Westbourne Case Study - Platform Excellence

Westbourne is an independent, co-educational boarding and day school located near Cardiff, Wales, delivering academic excellence in education for 2 to 18-year-olds.
Westbourne School is located in the seaside town of Penarth, just minutes from the Welsh capital of Cardiff, voted one of the top ten places to live in the UK by The Sunday Times.

The Challenge for Westbourne

Westbourne School used traditional working methods to manage their sales process using spreadsheets. You could only see a student's application date and that they were in the sales process.

However, there were no links to correspondence, how attentive a salesperson had been, turnaround time, tasks, or problems. The school only had access to these raw data points and could not use any analytics.

This system evolved to using google data sheets but was still only a single data point. The main challenge was finding a more modern approach to help the school manage its admissions pipeline better.

The Solution by PYB

Westbourne had initially contacted HubSpot directly and had been sold their onboarding package. The team that needed HubSpot training at Westbourne had all different levels of marketing, sales, and technical experience.

Unfortunately, the standard onboarding package from HubSpot did not accommodate these different technical levels. The team was overwhelmed with the original HubSpot training.

The team did “not understand the language” during the training. HubSpot could not explain the benefits to the school’s employees for using the system. To rectify the situation, HubSpot advised there were providers that could help with onboarding.

HubSpot recommended Plus Your Business (PYB). PYB came in and tailored the training to match the team at Westbourne. There were no additional charges from PYB to provide this training.

Although it was only one day of training, it perfectly matched the team. Elisa, from PYB, was also on-hand afterwards for any follow-up questions. The whole team at PYB was very supportive and helped Westbourne to embrace HubSpot.

The Results

Westbourne initially chose HubSpot purely from a sales perspective. The excel spreadsheets they were using were providing a snapshot of limited data. HubSpot helped Westbourne to streamline its sales process.

The attraction to using HubSpot was the ability to use a cookie on the site. The cookie helps to track customers from initial browsing, form filling, and then through the rest of the pipeline. HubSpot now helps to drive the school’s sales outcomes.

The Impact of the Solution

Westbourne uses HubSpot for the UK and Sydney, Australia teams. It wasn’t easy to pin down the teams on their customer turnaround times and contacts. HubSpot was the best software to help provide a solution.

Marie de Tito Mount, the Group Marketing & Admissions Director said, "HubSpot is worth its weight in gold for that alone. The other things that HubSpot does are great benefits, but not as significant as the pipeline element.”