As B2B digital marketers, one of our most important tasks is to drive prospects to our website and then convert them into leads. Ultimately, the goal is to later convert these leads into customers, repeat customers, and brand advocates.
It can be a challenge for the marketing team to have visibility of customer acquisition because it often falls to a sales team’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. This system is oftentimes wholly separated from the systems of the internal marketing team and external marketing agency. But with the ever-greater leaps and integration of marketing technology, marketing teams and their partner agencies should be looking to align their strategies and their software.
One platform that has been working hard to reinvent the seamless mar-tech stack is HubSpot. Best known for its marketing automation software, HubSpot has been adapting its centralized CRM database to work hard not only for marketing teams but also for sales and service teams—teams that are responsible for converting leads into sales and customers into returning business.
Leveraging integrated automation software gives us the opportunity to enable our messaging efforts to go further. We invest significant amounts of time and energy (and sometimes dollars) to attract and nurture a qualified audience through inbound and content marketing, email marketing, paid search advertising, social media, etc. When using a unified automation platform, we have to ability to not only identify potential customers on a personal level through engagement with our site and content, but we can identify the right time to assign them to the sales team. We can use signals and workflows connected to key messaging to transition the lead when they reach the decision-making phase of the purchasing process.
Once the prospect or lead has been moved over to sales, the rep can begin the one-to-one follow-up process. With the connected contact record, the sales rep can see the history of what messaging and content the individual has already engaged with. Not only does the rep know the basic contact information for this person, but they have insight into what pain points the contact has been reading about and can truly personalize their follow-up communications.
In HubSpot’s Sales Hub, sales team members can log notes that can be used by other sales reps, automate and personalize sequences of follow-up emails, connect their phone systems to place calls from inside the platform, and connect their calendars to allow leads to schedule meetings without back and forth communication. They can build daily queues for prioritized follow up, and they can also reassign contacts back to marketing for additional nurturing.
An integrated software platform like this has the power and ability to create better communication and better customer journey insights between the marketing and sales teams. Automation software doesn’t replace the human element—it elevates it. And for it to work, there has to be a clear strategy developed and agreed to by the sales and marketing teams.
If you would like to learn more about how we can help build a strategy that better aligns your marketing and sales teams, and how we can use marketing and sales automation software to drive more leads and close more sales, drop us a line or give us a call.