Sales and marketing are brother and sister disciplines, and sometimes they fight like siblings, too. Believe it or not, many companies use different software platforms for their sales and marketing divisions. Sometimes, internal politics can keep marketing from sharing insights with sales, and vice versa.
Websites have evolved to be much more than an online business card. They can serve as highly effective lead generators for a company. However, many of these sites are controlled by marketing departments with many of their greater benefits hidden from the sales teams. In the worst case scenarios, visitors to the site are added to a marketing list and even marketed to ad infinitum with no specific goal. These people eventually unsubscribe, meaning a loss of a potentially valuable customer.
A viable solution to this disconnect between marketing and sales comes from Hubspot, and their commitment to being a successful "Smarketing" platform. Smarketing, or sales and marketing, is the Hubspot method of connecting sales and marketing teams under an integrated dashboard and the sharing of leads into a single, easily-accessible data pool. Each entry in the data pool is identified by its place in the buyers journey, helping to maintain the unique validity of each record and allowing for the targeting of individual records for conversion depending on the step in the buying process.
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Lead-Scoring can be used to identify the likelihood of a customer to convert into a sale. Workflows can be automated throughout the entire marketing process all the way to the close, not just in the awareness stage. This allows a company the ability to maintain a relationship that will lead to higher conversions - you are much less likely to pressure a customer if you know that you can plan a hard sell at the appropriate time. Additionally, marketing will be able to use the tools to track campaign success and drive new leads to the sales team.
Moving Prospects
Email drip campaigns allow a company to automate email to more easily move connected prospects down the sales funnel and generate more qualified leads in the future. Hubspot's platform allows you to do this without coding a single line, and your sales team can pick the triggers and conditions that signal an email drop at the appropriate time. Each email can be tied to a clear goal, and your analytics on each part of the campaign will be segmented and easy to target for modification. You can also more easily fill your database up again as contacts naturally fall away.
Customizing Your Workflow
Hubspot allows you to customize a fully visualized workflow. The more easily that you can see your contacts, the simpler it will be to give personalized attention to each entry. You can view these entries in real time, giving you the power to build a targeted campaign with multiple stages. Personalize your emails more precisely using specific details and batch import individual information directly from your CRM.
Full Automation
Automation gives your creative sales and marketing leaders more time to strategize and grow a business. Hubspot gives you the power to set up score leads, rotate those leads into the sales environment and create webhooks as well. Every contact can trigger an internal notification, and you can incorporate the added functionality of Salesforce or Hubspot CRM task organizers as well.
Synchronized Inbound Marketing
In addition to the typical lack of information flow, sales and marketing often suffer from an inability to synchronize a consistent message between hubs. Hubspot's 'smarketing' platform, allows a business to keep the same face on blogs, landing pages and throughout email campaigns. The result is a more streamlined analytics process that ends in better lead management and more opportunities to automate website content, social media interactions, ads, CTAs and even SEO.
In short, if you are having trouble aligning sales and marketing, Hubspot and a focus on Smarketing may be just the answer for your company. Built specifically to address the technical disconnects and office politics that get in the way of a streamlined workflow, Hubspot is certainly a solutions driven approach to the future of your outreach.
Download our Free Growth Stack Deck to learn more about how Hubspot is solving typical problems between sales and marketing, and how you can apply it to your own business.
