HubSpot for Education: 10 Lessons From CRM Implementation

Thinking about CRM for your education organisation? Before you start, CMA’s Ben Fitzhugh shares 10 lessons we’ve learned (some the hard way) from implementing CRM in education, covering recruitment journeys, automation, data, integrations, reporting and the things that get complicated fast. One does not simply build a CRM.

I’ve spent a lot of time working alongside education marketing, admissions, engagement and commercial teams on CRM implementation. Different organisations. Different systems. Different challenges. And, occasionally, different ways of learning the hard way.

If you’re responsible for marketing, recruitment or admissions in an education organisation and you’re considering a CRM – or looking at how your existing CRM could work harder – this guide is for you.

Because technology is rarely the difficult bit. It’s the decisions around it. How your teams actually work. How information moves between them. What data you’ve already got. What needs connecting. Where automation helps and where a person needs to take over.

Get those things right and CRM can make a genuine difference to the way you recruit, communicate with and understand prospective learners. Get them wrong and you’ll probably spend a lot of time fixing things you could have designed properly in the first place.

So, rather than tell you what a CRM can do, here are ten things I’d want you to think about before you implement it.

#1 Your recruitment journey is longer than you think

As any marketing or admissions manager will attest: the nurturing period in education is most unusual. Someone could apply for a course but not actually start for another year or even 18 months. That’s a long time to maintain somebody’s interest and make sure they continue receiving useful, relevant communication.

Flip that coin and you’ve got the opposite problem. Like Santa, your business ostensibly happens one day a year. Therefore, CRM’s job is to keep things moving towards the “ho, ho, ho” rather than the “no, no, no”.

I’m obviously simplifying it, but a lot of education recruitment activity is ultimately converging on a defined point in time. If your main intake starts in September, large numbers of prospective students are moving towards that same date regardless of whether they first engaged with you last month or last year.

That creates a different CRM challenge to a conventional B2B sales pipeline. You need visibility across a much longer journey, but you also need the automation and data transparency to manage volume as you get closer to enrolment.

That’s one of the first things I’d design around.

#2 There is no single student journey

We talk about the student journey a lot. In reality, there are more of them than there are paths through Moria; and some are considerably easier to navigate than others.

A school leaver isn’t the same as an adult learner. An apprentice isn’t the same as an employer looking for apprenticeship provision. Then you’ve got parents and carers, higher education, commercial training and potentially several other audiences depending on your organisation. 

Behind each of those data points is a real human, with their own wants, needs and desires. Push them all through the same process and, at best, your communication becomes generic. At worst, it becomes irrelevant. 

That’s why the journey needs to reflect the person. And it doesn’t necessarily finish when somebody enrols. There’s progression between levels, further education into higher education, apprenticeships and other opportunities to maintain the relationship.

Retention matters too. If somebody starts a course and quickly realises it isn’t right for them, there may be an opportunity to help them move onto something more appropriate rather than dropping out completely. 

It’s that swap, don’t drop mentality that a well-calibrated CRM supports when you’re maintaining the information and communication around the individual throughout their journey rather than treating enrolment as the finishing line.

The practical implication is that your CRM structure needs to reflect those different journeys from the beginning.

#3 A shared inbox is not a recruitment process

Like The Lord of the Rings, I’ve seen this pattern plenty of times. Someone completes an enquiry form. It lands in a shared inbox. Somebody picks it up, works out what it’s about, manually enters the information into another system and then passes it to the person or department that needs to respond.

I bet you’ve seen it too. 

The downsides, of course, are steeper than the slopes of Mount Doom. Every one of those steps introduces another opportunity for something to go wrong:

• The information might be entered incorrectly
• The enquiry might reach the wrong department

There’s also the staff time involved in continually moving information between systems. But from a recruitment perspective, the thing I’d be most concerned about is speed. Someone has actively expressed an interest in studying with you. That’s probably not the point where you want your internal administration slowing the conversation down.

A connected CRM won’t fix a bad process by itself. But it gives you an opportunity to remove a lot of those unnecessary manual steps and make ownership much clearer.

#4 CRM should connect marketing with what happens next

This is probably one of the biggest opportunities I see for education marketing teams.  Marketing generates an enquiry. Nice work, team. Yet, the question remains: what happened to them? It’s easy, of course, to report that a campaign generated 300 enquiries. That’s useful, but it isn’t really the answer the organisation needs. 

The types of things I would be asking, include:

• How many attended an Open Event?
• How many progressed?
• How many applied?
• How many eventually enrolled?
• Which audiences, campaigns and channels are contributing to those outcomes?

When marketing and recruitment activity sit against the same CRM record, you start connecting the dots from the beginning of the journey with what happens further down it. Admissions or engagement teams can see the marketing interactions that have already taken place. Marketing gets visibility beyond the form submission.

That also changes how you can use the data. As internal teams interact with somebody, the CRM can update accordingly. Marketing segments can populate dynamically based on what’s actually happening rather than somebody continually exporting spreadsheets and rebuilding lists.

Open Events are a really good example. Registration, reminders, attendance and follow-up can all form part of the wider journey. More importantly, you can start asking what happened after the event.

And those insights aren’t only useful for reporting on this year’s Open Event. They can help you make next year’s better. That’s when CRM starts becoming much more than a database.

#5 Capture the data you actually need

When you start designing forms and CRM properties, there’s a temptation to collect information because you might want it later. The Master of Lake-Town took a similar approach to valuable things. It didn’t end particularly well for him. 

So, I’d start somewhere else. You could ask: what do we actually need to deliver the next part of this person’s journey properly? There are obviously GDPR considerations around the legal basis for processing information, subscriptions and how that data will be used.

Then you’ve got the fundamentals: first and last name captured separately, correct email and phone information, postcode and address where regional segmentation matters.

Then think about what you need to understand the enquiry. What course are they interested in? Which campus? What kind of enquiry is it? Do we need appropriately captured parent or carer information?

There are operational questions too. Is this somebody we already know? Are they a completely new contact? What stage should they enter? Where did the enquiry originate – website, phone, email, Open Event, paid campaign?

Good data capture makes everything downstream easier. But more data isn’t automatically better data.

#6 Automate the process, not the relationship

Automation can be brilliant in education because of the scale and length of the recruitment journey. But knowing where automation should stop is just as important as knowing what you can automate. At the beginning of a journey, automation can do a lot of the heavy lifting:

• Confirm an enquiry
• Send useful information
• Provide reminders
• Make sure somebody doesn’t disappear simply because a member of the team happens to be busy

Personalisation helps, obviously. But as somebody becomes more engaged, I’d build in clear points where the system alerts a person internally and the conversation becomes more personal.

The objective isn’t to automate the relationship with a prospective student. It’s to automate the things that allow your people to have a better relationship with them. That’s an important distinction.

#7 Your CRM and MIS don’t need to compete

One of the questions that comes up quite naturally is where HubSpot stops and the existing MIS, student management or application system takes over. Although personally, I don’t necessarily think about it like that. 

The learner lifecycle, after all, extends well beyond enrolment. They become a student. They progress. Eventually they leave as a graduate. Depending on the organisation, there may still be a valuable relationship after that.

Your MIS has a particular job to do. CRM has another. Unlike Sauron and Saruman, they don’t have to contend for mastery. 

What you need to establish is which system is responsible for what, when information needs to pass between them and what each team needs to see. That handover might happen at application. It might happen at enrolment. It might happen when somebody actually starts the course. Or the systems might continue running alongside one another.

Your wider infrastructure matters too. Website. Email. Phone systems. WhatsApp. Social channels. Paid media. Event platforms. Internal databases and student records. 

The objective isn’t to integrate everything because integrations sound impressive. It’s to work out where information genuinely needs to move. And if an existing system is doing its job properly, you don’t need to rip it out just because you’re implementing a CRM.

#8 One learner can mean more than one relationship

This is something I’d absolutely design around from the beginning. In education, you’re not necessarily communicating with one person. You can be communicating with a prospective student and their parents or guardian.

A parent might even submit an application or enquiry on behalf of the student. If the underlying data doesn’t properly distinguish those relationships, you can very quickly create problems with communications.

It’s also one of the reasons I don’t think an education CRM implementation should ever be treated purely as a marketing project. You need input from the people who actually understand these relationships. Marketing. Admissions. Engagement. Data teams. Commercial teams where appropriate.

The CRM has to accurately represent who you’re communicating with, how those people relate to each other and what information each team needs. Otherwise you’re building a technical solution around an inaccurate version of the real world.

#9 The difficult bit is often the data you already have

There are places in legacy data where even the wisest fear to tread. I’m joking. Sort of. But legacy data can be one of the most complicated parts of an education CRM implementation.

Education organisations can have databases and structures that have evolved over many years. Different departments have needed different things. Systems have been introduced at different times. Data structures that made complete sense when they were created don’t necessarily translate neatly into a modern CRM.

Caution: You can’t just pick all of that up and drop it into HubSpot.

You need to understand the existing data model, break it down and work out how that information should be reconstructed in something cleaner, more scalable and more future-proof. That also helps when you’re dealing with duplicate records and information spread across different systems.

Unique identifiers and existing data points can be used to match records, while HubSpot’s data management functionality can help identify duplicates, formatting issues and other data-quality problems.

But again, the technology isn’t the starting point. You need to understand the data you’re dealing with first. And this is where I’d resist the urge to get to the exciting stuff too quickly.

I’m not suggesting we need to hold a Council of Elrond every time somebody creates a HubSpot property, but you absolutely need agreement on the data model before you start building. 

Everything else relies on it. Automation. Segmentation. Reporting. Personalisation. Integrations. Get the underlying structure wrong and you’ll eventually find yourself unpicking decisions that should have been made at the beginning. Get the data model right first. Then build on it.

#10 Before you ask for HubSpot, answer one question: why?

If an education organisation came to me tomorrow and said: “We want HubSpot.” My first question would be: Why?

Not which HubSpot setup do you want. Not which features do you need. Why? Because sometimes an organisation already has a CRM or another system capable of doing what it needs.

What we often find is that an existing CRM is focused on one department doing one particular job. Sometimes there’s also significant under-utilisation, so the organisation is already paying for capability it isn’t using.

But you shouldn’t assume that’s the case. I’d audit what’s already there first. I’d want to understand the internal processes, existing databases, websites and technology, marketing activity, admissions and engagement processes, procurement requirements and how information currently moves around the organisation.

Then I’d probably ask:

1. Why do you want HubSpot?
2. What’s your budget?
3. What are your objectives?
4. What tools and databases are currently in use?
5. Who’s going to own this internally, and how much time can they give it?
6. How complex are your recruitment, admissions and commercial processes?
7. Is there a hard deadline for when the CRM needs to be operational?
8. What’s your team’s existing experience with CRM?
9. Which teams are going to use it, and how many people are in those teams?
10. What does your leadership team need to understand through reporting that they can’t understand today?

And then one more. Do you want a coffee? Because implementing CRM properly starts with understanding how the organisation actually works. HubSpot might be the answer. But “we want HubSpot” isn’t the problem we’re trying to solve.

Thinking about HubSpot for your education organisation?

If HubSpot – or another CRM – is the right answer, we’ll help you work out what that should look like.

And if it isn’t, we’ll tell you.

Book Some Time With Me