How Hubspot CRM Helps Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams

Information. This is the core thing that drives every business, everything else is just a derivative of it. The more data you have about your leads and prospects, the better you can tailor your offers to their needs and show them exactly how your company can help solve their issues and address their pain points.

The other essential point is to use that information effectively, it’s no good to just have it. Both your marketing and sales teams need to be on the same page and working together towards the same goal, to really reap the benefits of successful communication.

Information is what should be at core of effective Marketing (sales and marketing together) cooperation. For this purpose, you will require two things:

• A marketing software to acquire and manage your leads
• A CRM software to track and measure your work processes

Luckily, HubSpot offers both of these essential components all ready and waiting to be implemented, unlike other CRM solutions.

Set up closed loop reporting and share the data

The idea of closed loop is to exchange every bit of data available among all your teams and constantly provide feedback to each other, so everyone is on the same page with all the processes, operations and mechanisms.

In this case, closed loop marketing is the first step to align your sales and marketing teams together to share available information on both sides and keep each other updated on every aspect of the overall process (marketing->sales->closed accounts).

HubSpot CRM and automation software are perfectly integrated with each other so that both marketing and sales teams can track everything from the first touch of a visitor to a closed customer account. Here are some of the benefits of HubSpot CRM:

• The processes of your marketing platform and sales CRM are automatically synced with each other, so that there will be no information overlaps.
• It allows to update existing lead information and not create duplicate leads each time a lead revisits your websites and downloads a different offer.
• After your teams set the criteria for MQLs and SQLs, that information can easily be shared between the CRM and marketing platform, which allows to better segment your leads.
• You should set up regular closed loop reporting meetings to have both your teams gather together and share the information they have to improve the overall processes.

During the meetings, here is what each team needs to share with the other:

Marketing to Sales

• Lead intelligence – HubSpot’s lead intelligence tool allows to gather all the information about your leads, starting from the first touch point and ending with the closing date. The marketing team gathers all this information and presents it to the sales team to proceed with the buyer’s journey. When your sales reps know what kind of offers the leads are interested in, it’s much easier to focus their closing strategy on the specific topic and explain how your company can help solve the lead’s issues.
• Instant lead notifications – whenever a lead revisits your website, downloads a new offer or takes any important action of this sort, the marketing platform instantly notifies your team about whatever the lead is doing at the moment. This information can be essential for sales reps to find that small opportunity window when it’s the right time to make a call. As a sales rep or sales manager utilizing Hubspot CRM effectively, you will get instant, real time SMS notifications to your smartphone whenever a warm lead is filling out a form or completing a workflow.

Sales to Marketing

• Contact/lead updates – The sales team should update the marketing team about the touch points and progress they had for the leads. What emails did they send? How many call attempts were made? What stage is the lead in now? Etc.There might be cases when the defined SQLs are reluctant to become a customer after a phone call or email and it would be unwise to continue pushing. Instead, it might be a good idea to reclassify and downgrade the lead to MQL and nurture him or her some more, before trying another sales attempt.

• Closed deals Revenue – The closed deals should be presented to the marketing team so that they can calculate their marketing effectiveness ROI and understand how good is their work. You can track all the way back and see which marketing campaigns were the most successful and make changes/shifts in your marketing strategy accordingly.

• Identify the best performing marketing channels – Sales teams are most of the times reluctant or lazy to make decent reports, which hurts the marketing team’s productivity a lot. A report that goes all the way back to the first source visit (organic, paid search, email, social media, etc.) can be very useful for marketers to understand how to tweak their strategy and shift the main focus on the best performing channels, or understand why the other channels are underperforming and fix the matters.

• Calculate the marketing percent of the sales Quota – This is done to assess the effectiveness of the content strategy and how each offer helps the sales team close out more deals. Finding the top performing eBooks, landing pages, webinars, etc. will pinpoint how well the specific piece of content is doing and use it as a guide to tweak and enhance your content marketing strategy.

Information sharing is essential for your company to grow and expand. The more your teams know about each other’s work, the better they can collaborate and strive towards the end goal – getting more customers. Remember, sharing is caring 🙂