Break the ice with HubSpot sales and marketing alignment and automation
What’s the worst that can happen to a business when it comes to achieving its growth objectives? The answer is – sales and marketing do not work in tandem, which can mean they are working at cross-purposes with one another or in silos.
McKinsey says that most businesses do not grow and between 2010 and 2019, only 1 in eight businesses achieved 10% growth.
As a business, you need to make a concerted effort to reduce all barriers that impact growth and misalignment between marketing and sales is one of them.
Importance of marketing and sales team working in alignment
There is a direct link between increased revenue and better marketing and sales alignment. This is because both teams do not work exclusively with each other and use each other’s strengths to ensure targeted messaging, achieve better quality leads, improve conversion rates and shorten the sales cycle.
The buying behaviour of both B2B and B2C customers is not set in stone. It constantly evolves and the marketing and sales strategies should evolve accordingly. It, therefore, becomes imperative that marketing and sales walk in step, with marketing enabling sales at each stage of the sales cycle to ensure leads are targeted in a personalised manner. The focus should be on creating the right story while nurturing deals which resonate with the lead/prospect and encourage purchase action. This can only happen with marketing and sales teams working well together.
Markers of marketing and sales non-alignment
Before you start acting on the misalignment or non-alignment of your sales marketing teams, it is essential to identify the signs that point to both teams not being on the same page. Let’s take a closer look at what these are:
MQL is King
If your marketing team evaluates its performance solely on the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) it can achieve in a month, then there is an apparent misalignment with sales. According to Salesforce, only 13% of MQLs convert into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and 6% turn into deals. The underlying challenge is that sales must convert leads into paying customers. So, it makes sense that your MQLs are such that they have a better chance of transforming into a Sales Qualified Lead, which can then translate into an opportunity, ending in a closed sale. If this doesn’t happen, low-quality leads are passed to sales and they find it near impossible to achieve favourable outcomes on those leads. This results in a clash between two teams critical of driving business growth.
Zero synergy
Have you been on those sales-marketing sync calls, realising there is no sync between the two teams? The call typically ends sourly, with team members accusing each other of not doing their jobs well. This happens because sync calls are the only time the teams interact with one another and key team members have little clarity on what the other side wants to achieve and why it wants to go on a specific path instead of another. When this happens, sales messaging does not appear like a natural progression of marketing messaging. Also, both departments are on the same page regarding lead scoring, which defines lead quality. There is no discussion on how a lead must be scored and how it needs to progress through the funnel, the kind of messaging it must be targeted with, and the nurturing process taking cognisance of the revenue from the lead.
It’s a competition
Are you trying to go one up over the sales or marketing teams? Are you always trying to show that the quality of the leads is bad or sales don’t know their job, impacting deal close rates? The situation sometimes gets so bad that the sales team starts taking its own campaign and content decisions, which can appear to conflict with the marketing campaigns. E.g., sales might execute a campaign for cold leads that sales had interacted with previously but have been cold for quite a while. Marketing might feel that such cold leads deserve to be woken up with personalised messaging under their purview, resulting in a conflict that can best be avoided.
Fixing the problem
There are no quick-fix solutions to fixing the sales and marketing problem and getting the teams to work seamlessly with one another. But it all begins with communication and listening to one another. Marketers must understand that their job at its core is not just branding but about becoming a key facilitator of achieving revenue targets; this means they should be able to pass on the highest quality leads to sales and make sure their campaigns can accelerate sales pipelines. Sales enablement is a crucial aspect of marketing; therefore, continuous meaningful interaction is the way forward.
Moreover, you should be able to identify clear, measurable outcomes that both departments can get behind. Typically, sales are under tremendous pressure to achieve their targets and marketers need to get an idea of these targets and work with the sales team to formulate targeted campaigns that can help achieve sales goals.
Also, it is imperative that both functions work with clean data, monitor results from campaigns, keep track of campaign iterations and ensure they stay on top of each other’s activities but do not interfere. This helps maintain much-needed transparency.
How does HubSpot help?
HubSpot is a platform that can be an ideal unifier for your sales and marketing efforts. It has two major components, the marketing hub and the sales hub:
- HubSpot helps you keep track of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) through dashboards that both sales and marketing can access. Users from marketing and sales are kept updated about campaign progress and results from the campaigns, which are updated in real-time. This ensures alignment of the parameters that matter to both sales and marketing and to the organisations as a whole.
- With HubSpot, the marketing content calendar and campaigns can be aligned with the revenue targets (dependent on sales). This tells the sales team that the marketing messaging is aligned with the sales outreach processes and the results can be monitored through the platform.
- Another critical area where HubSpot helps is by aligning lifecycle stages (marketing) and deal stages (sales). By using ‘Lead Status’, a customisable property within HubSpot CRM, marketing and sales can stay on top of any lead in the buying process, whether new, open, in-progress, open deal or unqualified. In addition, the status of the lead can be customised in a manner that makes more sense for both marketing and sales, e.g., ‘hot’, ‘warm’, ‘priority’, ‘low priority’ and so on. For example, if sales mark the lead as a top priority, marketing automatically knows the contact must be moved out of a nurturing campaign. This results in closer alignment.
- With HubSpot sales and marketing, you have access to unified data that can act as a single source of truth to analyse the success or failure of campaigns and show the way forward. There is scope for subjective arguments as data-driven analysis helps deliver objective conclusions. The alignment will be far smoother with sales and marketing using accurate data.
The idea behind using HubSpot for marketing and sales is to automate repetitive tasks, access and use accurate data to gain outcomes-focused insights and ensure that all marketing and sales activities work perfectly. Therefore, your focus must be to maximise the potential of this CRM tool to achieve the alignment you need.
The benefits of HubSpot marketing and sales Hub
Have you heard about smarketing?
It is a process that closely aligns sales with marketing, leveraging an integrated approach to achieve business goals.
With HubSpot, you are giving your marketing and sales teams the benefits of marketing and sales hubs to empower smarketing. You can access an advanced toolset that helps you collaborate better, thus reducing internal conflict and getting sales and marketing on the same page to achieve business goals using a consolidated sales and marketing strategy.
With HubSpot marketing and sales hubs, you benefit from the following:
- Readily available and always accessible meaningful data that facilitates data-driven decision-making to improve customer experiences, achieve pre-determined business outcomes and boost strategic visibility across marketing and sales.
- Brand messaging that is unified across sales and marketing enabling both functions to deliver personalised content across the customer journey that is best placed to deliver more value.
- Focused automation helps you create and execute automated outreach strategies through the various lifecycle and deal stages; this improves efficiency, productivity and accelerates go-to-market.
- Improved team unity as they get behind a single source of truth delivered through marketing and sales hubs, which ensures they can stay on top of the needs of customers.
- Real-time monitoring or marketing strategies to measure the ROI of all sales and marketing activities; getting a ringside view of success and failures helps iterate strategy on the go.
The most significant benefit of marketing and sales hubs is that they can align marketing and sales functions by centralising operations in a single solution.
Conclusion
When it comes to marketing and sales alignment, there are no halfway measures and you cannot take chances. This is where HubSpot enters the picture to help marketing and sales think together, action their thinking and achieve desired results.
Why TransFunnel?
The right marketing solution provider like TransFunnel can help you with sales and marketing. Our experts give training on how to bring sales and marketing efforts on the same page within HubSpot to achieve one common goal.
Leverage HubSpot to align sales and marketing with us!
