Almost a rookie here (used the free version for a long time but mainly as contact manager and tech information storage) that is now having to move up. This is going to be a touch long so I apologize (watch, I get spanked for this).
I am the new Sales Manager ( really the 1st, and 1st ever true "sales person") for a small companion animal training related publishing company that is really more a holding company for several web properties. We have a blog where we give animal raising/training advice; We sell training books and DVDs online to the public via our website and also thru Amazon, and in bulk to large vet clinics and schools; and we offer online continuing education credit and certification courses for Vet Med and pet care professionals, which is one of our main focuses now.
We currently use Hubspot but haven't found it easy to use except for mass mailings and it sucks as a contact DB. In Hubspot we have the over 1000 students we have had go through our courses or are currently going through, as well as over 52,000 people who have filled out a form to get something free from one of our over 40 "inbound marketing" "landing pages" (I didn't do this! lol). Those last folks
are
potential buyers of our products but I would say that 99% of the ones that would buy something are going to be 1 time book/DVD buyers and not anything substantial.
Our main focus right now is a particular 6 month online certification course for Vets, Vet Techs, Dog/Cat trainers and groomers. These people may or may not be going through the course on their own (vs for their clinic/hospital/business) so there may be no "company name" associated with them. We are also looking at selling the course in bulk to Vet/Vet Tech schools, large vet med corporations and larger private clinics/hospitals. The schools of course would be educating/certifying new vets and techs and the clinics and corporations would be getting their employees certified so that they themselves (the hospital/clinic) can be "accredited". These would be our actual
"accounts" I would think but would have to have a way of linking my new custom "student" module to the accounts that have graduates working for them so that we can see if a particular account has the requisite number of graduates for the account to reach accreditation level.
The last twist is that we also need to use this program for a Contact DB with a place for partners, service providers, content contributors and the like so that the staff here has a common place to look for contact info.
What would be the best way to set this up? I don't want to dump all 52,000 Hubspot "leads" ($15-$30 single purchases maybe) into "Leads" in Zoho as they would clutter up my real leads so I need to have a place where I put them and still mine them for potential larger sales (we would continue to market to them of course, likely through Hubspot). I also need a place to put
potential students ($2-$400 single purchase) so I don't lose them, but when they do buy a course, they don't become an "account"... With my accounts, if they are a school doing hundreds of students, I don't need to see those students affiliated with the school ( I can filter that in my "student" module I hope) but for those "accounts" that are vet clinic/hospitals/etc that have to have a certain percentage of their employees certified in our program to be "accredited", I need to be able to easily look at that account and see the names of students (from the custom student module) that have completed the courses.
I guess the questions are:
1) how would you lay this out?
2) What do I do with the 52,000 prospects/leads/form fillers from Hubspot? New Module? If so, can I convert them to real Zoho "Leads" in the future w/o having to reenter them?
3) Where to put single course student prospects so that they don't become an "account" when they sign up
4) Can I tie completed students from my custom student module to an account in the account module?
5) Where is the best place to put other contacts such as service provides, partners, content creators, researchers, etc?
Clear as mud? If you made it this far, Thanks!