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Case study

EdTech Company Scales Complex Operations with Enterprise-Wide Digital Transformation

Industry
Education, EdTech
Duration
12 weeks
Type
B2B, B2C, B2B2C
Solutions
HubSpot implementation, custom system architecture, data architecture, marketing, sales, service & support operations enablement

HubSpot products used

MarketingHub_Icon_Gradient_RGB_24px
Marketing Hub®

Enterprise (Includes 10,000 Marketing Contacts)

Product_Icon_Only_Sales_Hub
Sales Hub®

Enterprise (1 Sales Seat)

Product_Icon_Only_Service_Hub
Service Hub®

Enterprise (1 Service Seat)

Content Hub-1
Content Hub®

Enterprise

Product_Icon_Only_Operations_Hub
Data Hub®

Enterprise

commerce_hub
Commerce Hub®

Enterprise (1 Commerce Seat)

Archer Review is an education technology company supporting nursing and medical education programs that prepare students for high-stakes licensure exams such as the NCLEX and USMLE. Archer serves both individual learners and institutional partners, with its institutional business focused on nursing schools, medical schools, and multi-campus education systems.

Archer’s institutional relationships are structured around academic programs, defined cohorts of learners, and academic calendars. Institutions often contract for access across multiple start dates, programs, and years, creating long-term partnerships that evolve over time rather than one-time sales. This introduces compounding complexity across people, processes, data, and technology at every stage—with particular challenges for revenue forecasting and reporting.

As Archer’s institutional business scaled — alongside acquisitions and rapid growth — the systems supporting those partnerships no longer reflected how education programs are structured, delivered, and expanded over time.

To support continued growth, accelant partnered with Archer to redesign its enterprise systems architecture in HubSpot—aligning the platform to the realities of Archer’s go-to-market model, while creating a scalable system capable of supporting long-term growth.

 

THE CHALLENGE

At a high level, Archer—like many education companies—was pursuing two critical goals:

  • Drive top-line growth through long-term institutional partnerships built on a land-and-expand model, and direct-to-student program sales
  • Improve bottom-line performance by reducing operational friction and consolidating technology costs

The overarching blocker?

Their operating model is inherently complex. A single relationship can span multiple campuses, programs, academic calendars, and learner cohorts—each with different start dates, commitments, and renewal dynamics. Growth does not come from simple account expansion, but from adding cohorts, programs, and years of access over time.

As Archer grew, this complexity began to create material business risk:

  • Leadership lacked a clear, trusted view of institutional exposure across programs, campuses, and academic terms—making it difficult to confidently forecast revenue or plan ahead.
  • Expansion opportunities existed within current partners, but were hard to see holistically, slowing Archer’s ability to systematically grow accounts over multiple years.
  • Critical academic moments—program launches, cohort starts, invoicing, and renewals—relied on manual handoffs and institutional memory, increasing the risk of delivery issues that could erode trust with schools.
  • Operational costs continued to rise as disconnected systems and workarounds multiplied, limiting the efficiency gains needed to support profitable growth.

 

THE SOLUTION

The goal was to translate Archer’s business model—institutions, programs, and cohorts—into a scalable operating system that supports long-term partnerships with students and universities alike.

System Architecture

accelant designed a centralized HubSpot CRM architecture to serve as Archer’s marketing, sales, and service home base. This enabled all teams to operate from a shared data model built on unified customer and account records rather than disconnected tools or workflows.

Archer Tech Stack - Architecture (1)

Key architectural decisions included:

  • HubSpot CRM as the core data layer for contacts, companies, deals, and tickets.
  • Custom objects and properties to reflect Archer-specific workflows and data requirements like student Cohorts
  • Standardized lifecycle stages and handoffs across marketing, sales, and service
  • Modular workflows designed to scale as Archer grows or introduces new business lines

This architecture ensures data flows seamlessly across teams, so every interaction informs the next.

AI Reporting Agent

Archer implemented custom AI reporting agents to transform CRM data into clear, narrative insights for leadership and board reporting.

Instead of manually analyzing dashboards, the agents summarize what happened in the business and explain why deals were won using both structured data and conversation insights. This enables faster, more consistent reporting while uncovering patterns that may otherwise be missed.

Another agent prepared a quarterly Board summary, allowing the CRO to spend his time on strategy instead of data analysis.

As a result, Archer gains a deeper understanding of performance drivers and can make more informed strategic decisions.

 

Marketing
Improving Lead Quality, Targeting, and Revenue Attribution

accelant implemented a full-funnel marketing engine within HubSpot to address limited visibility into lead quality and unclear attribution between marketing activity and revenue.

Key implementations included:

  • Buyer intent signals to identify schools actively researching Archer’s programs

  • Automated lead capture through HubSpot forms and landing pages
  • Advanced segmentation using lists and custom properties
  • Lead nurture workflows aligned to Archer’s buyer journey
  • Campaign tracking and attribution tied directly to revenue
  • Marketing dashboards to visualize funnel performance and ROI, enabling clearer insight into which efforts influenced pipeline and revenue

HubSpot ICP Assistant

The HubSpot ICP Assistant was used to help Archer validate and refine their marketing and sales messaging against clearly defined ideal customer profiles.

By leveraging pre-built ICP data, the team could test content—such as pitches and collateral—by “role-playing” as target buyers and receiving feedback aligned to their priorities. This provided a reliable way to strengthen messaging before it reached prospects, especially in a complex education market with varied personas.

As a result, Archer reduced risk in content development while improving consistency, relevance, and overall go-to-market effectiveness.

 

Sales
Creating Account Clarity and Real-Time Pipeline Visibility

accelant configured HubSpot as a sales execution platform to address inconsistent account data, manual deal tracking, and limited real-time pipeline visibility.

Key implementations included:

  • Revenue management design. Alignment of quoting and proposal processes within the CRM

  • Customized deal pipelines mapped to Archer’s real-world sales stages

  • Customized lead pipelines for prospect tracking and outreach
  • Automated task creation, reminders, and deal progression
  • Sales dashboards showing pipeline health, velocity, and conversion metrics, reducing administrative overhead and providing leadership with consistent performance insight

Custom Account Mapping Agent

The Custom Account Mapping Agent was developed for Archer to automate the creation of complex account hierarchies within the education sector, where each institution contains multiple schools, programs, and buyer groups.

Instead of manually researching and building these structures, the agent analyzes a company’s website and generates a full account map, including parent–child relationships and associated records directly in HubSpot. This significantly reduces the time and effort required to understand the total addressable market and ensures more accurate account coverage.

As a result, Archer can scale prospecting and sales efforts more efficiently while gaining deeper visibility into each account’s structure and opportunity potential.

Company Research Agent (Prospecting Intelligence)

The HubSpot Company Research Agent was used to automatically analyze new companies entering Archer’s CRM and generate tailored insights for sales outreach.

By applying custom instructions aligned to Archer’s offerings, the agent identifies likely customer needs, relevant solutions, and key buying signals before a rep engages. This replaces time-intensive manual research and equips sales teams with actionable context at the start of every interaction.

As a result, Archer can deliver more informed, relevant outreach while improving efficiency across the sales process.

 

Service
Enabling Context-Rich, Efficient Customer Support

accelant implemented HubSpot Service Hub to solve fragmented service workflows and limited visibility into customer history by unifying support and success operations within the same platform used by sales and marketing.

Key implementations included:

  • Customer Success Workspace to help managers proactively manage account risks or opportunities
  • Centralized ticketing with automated intake and routing
  • SLA tracking with priority-based workflows
  • Knowledge base creation for internal and customer self-service
  • Customer feedback surveys tied directly to CRM records
  • Escalation workflows to ensure timely resolution

This approach gave service teams full lifecycle visibility while improving the speed, consistency, and quality of customer support.

 

THE OUTCOMES

By redesigning its institutional operating foundation around how education actually works, Archer is now positioned to grow more predictably, operate more efficiently, and scale long-term institutional partnerships without adding proportional complexity.

Predictable land-and-expand growth within institutions

With institutions, programs, and cohorts clearly modeled, Archer can now see where revenue growth truly comes from—not just new logos, but expansion within existing partners over time.

The business can confidently identify and plan for:

  • New cohorts within existing programs
  • Expansion into additional programs or campuses
  • Multi-year renewals aligned to academic calendars

This transforms growth from reactive account management into an intentional, repeatable land-and-expand motion that scales across academic years.

Reduced operational and delivery risk at critical academic moments

Education businesses face their highest risk at transitions—program launches, cohort starts, invoicing, renewals, and handoffs between teams. Archer now operates with clarity and consistency at these moments.

Leadership and frontline teams share a common understanding of:

  • What has been sold, to whom, and for which academic terms
  • When programs and cohorts are launching and renewing
  • Where delivery, renewal, or concentration risk exists early—before it becomes a customer issue

This reduces operational fragility while protecting institutional trust and educational outcomes.

Reclaimed roughly $15k in annual tech spend and 2k data entry hours

 As part of establishing a single, reliable operating foundation, Archer reduced reliance on fragmented tools and manual intermediaries that previously obscured visibility and introduced operational risk. 

  • Direct Technology Cost Optimization: Saved an estimated $15,000 annually through a strategic combination of outright tool elimination and aggressive license/tier rightsizing of remaining platforms.
  • Operational Capacity Reclaimed: Eliminated an estimated 1,500+ hours annually of manual data entry, disconnected quote generation, and spreadsheet maintenance—effectively reallocating tens of thousands of dollars in labor capacity back toward revenue-generating activities.

Platforms reduced, replaced, or deprioritized include Brevo, Google Sheets, Excel, Monday.com, Microsoft Word, Power BI and Coefficient, third-party integration tools (e.g., Zapier-style automation), ad hoc tools and individual productivity apps.

Other tools such as Docusign, accounting systems, and event software were retained where appropriate, but no longer function as sources of institutional truth.

Beyond tool consolidation, Archer also avoided future tech stack sprawl by embedding critical workflows—reporting, automation, scheduling, and data transformation—directly within HubSpot rather than layering on additional point solutions.

Improved leadership visibility and decision-making

For the first time, Archer leadership can view institutional performance and exposure at the same “altitude” used to run an education organization—across systems, campuses, programs, and cohorts.

This enables more confident decisions around:

  • Revenue forecasting and planning
  • Institutional concentration and risk management
  • Resource allocation across sales, onboarding, and customer success

Strategic conversations are now grounded in a shared, inspectable view of institutional reality rather than spreadsheets and narrative interpretation.

A scalable foundation for profitability and future growth

By consolidating systems and standardizing core workflows, Archer has reduced software cost and operational drag that previously grew alongside revenue. Teams spend less time reconciling data and more time executing against strategic priorities.

Just as importantly, the new foundation is built to scale:

  • Supporting future program launches, campuses, and institutional expansions
  • Accommodating acquisitions without requiring another operational rebuild
  • Enabling AI-assisted workflows grounded in accurate institutional and academic context

Together, this positions Archer to increase revenue, improve margins, and adapt to a rapidly evolving education landscape—while maintaining the rigor and trust required for long-term institutional partnerships.