Accelerating sales and marketing excellence with HubSpot for Pro Football Academy
Pro Football Academy is on track to become the UK's largest sports-training company, scaling fast across new regions and evolving from a football-training business towards a broader media business over the next two to three years.
The sales and marketing operation ran on a custom, in-house platform built and maintained in-house over more than ten years, a system that could not scale and had become the business's biggest operational risk.
HubSpot is now utilised by the business to run its sales and marketing operations.
The Challenge
A decade on one platform“One aging platform carried the whole business.”
Pro Football Academy started small, running a modest number of trainings across the UK, and the custom platform built for them worked well at that size. But the business has scaled rapidly. It now trains over 13,000 players a week worldwide and has expanded into Spain, the UAE, and the United States, and the decade-old system was never built for that scale or for those markets.
The sales and marketing platform could no longer keep pace. Because the operation ran on a single bespoke system, everything the company did was concentrated in one aging platform that was never designed for this volume or for multiple regions. For a business growing this fast, that concentration was a risk.
Replacing it with a scalable sales and marketing platform was essential to the company's next phase.
Everything the company did was concentrated in one aging platform.
They needed more than a new tool. They needed a hands-on partner who could communicate and execute quickly, and who could de-risk the technology to make the business ready to scale.
The Game Plan
Approach & solutionWe started on site, not behind a screen.
A phased migration with HubSpot at the center, built on trust, mapped in person, and rolled out without a risky big-bang switch.
We flew to PFA HQ and whiteboarded the customer communication flows together, mapping how the sales and marketing operation should run once off the legacy platform. Working through it in person earned the trust to replace a system they had relied on for a decade, and surfaced detail a remote audit would miss.
From that discovery we designed a phased migration to avoid a risky big-bang switch on a business training over 13,000 players a week, with HubSpot at the center and best-of-breed app partners handling the channels the old platform could not, each integrated into HubSpot rather than built as fragile one-off code.
The replatform of sales and marketing operations to HubSpot is now complete. In HubSpot they now have:
We bridged in specialist systems so Pro Football Academy gained capabilities the old platform lacked, while keeping everything connected through HubSpot:
SinchFor SMS and RCS messaging, with two-way conversations routing into HubSpot and SMS fallback for reliable delivery.
AircallFor calling, integrated directly into the workspace.
PFA's own appTheir in-house developer connects the app to HubSpot through the API, using a caching design that keeps the integration comfortably within HubSpot's daily API limits.
The Results
Before vs. afterThe change to sales and marketing was significant.
Before, they had no way to run marketing campaigns at all and almost no visibility into their own data. To work out who to call, who to follow up with, and which customers were at risk, the team exported CSV files and manually cross-checked spreadsheets. It took a lot of time, and even then customers slipped through unnoticed.
Drag the slider to compare the legacy platform with life on HubSpot
They can create and send marketing campaigns nativelysomething the legacy platform could never do, using HubSpot's Breeze AI to generate the copy for landing pages and emails.
Live reporting and dashboards have replaced the spreadsheet cross-checking, giving the team a clear, real-time view of customer health for the first time.
Follow-up and at-risk outreach now runs as an automated, task-based system driven by HubSpot data, so the right people are contacted at the right time.
Communications across email, SMS, and RCS are consolidated in one place.
No way to run marketing campaigns at all.
Almost no visibility into their own data.
Exported CSV files and manually cross-checked spreadsheets.
Customers slipped through unnoticed.
Together this freed up a lot of the team's time and significantly reduced the risk of customers falling through the cracks.
The Impact
The season aheadA platform that keeps compounding in value.
The migration is already changing what the business is capable of. PFA now runs its sales and marketing day-to-day operations on HubSpot at the scale they have grown into, training over 13,000 players a week worldwide, on a platform built for that volume.
The sales and marketing core now lives on HubSpot and supported app partners, and PFA's own developer is free to build on top of that platform, including their academy app. That has already made the business far more robust and easier to run and scale as the team grows, and it removes its biggest structural risk.
Consolidating onto HubSpot also gives Pro Football Academy the clean, unified foundation that makes AI usablewhich the fragmented legacy system could never support. With every conversation now in a single inbox across email, SMS, RCS, and other channels, they are set up to layer AI into how they handle a high volume of messages as they scale.
Every conversation in a single place, the foundation that makes layering in AI possible as they scale.
Introducing HubSpot to our sales and marketing team has been transformational. It has given them greater visibility across the whole customer journey and allowed us to tailor communications more effectively.
