TIAS School for Business and Society (interim)

TIAS operates in a dynamic market for academic and post-academic education. Professionals expect relevant content before sales contact and increasingly compare providers on societal impact, academic quality and applicability. At the same time, TIAS aims to grow in revenue, reputation and meaning, and to secure a leading position in Europe.

The original question focuses on marketing effectiveness and lead generation, but strategic dialogue reveals a broader challenge. The commercial approach is highly product- and department-driven, outbound-oriented and insufficiently aligned with the customer journey. Marketing, sales, program management and technology largely operate in silos, while growth requires coherence, data and clear choices.

From the role of interim head of marketing and sales, we therefore develop an integrated vision for commercial and digital transformation. The starting point is clear: everything is branding. Customer experience is central, data informs decisions, technology enables scale, and content feeds the relationship with the market. Marketing is no longer a campaign instrument, but a structural growth mechanism that adds value at every stage of the funnel.

This strategy translates into a shift from an almost exclusively outbound model to an inbound marketing and sales approach. Buyer personas form the basis for content, activation and follow-up. The funnel is redesigned from awareness to decision, with clear definitions of leads, MQLs, SQLs and opportunities, and shared responsibility between marketing and sales in the middle of the funnel.

HubSpot is implemented as the central platform for inbound marketing, sales and CRM. Workflows, email flows, landing pages, content, dashboards and pipeline insight come together in one system. This creates control over processes, real-time management information and the ability to steer on data rather than assumptions.

The embedding of the strategy is not only in tooling, but primarily in organization and ways of working. The focus shifts  from product thinking to customer journeys, and from separate departments to multidisciplinary collaboration. Marketing and sales now operate from one shared growth framework, aligned with TIAS’s positioning as School for Business and Society and its societal ambition.