PSB Academy is a leading private education institution in Singapore focused on helping students prepare for the New Economy. The school hosts over 16,000 students from over 50 countries to pursue their certificate, diploma, and degree courses.
As PSB Academy’s Digital Marketing Specialist, Royston Teoh oversees marketing campaign execution, with around 100 incoming leads each day. PSB Academy was using an enterprise resource planning tool (ERP) as a CRM and managing their large pool of leads with that tool presented a lot of challenges. "Its functionality was limited,” Royston says. “Primarily, it functioned as a system to store leads and data.”
When leads submitted a form, the information would not upload to their previous tool automatically and that lack of automation meant that leads could get lost in the shuffle. “Due to the absence of an effective leads management system or CRM, we faced challenges in efficiently handling our incoming leads. Assigning appropriate contact owners and ensuring that the relevant sales personnel received them for follow-up was a daunting task.”
In order to allocate their marketing budget efficiently, PSB Academy invests significantly in digital marketing and therefore needs to determine the most effective campaigns, channels, and keywords. Their previous tool didn’t offer any visibility into that data.
There were no integrations, which made it impossible to properly track campaigns. “In [our previous tool], we couldn’t see what keywords our leads were responding to, or what sources they were coming from,” Royston says. “If we don’t know where our leads are coming from, we can’t properly target our audiences.”
Switching to HubSpot gave PSB Academy unprecedented visibility into their campaigns and customer journey, from start to finish. “HubSpot offers a lot of integration opportunities that allow us to connect to the other tools that we use, and we can track our campaigns directly in HubSpot itself,” Royston says.
“With HubSpot, we have the ability to integrate with Google Ads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. There is also an option to integrate directly with WhatsApp Business Account. Everything is tracked properly through HubSpot.”
Switching to HubSpot has also made it much easier for the sales and marketing teams to work together. “When we were using [our previous tool], the communication between sales and marketing was near zero, because we couldn’t see where leads were coming from,” Royston says. “With HubSpot, the communication is very dynamic. All our consultants need to do is update lifecycle stages of their prospects, and marketing will know which campaigns produce higher-qualified leads. We are closing the gap to ensure that sales and marketing are working very closely together.”
Thanks to the visibility, tracking, and lead attribution that PSB Academy now has access to in HubSpot, they can optimise their paid campaigns and target only the highest-converting keywords. Royston uses the original source property to track where leads are coming from. “With HubSpot, we can see exactly which keywords and which channels convert the best,” Royston says. “So we won’t inadvertently spend a chunk of our budget on keywords that won’t convert. If we don’t know where leads come from, it’s just a blind marketing campaign. That’s a waste of budget.”
HubSpot’s automations make Royston’s job much easier. He can automatically send and schedule EDMs. He can set up a workflow to assign specific salespeople to leads, based on what was submitted and where the lead came from.
“Workflows in HubSpot are very intuitive, with a lot of functionality,” he says. “We have different schools, and each school has its own sales team. So we split our leads out with different workflows, and each lead gets assigned automatically. The automation takes care of it. And we can disqualify leads straight away if they don't meet our minimum entry requirements. This reduces the time that sales spends calling leads to check their qualifications.”