Using CRM in your teaching

The goal of career and technical education (also known as CTE or BTEC) is to give students practical and real-life work skills. Key here is knowing how to use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as it is relevant for all businesses. 

Hi, the “vocationals”, Benjamin and Kristian here!

We are making a series of blogs to share how we got the most out of work-based learning and became relevant in the labor market. One thing we spend many hours working with is CRM systems. In our case, it is HubSpot. Sadly, we did not cover Customer Relationship Management systems in our education. That’s why we would like to offer you a teaching plan for how to teach CRM to your students.  

First we need to cover what it is and why it is relevant. Then to explore the value of CRM in education and why we want to focus on it.

HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. (Source: The Cloud People).

What is CRM?

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a tool where you can keep track of all your customers, deals, contacts, prospects, and much more. The system gives you a complete overview of all your contacts and where they are in your sales funnel or flywheel as HubSpot has now introduced. We use HubSpot to plan a series of emails through sequences and workflows to automate activities. We also make great use of task management and deal flows. The best part is that we continuously track this in a sales dashboard.

We use CRM every single day in our jobs. A basic understanding of these systems will give your students a valuable head start.  

The CRM market includes a number of big companies such as Pipedrive, Salesforce, Zoho and SuperOffice. But have in mind that HubSpot is the market leader. As we work with HubSpot we’ll be using their platform as an example. This was the best platform for small businesses and Hubro’s business model. Want to explore the different systems? Check out this overview site

How to teach CRM?

HubSpot offers free access to its platform that allows you access to many of its basic features. Taking this into consideration it is beneficial to use it with your students too. This way they get hands-on experience.

Follow these steps to get started easily.

         1. Get free access to a platform. Start off by letting students have access to the platform. This way they can get familiar with the platform. Register at Hubspot to get access to free accounts. 

         2. Let the students construct cases. The students will now individually make two cases each. Create or use information about a fictional lead/customer. They need to include the name of a contact person, company, title, and actual case.

         3. Start working in pairs. Split your students into pairs and let them switch cases. 

Now they will make a customer card and fill in the information about each case. They can also set up a deal for different cases.  There are a lot of ways you can teach CRM to your students. To assist you we have made a case in Hubro. In this case they run their own virtual company and fill in relevant info into HubSpot. Click here to get access to the full teaching plan.

We hope this is helpful to you and your students! 

See ya! 

Kristian & Benjamin