Effective sales and marketing alignment is proven to increase revenue by 208%. That's quite a nice revenue jump!
The benefits of having your sales and marketing teams work together are very clear: your marketing team draws in the clients your sales team actually wants to deal with, and your sales team can help your marketing team optimize their efforts to draw in those qualified leads.
Aligning sales and marketing makes for a seamless, effective sales cycle that is shorter and has a higher success rate. Ready to learn more?
Yes, it's clear that sales and marketing alignment is a must, but there's not much information about practical application.
You obviously need to facilitate communication between both teams, but short of having so many meetings that no one has time to do actual work, it's tough to figure out how to get everyone on the same page. That's where HubSpot comes in!
As an inbound marketing growth agency, our potential clients often ask, "What is HubSpot, and how can it help us align our sales and marketing teams?"
For companies that need a CRM and are hoping to work towards closer sales and marketing alignment, we recommend HubSpot. While we know CRMs aren't perfect for everyone, HubSpot is our favorite option for qualified clients who need something to get their sales and marketing teams on the same page.
If you've been weighing your CRM options, here's a rundown of how HubSpot works and how it can help align your sales and marketing teams.
One of the biggest killers of sales and marketing alignment is a failure to communicate. What is the best way to fix it? Intuitive, practical communication.
It doesn't make sense to set up a meeting every time something new happens with a lead or prospect, but you do need to have open lines of communication between both teams so no leads fall through the cracks.
HubSpot helps by offering two CRMs: one designed specifically for marketing teams and one specifically for sales teams. What's awesome about HubSpot is that these CRMs work totally in tandem and on the same platform. Every interaction your company has with a new prospect is always logged, categorized, and automatically synced across both teams.
Your marketing team can easily look at a lead to see if sales have had the chance to reach out yet, and your sales team can jump into a conversation with a warm lead at the exact moment they're ready to progress to the decision-making stage. This helps eliminate interruptions in your day-to-day office work and makes it easy to recap progress at your weekly or bi-weekly sales and marketing team meetings.
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HubSpot also makes it easy to define each lead and pass it along to the sales team or the marketing team when necessary.
Within HubSpot, you’ll define what criteria qualify a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) or a sales-qualified lead (SQL) – whether it's downloading a content offer, booking an appointment, or responding to an automated workflow. From there, it's easy to move MQLs and SQLs up and down the buyer's journey based on the criteria you've set to qualify them.
You can also set criteria for site visitors, prospects, or subscribers. Say someone has just visited your blog and signed up for your newsletter. If they keep reading your newsletters and blogs but don't convert on CTAs or content offers, you might categorize them as a "subscriber."
You can use that classification to send them information they might care about later on, and your marketing team can continue nurturing them until they take enough actions to pass them along to your sales team.
The HubSpot CRM offers automatic notifications. If there are specific actions — like downloading a particular content offer or submitting a form on your contact page — that signal to both teams a lead may be ready to convert, you can set HubSpot to send automatic notifications to the responsible parties.
This way, when a lead is on your website, the relevant team member can strike while the iron is hot — offering up more relevant content or suggesting they set a meeting — just as that lead is thinking about your company.
Can this come off as a little creepy at first? Maybe. But it's a great way to offer the personalized, specific service today's consumers expect from the best companies.
Another sales and marketing alignment benefit the HubSpot CRM offers is its exceptional analytics and metrics reporting capabilities. No matter what metrics you're tracking, the CRM makes it easy to see and share those reports with anyone in your team.
We've said it before and we'll say it again: The key to sales and marketing alignment is communication. Your sales team needs to know what the marketing team is doing to draw in qualified leads, and your marketing needs to know which of their efforts are contributing to a closed sale. HubSpot makes finding and sharing these metrics easy with open reporting that's easily shared.
At your weekly sales/marketing meeting, your sales team can show the marketing team which leads have finally closed and how they arrived at the sales team, whether from an organic, paid, or email marketing effort. Conversely, your marketing team can use the data compiled by HubSpot to show the sales team what content new leads are responding best to, and what potential sales angles they can use to close that lead more quickly.
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The ultimate benefit of the HubSpot CRM is transparency. Effective sales and marketing alignment can increase revenue by 208%. The best way to get those teams on the same page is a transparent, user-friendly CRM that allows both teams to interact and see what the other team is working on. HubSpot's software seamlessly integrates your sales and marketing teams' software into one simple platform that offers transparency and encourages communication.
If you're interested in increasing your revenue by 208% in the new year, the HubSpot platform can help. Get in touch with the Evenbound team today to discover how we can take your sales and marketing operations to the next level.