Life in training and events can be hectic.
Whether they’re managing hundreds of attendees, chasing payments or having to find a new venue at the last minute, those working in the sector always have their hands full.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems play a vital role in helping to keep their daily operations running smoothly.
However, not every CRM is suited to this sector’s fast pace and unique requirements.
In this article, we explain why KulaHub is the ideal solution for training and events companies. We’ll focus on the benefits we provide in five main areas. We’ll then take a look at a client we’ve recently helped in the industry.
- Managing attendee and membership data
- Improving your email marketing
- Reporting success
- Boosting your lead generation
- Ensuring you get the best out of KulaHub
- Case Study: HQN’s data dilemma
1. Manage attendee and membership data
Efficient contact management is the key to running a successful training and events company.
However, many training and event providers still struggle to keep accurate, up-to-date customer records.
Let’s take a look at a few of the reasons why:
They use spreadsheets to store data
Lots of training and events providers rely on spreadsheets to store and manage their customer data.
Spreadsheets are simply not designed to manage the depth and quantity of data training and events providers use every day.
The data is siloed
Training and events providers collect data from a range of different sources, whether that’s training course feedback, customer referrals, or event attendance.
As a result, this information gets recorded and stored in multiple places in an inconsistent format.
This makes the information time consuming to collate, and using it to create mailing lists or conduct customer analysis becomes almost impossible.
Their data needs to be cleaned
To be effective, all sales and marketing functions including telephony, email and reporting software need to be connected to a single database where information can be stored in a common format. That’s where a CRM comes in.
However, there’s no point in populating a shiny new CRM with disorganised data that’s full of errors and duplications.
It’s therefore important to cleanse and tag all data to ensure that the new database is populated with good quality information.
Meet the data experts
KulaHub provides friendly consultancy on how to manage your company’s data.
We begin by assessing your existing data, telling you how to improve it and explaining how you can manage it better in the future.
Many training and events providers do not have the time or in-house expertise to transfer data from legacy systems.
That’s why we provide dedicated technical support over the phone from the moment you are set up on KulaHub.
We’ll also help you to clean, tag and migrate your data to make membership and contact databases easier to manage.
KulaHub automatically logs and stores all customer interactions in a single client profile.
Not only does this give you instant access to the latest customer data, but jobs like creating event mailing lists will take minutes rather than hours.
With KulaHub’s single view CRM, you’ll have greater visibility over your historic and upcoming bookings and be able to track event history.
This is useful because you can see which courses and events have been popular with different companies and individuals.
2. Improving your email marketing
Most training and events providers use email marketing as the main tool for communicating with members and customers.
These are either email marketing systems that are built into their current CRM or third-party software like Mailchimp.
However, using these systems can be time-consuming because they have to be performed manually and only produce generic email marketing campaigns.
Many providers also do not have the skills or software to design attractive campaigns and have to rely on dull, uncompelling email and newsletter templates.
Without a good email marketing CRM, training and events providers cannot use their data well enough to send targeted email campaigns based on customer buying habits, resulting in generic offers and content.
A powerful email marketing platform
KulaHub enables training and events providers to create highly targeted email campaigns in minutes rather than hours.
You can also design engaging email content by using our stock templates or create your own using our intuitive HTML editor.
Create personalised email campaigns
Not only does KulaHub store all of your contacts in one convenient place, but it also segments customers according to different characteristics.
Customer segmentation can be anything from industry to skill level and even potential interest in training courses.
This allows you to create targeted email campaigns with personalised and relevant messages that address your customers’ unique needs and challenges.
For example, you might be providing a new accreditation for health and safety in the construction industry.
Using KulaHub, you could identify all of the construction companies in your area that are large enough to require the accreditation. You might then create a sales message for those in the housebuilding sector and another for those in the commercial property sector.
Automate campaigns
Training and events providers have to juggle many courses, conferences and seminars at once. Email is the main tool used to manage every stage of these events, from pre-event booking reminders and updates to post-event feedback forms and thank you messages. As a result, the number of emails being sent out can soon pile up.
Therefore, being able to automate these processes will save you time and ensure important event information is not missed.
For example, if the venue for your event changes KulaHub can be set up to automatically inform the attendees.
This means you can spend more time focusing on delivering excellent training courses and events and let KulaHub take care of the administrative tasks.
Track customer responses
Using KulaHub also means that you no longer need to guess how successful your campaigns have been.
Instead, you can track open rates, click-throughs and responses.
This data allows you to see which aspects of your campaigns are working and what may need tweaking.
For example, you can use data to improve the impact of your campaigns, whether it be sign-ups to courses, more people buying event tickets or more businesses enquiring about your event packages.
Nurture customer relationships
KulaHub makes it easy to follow up with attendees by allowing you to send post-event surveys or advertise future events.
With KulaHub, you can also design professional certificates. This saves money on buying specialist design software like Adobe CS.
3. Report success
Training and events providers need to identify which courses and events have been successful to improve their offering.
But with so many taking place throughout the year it can be difficult to keep track of ROI, attendee numbers, revenues and other success metrics.
This is even more difficult if you’re using spreadsheets to store and analyse results.
Although spreadsheets can be useful, they are time-consuming, prone to human error and have limited analysis capabilities.
The first step to good reporting is efficient data management processes.
Make the most out of your data
With KulaHub, all of your data is automatically stored in the same place.
This means no more collating figures such as attendee numbers or course pass rates from different channels or departments. It also avoids information being misreported due to human error.
KulaHub collects this data in real-time and allows you to see the latest figures as they come in.
Better yet, KulaHub’s specialised dashboards offer customers detailed data visualisation capabilities.
These dashboards allow you to achieve an in-depth analysis of data by cutting it in any way you want, as well as produce engaging and informative reports for key stakeholders.
4. Boosting your lead generation
All training and events providers want to grow their business and doing so usually means increasing customer referrals and identifying new opportunities amongst their existing customers.
Find your perfect customers
KulaHub provides data-powered lead generation capabilities that enable training and events providers to:
Identify sales opportunities
With detailed customer data, you can identify new opportunities for courses and events. For example, you could spot common skills gaps amongst the businesses you work with. This information can then be used to either develop new training courses or create email campaigns that highlight how your offering covers these skills gaps.
Create a sales message unique to the prospect’s needs
Once you’ve identified an opportunity, you can create marketing messages that address their unique needs.
Let’s say the healthcare providers you target all need training on a new piece of medical equipment, but they all have tight budgets.
Your email marketing campaign could highlight the cost benefits of choosing your company as a training provider for the new technology.
Contact the prospect at exactly the right time
With KulaHub you can set triggers that alert your sales team when a customer is likely to buy.
This allows you to contact the prospect the moment there is a burning need for your services.
For example, you may know that only healthcare businesses with over 100 employees are required to take your new training course. You could then set up alerts to tell you when healthcare businesses in your area reach this staffing level.
Not only will this increase the success rate and efficiency of your sales team, but it will also increase revenue.
5. Ensuring you get the best out of KulaHub
Many training and events providers have limited technical capabilities in house.
This is why switching from legacy systems, training staff to use the new system and connecting third-party software can seem overwhelming.
Investing in a new CRM also carries risk and can bring up the following concerns:
- What if your membership is increasing rapidly and you need to expand your CRM?
- What happens if you only need to automate responses when people sign up for your training courses?
Our consultants are passionate about customer service and want you to get the best out of KulaHub. Let’s look at some of the ways we do this:
Full training
KulaHub provides full training to both new and existing members.
This service ranges from a new user onboarding session to helping customers with any queries they may have while using KulaHub.
Specialist developer expertise
If you have specialist requirements and an off-the-shelf solution does not exist, our developers can work on a bespoke solution.
This could include connecting software that isn’t designed to integrate with CRMs or creating bespoke customer interfaces.
KulaHub’s flexible architecture means that you can create a range of custom integrations that allow you to tailor and scale your CRM as your business grows.
Wide compatibility
KulaHub is designed to be compatible with most common integrations, allowing you to scale its functionality according to your needs and budget.
Some of the third-party software KulaHub integrates with includes Xero, Office365, Google Analytics and DocuSign.
Dedicated support
What sets KulaHub apart from the crowd is our willingness to be available whenever clients need technical or operational support.
Our support team is always available on the phone to answer your questions. This means no more tickets or trawling troubleshooting pages when issues arise.
Case Study: HQN’s data dilemma
Let’s take a look at how KulaHub helped training and events company HQN to streamline their customer data and fine-tune their sales operations.
HQN is a membership organisation that supports UK and Australian housing associations with tendering contracts to local authorities through training and consultancy.
Since launching in 1997, HQN now has over 1,500 members and thousands of customer records.
After a glitch with their old CRM, HQN realised that they needed a CRM to help them manage their data, automate their workflows and manage their vast email marketing strategy.
KulaHub worked with HQN to streamline their data and give them access to accurate real-time information in one convenient location.
By segmenting its members and potential customers, HQN has been able to create highly-targeted email marketing campaigns to improve sales.
But that’s not all. HQN’s new automated workflows have improved the company’s efficiency, allowing staff to focus on customer service and improve their training and events.
If you’d like to learn more about how KulaHub can help you develop a data-driven sales process, contact Andrew Booth on [email protected] or call 0800 049 6044.
