation which can allow uh you know partners are developers to to help them out and build a customer integration I have one more question I feel like you've kind of answered it a little bit by um talking about that that kind of champion um but what else do you think separates the the higher ed businesses that succeed with the digital transformation and then those that don't yeah I kind of did touch on it actually if you think about it because one thing I would say is you need you need a strong Champion to make it happen it's well not some it's it's helpful for everyone so someone coming in with the brief and with the backing to you know push this through because when you get under the hood of these projects sometimes you realize it was tried two years ago and it just didn't go anywhere it was tried it was tried three years ago and it was a disaster and people are a little bit burned from it so yeah you know I'm sure you've you've come across that before so a strong champion on their side is key uh and I would also say uh having a partner a HubSpot partner partner to be that link between the software and their team is fundamentally important and I you know been doing this for seven years probably hundreds of implementations vast majority of them have gone really really well but there's a big correlation between a partner being in the room from the start and the level of success so yeah I I I do encourage my uh my clients to to to work with a partner level of experience exactly just having done it before industry expertise knowing how to help them manage change internally that's a big part of it helping them to structure how they're going to run work workshops that's the kind of un uh the kind of unknown pieces to an a successful implementation that might be considered uh you know throughout the evaluation stage so Partners can can can run those and and offer their expertise and and do as I say they can do for you rather than you know uh just showing you they can actually get their hands around the project much more successfully save you some time and and I think think um a big part of that is you don't know what you don't know so there could be things you hadn't even thought of that a partner's experience would would kind of come into play there and something we like we do like to to show is our is our demo portal where we've kind of we've got that story mapped out from open day right through to them uh kind of managing the student experience so I'll pop a link below uh for people to sign up and and they can have a little playar around with HubSpot um itself but and I think we've kind of covered everything there James unless there's anything that you've thought of throughout that I haven't mentioned yeah just as to kind of add on to I suppose a couple of our points uh maybe I would say that the very important in the education space is social proof having like you said getting those referrals are having a lot of these a lot of the stakeholders they go to conferences together they they they they go training together there's a lot of uh commonality to their to their to their worlds and while there's competition it's kind of uh there's also cooperation so I think that and knowing that you know a very similar institution and a different part of the country has done this well uh and has you know off the Record you know uh kind of um you know uh off the Record uh testimonials with W with with another organization that's really powerful and it's the same with a partner as well so the level of Industry expertise or experience is key and I think that can really help that that you know that the snowball keep going because it's been an exciting space it's to spot's only uh educ it's only it's only industry vertical the last number of years because it's a perfect fit for it and that level of kind of experience and expertise does it's important to to to to to to make sure the success of of implementations and it's the same with Partners as well great that has been super useful super informative um I've definitely learned a lot from today so thank you so much for joining us today James cheers Bridget nice to meet you