Marketing and sales teams are understanding that they need to align their KPIs and goals to be successful.
In fact, when sales and marketing teams work together, companies see 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates, according to HubSpot.
But planning and mutual agreements can only get you so far. You need the technology to share lead progress and create strong lead funnel stages.
Maybe the biggest case of untapped potential for HubSpot users is creating automation to help marketing and sales teams work cohesively in lead management. For example, HubSpot gives you the power to build "workflows," or automation sequences, simply and easily to manage leads at different stages.
HubSpot's tools allow you to identify, sort, and create action steps for leads in your database automatically. Here are 6 ways to automate your marketing and sales alignment with HubSpot, helping you achieve better lead management, cooperation between marketing and sales, and a higher probability of closing deals.
What is a lead? The answer to this question can differ between marketing and sales teams, causing hostility and reducing the impact that both teams can make together. Marketing and sales teams need to agree on a common definition of a qualified lead. For example, you may agree that a sales lead has submitted information and works at a company with at least 100 employees, has the job seniority of Manager and above, and oversees a specific department.
But when you're collecting leads, it can take a long time to qualify them if you're doing lead prospecting by hand. Thankfully automation tools can help.
Start by standardizing each qualifying question so you have no open-ended fields. If each lead gives a unique answer, you cannot automate. Therefore standardizing lead information allows you to sort, organize, and qualify new contacts automatically with HubSpot. Nearly every form answer on your lead capture forms should be a drop-down menu of preselected answers, and each option should contribute to either "qualified" or "nonqualified."
By creating a workflow, you can then assign qualified leads to a sales rep and alert them to the new lead. Or if a new contact is not qualified, you can assign unqualified leads elsewhere, like HR for hiring or to a partnership program.
This makes sure all leads have a timely follow-up and that nobody falls between the cracks.
Marketing and sales teams must both have access to real-time information to see all the leads being generated in the funnel. That way everyone can know progress to goals, and all can mobilize if the goal will not be met for the month.
Once you've established your baseline for a qualified lead, you can create smart lists in HubSpot to bucket leads meeting this criterion. For example, a list called "marketing qualified leads" can include trait 1 + trait 2 + trait 3. (Tip: You can then easily update the leads' Lifecycle Stage property in bulk with a workflow for this list.)
This list becomes your primary place to see real-time progress to your goals. And marketing and sales teams can review this list regularly to see the leads who came in, and which campaigns brought them.
With this transparency, marketing teams earn more support for their work. And they gain more insights into how their campaigns are having an impact on sales outcomes.
Marketing teams work hard to build their contact lists. Not every new contact is sales qualified, but marketing teams often still keep their email lists engaged over time. So what happens when an existing marketing contact engages with a campaign? For example, what if a high-value lead downloads an eBook on your website, or clicks on an advertisement from your remarketing campaign?
With HubSpot, you can automate an internal email to tell the account owner about the activity. In this manner, you share intelligence between marketing and sales efforts. And you also enable a more timely, relevant, and tailored outreach based on a person's actions.
Similar to a lead engaging with a campaign, your sales team should know when a hot lead or a new prospect revisits your website. This can prompt an outreach from your sales team that is well-timed.
HubSpot has out-of-the-box prospect revisit notifications that you can simply turn on for the sales team. Then sales representatives can see a daily prospect digest and tailor their tasks for the day accordingly, like making calls or sending emails to active companies.
You can also create your own automated notification, such as an email that alerts a particular sales rep any time a high-value lead visits your pricing or demo pages.
Transparency is just as important for sales teams to have as for marketers. Marketers must see the impact of the campaigns they are generating and trace them to the final deal, whether it is closed or lost. This is called closed-loop marketing, and it is important to help you make results-driven marketing decisions.
With HubSpot, sales teams can easily use the Deal Pipeline feature with custom deal stages to show progress of leads in the sales process. This will show marketers the percentage of their leads who close and those who don't progress past a certain point. And by assessing the leads who close, marketing can reveal which campaigns brought those leads in the first place. This helps marketing optimize their efforts to bring even more high-value leads.
If the sale doesn't go well, teams can use the benefits of remarketing. Once the deal is marked "closed lost," "unqualified," or another equivalent within your funnel, you can create a workflow to enroll those leads back into a remarketing campaign.
This campaign might be a series of emails that re-engage the person until they are more ready to buy. It's helpful to keep in touch with lost opportunities because circumstances change. However, without automating this process, some very important deals can fall through the cracks.
A marketing and sales alignment is very important to agree on KPIs and share insights. However, with a tool like HubSpot, you can take lead intelligence and management to the next level. Use HubSpot workflows and prebuilt tools to keep transparency and notify teams where leads are at in the funnel. Both your marketing and sales teams will work better, faster, and more effectively to close deals.
Sources
HubSpot, 20 Stats That Prove the Power of Sales and Marketing Synchronization, updated 2017
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