Company Overview

This project involved an international school based in Austria that serves a diverse, multilingual community of students and families. The school operates in both German and English, drawing prospective families from across Europe and beyond. As an institution with a competitive admissions process, the school's ability to manage inquiries, track applicants, and communicate efficiently with families is central to its operational success.

Despite a steady stream of admissions inquiries each year, the school had no structured system in place to manage the journey from initial inquiry through enrollment. Administrative staff relied on a patchwork of spreadsheets, email threads, and manual tracking to keep tabs on where each family stood in the process — an approach that became increasingly unsustainable as application volumes grew.

The Challenge

The school's admissions team faced a fundamental visibility problem: there was no centralized system to track where a prospective family stood in the admissions pipeline at any given moment. Inquiries arrived through multiple channels — email, phone calls, website forms, in-person campus visits — and each touchpoint was managed independently. Without a unified view, it was easy for follow-ups to slip through the cracks, particularly during peak admissions periods when the volume of incoming inquiries surged.

Compounding this challenge was the multilingual nature of the team and its constituents. Communications needed to flow seamlessly in both German and English, and the system had to accommodate families who might interact with the school in either language depending on the context. Any CRM solution would need to support this bilingual reality without creating confusion or duplication in the records.

The school also lacked meaningful contact segmentation. Alumni, prospective parents, currently enrolled families, and active applicants were all mixed together in informal contact lists. This made it nearly impossible to send targeted communications — for example, sharing enrollment deadlines only with active applicants, or sending alumni event invitations without including families still in the inquiry stage. The absence of segmentation meant that every communication required manual list-building, which consumed hours of administrative time each cycle.

Additionally, the admissions team had no automated workflows for routine communications. Confirmation emails, document request reminders, interview scheduling follow-ups, and status updates were all handled manually. This not only created a significant time burden on the admissions office but also introduced inconsistency in the family experience — some families received prompt follow-ups while others waited days, depending entirely on staff workload at any given moment.

With an upcoming admission season approaching, the school recognized that continuing without a structured CRM would mean repeating the same operational pain points. Leadership wanted a solution implemented before the next admissions cycle began, which created a clear deadline and a sense of urgency around the project.

Our Approach

We began with a thorough discovery phase to understand the school's admissions process from end to end. This included mapping every stage a prospective family moves through — from initial inquiry and campus tour scheduling, through document submission and interviews, to final enrollment decisions. By documenting this workflow in detail, we established the foundation for a CRM configuration that would mirror the school's actual operations rather than imposing a generic sales pipeline.

With the admissions journey mapped, we configured HubSpot CRM with a custom pipeline tailored specifically to the school's admissions stages. Each stage represented a meaningful milestone in the process, giving the admissions team a clear visual dashboard of where every prospective family stood at any point in time. Pipeline stages were labeled in terms familiar to the education context — not sales terminology — so the team could adopt the system without a steep learning curve.

Next, we built a robust contact segmentation framework. We created distinct segments for alumni, prospective parents, active applicants, currently enrolled families, and other stakeholder groups. Each segment was defined by clear criteria and maintained automatically through HubSpot's list functionality, eliminating the need for manual list-building before each communication. This segmentation also laid the groundwork for targeted outreach campaigns tailored to each audience.

We then designed and implemented automated workflows for the most common admissions communications. These included inquiry acknowledgment emails, document submission reminders, interview scheduling confirmations, and status update notifications. Each workflow was configured with appropriate delays and conditions to ensure that communications felt personal and timely rather than robotic. The bilingual nature of the school was accounted for in the workflow design, with language preferences tracked at the contact level.

Throughout the implementation, we maintained close communication with the admissions team, providing walkthroughs of each configured element and incorporating their feedback before moving to the next phase. This collaborative approach ensured that the final system reflected the team's actual needs and working style.

Tech Stack

• HubSpot CRM — Configured as the central admissions management platform, including custom pipeline stages, contact properties, segmentation lists, and automated workflows

Key Deliverables

• Custom admissions pipeline — A tailored CRM pipeline reflecting the school's specific admissions stages, from initial inquiry through enrollment confirmation
• Contact segmentation — Structured segments for alumni, prospective parents, active applicants, and enrolled families, maintained automatically through list criteria
• Automated admissions workflows — Workflow sequences for inquiry acknowledgment, document reminders, interview scheduling, and status updates, reducing manual follow-up to near zero
• Pipeline monitoring dashboard — A centralized view enabling the admissions team to track all active applicants and identify bottlenecks in the process at a glance

Business Outcomes

The most significant result was a 100% improvement in admissions pipeline visibility. For the first time, the admissions team had a single, reliable view of every prospective family's status — no more digging through email threads or cross-referencing spreadsheets to determine who needed a follow-up. Leadership could review the pipeline at any point and understand exactly how many families were at each stage of the admissions process.

Automated workflows eliminated manual follow-up for routine admissions communications. Tasks that previously required staff to remember, draft, and send individual emails were now handled automatically by the system. This freed the admissions team to focus on high-value interactions — campus tours, family interviews, and personalized outreach — rather than administrative busywork.

Critically, the entire implementation was completed ahead of the upcoming admission season, meeting the school's original deadline. The admissions team entered their busiest period with a fully configured CRM rather than scrambling to manage the influx of inquiries with ad hoc tools. This timing ensured the school could immediately benefit from the improved process during the highest-volume period of the year.

The contact segmentation framework also gave the school a foundation for more strategic communications going forward, enabling targeted outreach to alumni for events and fundraising, personalized messaging for prospective families, and streamlined updates for currently enrolled parents.

What the Client Said

"From start to finish, I was very satisfied with the implementation, communication, and transparency. I can only recommend HubSpot Simplified!"

— School Administration