Aligning Marketing and Sales With HubSpot

Marketing and sales departments often feel like two ships passing in the night — even though they should be headed to the same port. It wasn’t always supposed to be this way. Marketing and Sales departments everywhere have become siloed off from each other when they each have data, knowledge, and materials that could benefit the other party. So, instead of working toward common goals they’re working on their own, creating gaps in organizational knowledge and sometimes, even a little bit of animosity. 

Previously, we wrote about the different ways that business leaders could encourage more inter-departmental harmony. Today, we’re going to discuss how one of our favorite tools at Hivehouse Digital—HubSpot, can be your secret weapon in aligning your marketing and sales teams. Let’s dive in. 

The Importance of Marketing and Sales Alignment

First, we’ll lay the groundwork and discuss why it’s so important for Sales and Marketing to work together. You know, in case you’re a rogue sales guy who received this article in your email from an obviously very smart coworker. 

Increased Business Growth

When marketing and sales align their strategies and efforts, they more effectively target and nurture leads leading to better conversion rates and thus, more sales. While marketing provides the leads and big-picture strategy, sales provides the feedback and industry knowledge. Each party’s contributions sharpen the other’s efforts. 

Improved Customer Experience

Collaboration between Sales and Marketing leads to a seamless and consistent Buyer’s Journey. Think of it this way: is there anything worse than when you’re on the phone with customer service for an internet or cell phone issue and they transfer your call over and over? That’s how an inconsistent customer experience feels, messaging constantly changes leaving the customer disoriented and dissatisfied. 

A coordinated customer experience between marketing and sales leads to established expectations that the Sales team can deliver on. 

More Efficient Resources Management

When you’re working toward common goals, it’s easier to create sales and marketing materials with the same messaging and it’s easier to share data and insights. Instead of accidentally duplicating each other’s work, each department is in line with what’s being developed, what marketing messages are being sent out, and what the current sales strategies are. 

How HubSpot Aligns Your Teams

As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, HubSpot is our CRM of choice here at Hivehouse Digital. It’s built around the idea of Inbound Marketing, which makes it one of the best weapons for B2B businesses with longer sales cycles. 

Lead Scoring

One of the biggest issues facing marketing and sales departments is lead quality. While marketing (usually) works hard to generate leads, sales teams with limited time can be picky as to which leads are actually worth pursuing. 

As the name implies, lead scoring allows sales and marketing teams to assign a score to leads — providing a quick way for both teams to assess lead quality. 

How Does Lead Scoring Work? 

One of the coolest features of HubSpot is its ability to track contacts through their entire customer journey — from a generic name or email to a life-long customer. The lead-scoring feature can even be customized to your organization. For example, as your leads download more content or continue to interact with sales, their lead score will improve. Now, your sales teams understand exactly which leads are the furthest along in their customer journey and therefore more likely to close. 

HubSpot even offers predictive lead scoring, leveraging machine learning to fully automate your lead scoring. 

Reporting & Data

Lead scoring is found in your sales dashboard along with your other chosen KPIs. The HubSpot dashboard can be customized to display the exact information your sales and marketing team creates with HubSpot’s Reporting & Data features. 

When it comes to partnerships like sales and marketing or marriage and dating, there may be nothing more valuable than communication. HubSpot’s Reporting & Data will allow each of Sales and Marketing to become completely transparent on lead performance, sales funnels, contact customer journeys, and more. 

The dashboard is where your most important information can be accessed at a glance, but as you dig deeper into all of the data stored in HubSpot you can begin generating reports. There are useful, reusable report templates as well as ways for you to create custom reports. 

Remember earlier when we were talking about common goals leading to organizational success? Another feature in the Reporting & Data section of HubSpot is HubSpot Goals. 

Extremely useful for Sales teams that track their activity in HubSpot, some common goal templates used in HubSpot are:

• Calls made
• Deals created
• Meetings booked
• Revenue

For marketing, we have goals such as: 

• Contacts from first-form submissions
• Contracts from the last ad interactions
• Number of contacts in a lifecycle stage

Of course, as is often the case with HubSpot features, you can create your own custom goals. 

Overall, HubSpot’s Goals is a useful tool that creates a common area where goals can be transparently accessed by both parties, making collaboration easier. 

Automation

Between marketing and sales activities there are a ton of repetitive tasks. Unfortunately, many of those repetitive tasks need to be communicated between the two parties to keep both abreast of progress on deals, customers, and leads. 

With HubSpot’s automation features, you’ll be able to ensure things like notifying sales of a new lead are automated — rather than waiting for marketing to send over an email. 

At Hivehouse Digital, we’re always experimenting with new ways to use HubSpot’s automation features. Some of our favorites are below.

• Automate lead scoring — We discussed this earlier, but it’s worth reiterating how easy lead scoring can be. Once your particular parameters are built (such as what you consider a sales-qualified lead) HubSpot can take it from there. 
• Notifications — From triggering a notification when a contact takes a certain action to notifications for when sales activities are completed, HubSpot’s notifications can be triggered for just about any activity your team needs to be aware of. 
• Workflows — Workflows, such as an email drip notification, can be triggered when contacts take a certain action. Imagine that — your sales team can continue to work on closing deals, while HubSpot nurtures those leads further away from closing. 

Hivehouse Can Set Up Your HubSpot for Marketing & Sales Success

As an agency full of certified HubSpot experts, we understand what it takes to transform your HubSpot CRM into a lean, mean sales and marketing facilitating machine. We have a full suite of HubSpot Support Services designed to help you optimize lead and customer engagement throughout the entire sales cycle. We can even help train your sales and marketing teams on HubSpot best practices. Check out our full offering of HubSpot services here.