What's the Best CRM for Higher Education?

Wondering about which CRM is the best for higher ed? 

The HubSpot CRM freemium pricing model is ideal for universities as a large number of free CRM seats can be combined with a smaller number of paid seats for the premium features in HubSpot Sales Hub (and potentially HubSpot Marketing Hub and HubSpot Service Hub).

This ability to combine free and paid seats in the same portal/instance is a relatively unique pricing model in the marketing/sales SaaS industry.

HubSpot CRM can be used to

• track contacts at various lifecycle stages
• manage tasks
• log activity automatically (email activity, meetings, and calls)
• connect the dots between contacts, companies, and deals
• streamline communications with email templates
• be the single-source-of-truth for all communications logged in one central place

There are also dozens of native integrations with CRM that could be exceptionally valuable to universities (including surveys, webinars, and eCommerce apps).

On the academic side, HubSpot has also been a big supporter of higher education for the past several years with its HubSpot's Education Partner Program -- which provides professors with resources to help teach courses on marketing and sales topics.

So marketing students can learn highly valuable skills for CRM implementation as part of their core curriculum.

Do you work in higher education? Are you trying to identify the best CRM for your college or university? What options are you considering? What are your primary criteria? Let me know in the comments below.