EMEA HubSpot Sales Playbook

INTERNAL ONLY

Research & Prospect

Identify the best fit schools and leads that have the highest chance of becoming customers, then create compelling messages that make prospects excited to get in contact with you.

Good Fits

There are specific types of schools that we tend to see success with, and that you should target.

  1. Independent Schools: These are private schools, can be private academies, schools teaching US curriculum in Europe, private schools feeding into high end universities. They tend to struggle with lower school enrollment specifically. Look out for sophistication, they might not even have a marketing department.
  2. Business Schools: These tend to be more sophisticated and advanced with their marketing efforts. Very high ROI.
  3. Trade Schools: Very niche markets eg. cooking, hospitality, drama, dance etc. It is easy for them to create content. Admissions Cycle is very long, as they are usually selling to adults and getting them to come back to school. Marketing Automation is a great fit to nurture throughout the Admissions Cycle.
  4. Continuing Education / Graduate Schools: Programs within a larger university, they tend to be autonomous.
  5. Online / For-Profit Schools: big budgets, have more sophisticated marketing teams that will understand Inbound Marketing and adopt new technologies.
  6. Online courses/MOOCS: Have large databases, always an Enterprise customer. Are typically sophisticated with marketing technology as they have a real need for it. Be wary of freemium online course businesses as the customer value is not very high.
  7. Language Schools: Generally spend huge amounts on PPC and agents to generate enquiries. Typically not very inbound savvy so won’t be using any sophisticated marketing tools. HubSpot can help them fix the problem of high COCA.

Bad Fits: 

  1. Public Schools/universities: No concept of a lead.
  2. Undergrad at Large Universities (think UCC, Trinity).
  3. Alumni and Development Teams: It is tricky to get them off older systems, very slow to change, eat up a lot of time. Web teams are very sceptical of HubSpot stealing their thunder .

How to Approach Prospecting

There are three ways to think about finding good fit companies: 

  • When a person converts on HubSpot's website, a lead is created in Salesforce. Salesforce then gives that lead a territory stamp based on company size, industry, and location, and assigns it out. You will want to create a view to see your new open leads with a recent conversion. The following criteria is a good starting place, as it filters out students/professors:

    EDU_Open_Leads.jpg

    The columns in your view will help you sort and prioritize leads. For example, you could sort by 'recent conversion date' or by 'rating' once you've rated your new leads.

    When a person converts on the website, and there is already an Account created for a School, the lead will be auto-converted from a lead to a contact. You should also prospect through your Contact Views to see recently converting Contacts.

    Create a view to filter out Contacts associated with Accounts.

    edu_work_leads.png

  • As a BDR, you will not be rotated brand new leads. Therefore, you will need to quickly and effectively find leads and contacts to work that are warmer, or that your IMS didn't get a chance to work. As an IMS you should also be prospecting into the database, looking for good fits. First, create a view to include leads stamped in your territory that aren't currently in your name.

    For Leads:

    1) Pull from the Recycled Lead Queue
    2) Add a territory filter such as Territory = your territory code 

    edu_territory_1.png

    For Contacts:

    As stated above, if an Account has already been created for a school, there will be many great fit leads that are contacts not leads. To find accounts not in your name, use the following criteria:

    1) Check "All Accounts"
    2) Account Owner = Open Account
    3) "Territory" = your territory code

    edu_territory_2.png

  • There are a lot of schools that don't know about inbound marketing, and haven't come to HubSpot for our resources. Refer to the above section to understand "good fits." The following tools are designed to help find good fit schools and easily add them to Salesforce.

    Datanyze - Good "industries" to add to your list in Datanyze are higher education, e-learning, and education management.
    LinkedIn Sales Navigator
    Sidekick - Sidekick is great to use if you find a schools website directly (via Google Searches/Wikipedia lists of schools/etc). You can then add in leads right from the school's website via the Sidekick sidebar in Chrome. Pro tip: most schools have contact information listed on their websites!!

Rate high or low?

It is very important to rate your leads to prioritise prospecting time when you go back to work "in progress" leads and contacts. Assess whether the lead or contact is a high, medium, or low lead. Elements to consider when assigning a lead rating include: 

1) School Characteristics: What type of school is it? Good fit or bad fit?
2) Contact/Lead Characteristics: What is their title? What department do they work in? 
3) HubSpot Lead Intelligence: What type of content are they downloading and how often?

Consider: 

- Type of school, reference above to see the good fit schools you should be targeting.

- Look for titles like the following in each department:

  • Marketing: Digital Marketing, Marketing Manager, CMO, Enrollment Management
  • Executive: Provost, Dean (these are decision makers, but you’ll need to get in touch with marketing first most likely)
  • Admissions: Director of Admissions (Admissions Counselors would me medium, try to get to their boss)
  • Avoid Alumni / Development 

- Have they ever spoken or interacted with HubSpot before?

- Is the school struggling with enrollment? You can get some of these data while researching before calling.
 

Who are you talking to?

While you’re doing your research, assess the marketing sophistication of the school and try to guess what their biggest issues will be. This will help you determine the positioning statement that will be the most relevant to them that you can later highlight on your connect call. It’s also important to recognize what will resonate the most with various personas you're speaking with so that you can tailor the conversation to their interests. For example:

Marketing Manager:

- Might be new to the school, many schools are shifting away from “communications” titles and building out digital strategies. They are likely the first person in this role, and have a lot of initiatives.
- Talk about challenges with marketing, frame your conversation around their day to day goals

Admissions:

- If Admissions directors/managers are coming to HubSpot for content, they are likely responsible for generating prospective students themselves and don’t have a marketing team to support them.

 

Trigger Events

Trigger events are signs that a school is growing and/or changing its marketing strategy. So even if a company previously looked like a low or medium fit, a sign pointing to one of these events could indicate that they’re turning into a high lead. You can usually find these on the company’s website or through a Google search.

Example Triggers:

Decline in enrollment
New programs being added within a school (executive MBA for example)
Hiring a new marketer
New campus being announced
New Director from a commercial background

 

Email Content

In the process of prospecting, you're playing the role of a human nurturer by providing the prospect with the right resources at the right time in order to pique their interest in HubSpot.  Generally, you should be reaching out to a prospect with a minimum of five times, and as a rule of thumb, unless the prospect asks you not to contact them further, you can reach out to them for as long a period of time as seems valuable. 

Your message should address:

Why you are contacting the prospect (focussed on them)
Why you are contacting the prospect now
A request for something you want from them that is easy and quick to complete

Connect your email to portal 53 in order to access Sidekick and example prospecting templates. You can use any templates in the "EDU" folder for prospecting. Choose a template depending on the type of school (higher ed versus independent) and if it's an inbound lead, or cold sourced. EMEA reps should consider customising email sequences specific to Geographic location where education trends differ, and be cognisant that the prospect may not be a native English speaker.

HigherEd Inbound 1st Touch

highered.png

Independent School Inbound 1st Touch: Blogging/SEO 

independent_school.png

Tips for customising templates:

- Relate the value proposition to type of school (higher ed or independent)
- Give an example of a similar school you worked with
- Tease with an idea you have for their website and relate that to what type of content they downloaded (SEO or Email)
- Add a case study (usually to later emails)