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Sales and Marketing Alignment HubSpot CRM
How Can You Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment While Leveraging Hubspot’s Key Capabilities?
How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment While Leveraging Hubspot’s Key Capabilities?
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How to Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment While Leveraging HubSpot’s Key Capabilities?
Today’s market conditions and ever-changing customer needs mean that your business must work twice as hard to secure quality leads and close high-profit sales. Keeping the pace with trends in buyer behavior and being more agile and streamlined can be easily achieved through smarketing (sales and marketing) alignment.
All too often, marketing and sales teams operate under their own steam rather than in tandem, relying on siloed systems, working towards independent KPIs, and failing to share the insights.
Sales and marketing alignment should be your top priority since whenever these two separate functions work together, your organization can enjoy improved efficiency and skyrocketing sales. In fact, tightly combining the two can increase your deal closing rate by 67% and your revenue by 209%.
Have no idea where to begin? Keep reading to learn about the importance of smarketing alignment and how HubSpot, a cloud-based CRM tool developed for sales and marketing teams, can help you achieve it.
Why Aligning Sales and Marketing Is Critical?
There are several reasons why the two functions must be attuned. However, we believe that it is more valuable to explore what happens when the sales and marketing teams are misaligned.
Low-Quality Leads
The number one symptom of the dissonance between sales and marketing is poor-quality leads. Only 56% of B2B marketers verify leads before passing them to the sales team. Lack of data sharing and clear focus between both departments often results in wasted time and resources chasing poor-fit prospects that do not have sufficient budgets to purchase your product or service. Consequently, your company’s growth is stalling, revenues are shrinking, and the gap between sales and marketing is widening ever further.
Customers Are not Engaging With Marketing Content
Your marketing team might be highly effective at bringing in inbound traffic, but that does not mean that leads are converting. When was the last time your sales and marketing departments sat together to create an ideal customer profile?
Marketers are undeniably savvy with the latest trends in the industry, but to understand the actual pain points and struggles of your prospects, you must engage your sales department. They are the ones closest to the customer; thus, their insight could help sharpen marketing efforts and bring high-quality leads with sufficient budgets behind them.
Sales and Marketing Are Unaware of One Other’s Activities
Often, both teams rely on separate software to do their jobs without cross-referencing or interacting at regular intervals.
Likewise, their motivators, KPIs, and goals are distinct: salespeople are driven by commissions earned from high-ticket deals, whereas marketers are concerned with engagement metrics and lead generation tactics.
However, your sales team cannot sell without igniting consumer interest in your products or services, and your marketers are unable to do their job without the input of the sales – it must work both ways.
Longer Sales Cycles
Long sales cycles, particularly in B2B business, mean that securing high-caliber clients is challenging, especially if your sales and marketing departments are approaching the leads out of sync. Teams that are not used to sharing data and having solid workflows and communication channels have low chances of converting customers.
Sales and marketing alignment not only unifies leadership and improves efficiency, but it can also simplify workflows and creates better customer experiences by using shared tools like the HubSpot CRM.
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How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams Using HubSpot?
Unifying both teams towards the same goal of nurturing and closing quality leads requires addressing communication and workflow pitfalls.
Start With the CRM Platform
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform is the backbone of every business, as that is where all the customer information is stored. Shared access to the system allows marketing and sales teams to improve communications, gain access to deeper insights, avoid duplicate efforts, and increase lead quality.
Using a CRM Platform like HubSpot’s CRM Software, you can allow sales and marketing users to get complete visibility into the common KPIs and customer journey/sales funnel while capturing more leads through personalized marketing communications.
The platform improves your marketers’ and sales team’s collaboration capacity, as users can effortlessly access real-time order histories, sales activities, and marketing insights. In addition, the sales department can access relevant marketing materials all in one place, while marketers can use consumer data to fine-tune future marketing initiatives.
Agree on Lead Management and Nurturing Process.
Leads are the common thread and the reason for discontentment between marketing and sales. But it does not have to be that way.
To start, get marketing and sales together so they can work on defining the set of baseline criteria for the leads. Sales teams’ intel here is instrumental, as they are on the ground, talking to customers and developing a deep understanding of what genuinely resonates with them.
Once you know your ideal customer precisely, it is time to utilize HubSpot’s Lead Management Software. This tool allows marketers to assign both positive and negative points to contact properties, firmographics, and behaviors and create mutual workflows so that both marketing qualified (MQL) sales qualified (SQL) leads can be sent directly to the sales team to act upon.
Furthermore, it is crucial to ensure that sales and marketing teams touch base on a regular basis. Having a solid feedback loop means that the sales team can report on the current lead scoring approach and the effectiveness of the tactics. At the same time, marketers can work on adjusting the criteria accordingly.
Multi-touch Attribution Reports
Data is fragmented and content is distributed across many platforms, meaning that customers engage with your business via multiple touchpoints. Thus, it has become challenging to attribute which piece of content or interaction has resulted in a conversion.
HubSpot’s Attribution Reports systemize all relevant interactions from your buyer’s journey together using pre-built models that can conclusively identify which channels and content are helping you accomplish your marketing and revenue goals.
Has a lead entered the sales pipeline through inbound marketing with no sales involved or followed by a sales activity? Was the deal closed by an outbound sales representative with the marketing team’s support or just by marketing alone?
Regardless of the variation, HubSpot Attribution Reports allow you to track an entire customer journey and, most importantly, help your marketing and sales teams to correlate their efforts and see how they translate into sales.
On that account, both departments can enhance their strategic planning processes and develop highly accurate sales forecasts and more nuanced marketing initiatives.
Aligning for Success
Bringing both teams on the same page could be challenging. Still, with the existence of sales and marketing tools, such as HubSpot, you can enable your sales and marketing teams to work with more efficient communication, transparency, and trust, which should create strong sales collateral and encourage critical growth.
At CiiAction, our certified and well-versed HubSpot consulting and end-to-end implementation team can help you make the most of the HubSpot platform. Our goal is to automate more value for your business while carefully crafting and proposing solutions that truly reflect your company’s goals and address your pain points.
If HubSpot sales and marketing alignment seem daunting, reach out today, and we will be happy to take care of it for you.
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Sales and Marketing Alignment HubSpot
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