How HubSpot Academy saves 30 hours each week
HubSpot Academy offers inbound marketing, sales, and service education. It awards more than 60,000 certificates to organizations and individuals looking to grow their business each year.
As you might imagine, it’s a lot of data to manage and things have only picked up as more organizations undergo their own digital transformation.
As the Principal Program Strategist, Julien Clement manages HubSpot Academy's growth, ensuring timely results and identifying opportunities for improvement. A typical day for Clement involves three to four hours of meetings, running status checks on the multitude of ongoing projects, tracking impact, and brainstorming future offerings.
“We had been using Google Docs to have some visibility into what our professors were working on,” Clement explains. “Our video editors need to know, 'When is that supposed to be done so that I can take the video and edit it?' And then, once the video's edited, when can we launch it? There's a lot of moving parts in there, and it became unworkable because we weren't able to be efficient.”
Clement says the lack of visibility resulted in a lot of missed deadlines due to thousands of rows in Google Docs where information ended up getting buried. They needed a more flexible way of working. So Clement’s manager directed him to Airtable.
Airtable provided all of the previous functionality they'd grown accustomed to, particularly the cloud collaboration capabilities, but provided the streamlined features the team had been clamoring for. Clement's team now has the ability to effectively collaborate with several internal and external teams on a single platform.
“The golden ticket for us is, because we have so many different teams, we have all these dependent activities where if a script doesn't get done by X date, then they can't film, and if they can't film by X date, then they can't video edit and a lot can get lost in translation,” Clement said.
Airtable saves them time and prevents headaches by allowing HubSpot to store all of its content in one location. With hundreds of videos and thousands of documents referencing the same things, it’s critical for the team to be on the same page about what needs to be updated and what needs to be localized.
"We can actually do real product management now!"
Customized views have also been a game changer. Each person (or team) has the ability to leverage their own custom, filtered views in order to ascertain what deserves their attention, whether at the task or project level.
Clement’s team was able to further customize this system by writing formulas to automate their processes, thus building a truly proprietary workflow for HubSpot. Everyone with an activity associated with a project could already be tagged to the project, and anyone on the team can see how many activities exist within the project, but now, they can also see the percentage to completion, how projects are pacing based on deadlines, and more.
The HubSpot Academy team now saves 30 hours a week on product management.
"Within the first few months, we'd already saved close to 300 hours of manual data entry–labor of copying information over, double checking things that shouldn't need double checking. Now, we can be much more scientific.”