How Marketing Helps Sales Sell More in 2019: Twin Cities HubSpot User Group Recap

Did you miss the latest Twin Cities HubSpot User Group meeting? Did you attend but want a recap? Keep reading for an overview of what we learned and our top 10 takeaways!

In a digitally connected world, potential customers research your business before you even know that they exist. As leads jump into your sales process at any stage of readiness, it is important for your sales and marketing efforts to present a unified message.

So, how are marketing and sales departments able to work together to bring in customers?

It all begins with planning together. By establishing goals, strategy, and key performance indicators (KPIs) — in tandem — you’ll be starting off on the right foot by coming to an agreement about what you are working towards, how you will execute it, and how you will measure your success.

Once you’ve created a plan, it is essential to get your teams working using unified processes. Ultimately, your success or failure rests on the adoption and execution of a single system. Getting buy-in from your teams will be much easier if your leaders champion the system.

Build your portal to align with your sales and internal processes and terms. The system that you establish will only work if your teams use it, and customizing your portal to align with the processes and terminology that they are familiar with (what you call your prospects, key moments in your sales process) make it more likely that your team will feel comfortable working in the system. 

After you’ve established a unified system, give it a performance review. HubSpot has great reporting tools to make this part easy, but don’t overwhelm yourself with too much data. Use your KPIs to determine what’s working and adjust your strategy accordingly. You’ve got this!

Here's a quick highlight reel of the event:

 Top 10 Takeaways from the TCHUG

1. Establish a “smarketing” strategy by having meetings with both sales and marketing teams present. Get to know each others’ needs and processes before building a unified system. Once everyone is aligned they have a chance to contribute, not only will you ensure that both sales and marketing needs are met, but departments will have stronger buy-in if they feel that they have a say in the process.
2. Formulate SMART goals together. Identify your SMART business goals, the tactics you’ll use to reach them (including what content you’ll launch to generate more leads), and KPIs you want to track to define success and understand how to improve.
3. Define lifecycle stages for your business. You might find that the HubSpot presets don’t work for your company, but that’s okay! Within HubSpot’s contact property settings, you should adjust the lifecycle stage options to fit your business. If you’re a small owner-run business, the preset options of Marketing Qualified Lead and Sales Qualified Lead might not matter to you because you ARE the whole business — both marketing and sales. Use the stages of Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunities, Customer, Evangelist, or create your own to match the ways that your customers move through your company’s unique buying process.
4. Align your properties with processes and priorities that are important to your company. Create custom properties that fit with your actual operations and feel free to leave behind pre-built properties that don’t fit your business. For example, if your business generates leads based or referrals or events, it might be worthwhile to create a custom property for “Referral Source” or “Event” to help you keep track of where your leads are coming from.
5. Lead Scoring helps your marketing team calculate when a lead is “sales ready.” Assign points to attributes or actions that demonstrate that a lead is a good fit for your offering.
6. The Fit Interest Matrix is used to filter your leads before sending them to sales. By comparing the fit and readiness of a lead (determined by lead score), you’ll be able to better determine if a lead should be moved to sales or whether they could benefit from additional nurturing from marketing.
7. Automate the handoff process when a lead has reached a sales-ready lead score, it’s time for the handoff, and you’ll want to automate the process as much as possible for timely and seamless execution. You might begin by creating a HubSpot workflow that assigns a qualified lead to a sales rep, creates a task for following up with the lead, and sends the rep a notification email.
8. Open a feedback loop between marketing and sales. You should have already established SMART goals and determined KPIs together, so marketing and sales goes back to these metrics and determine whether your lifecycle stages, custom properties, and lead scoring scale are working and adjust as necessary. By establishing a dialogue between departments, your processes will only get better over time.
9. Leverage marketing-created content to your advantage. Sales relies on the expertise of marketing to create content (and the tools) that sales needs to sell, including everything from physical brochures to digital meeting invites and marketing automation to fill calendars. An open dialogue will allow sales to ask marketing for the materials that they need.
10. Use reporting to gauge your results, but avoid “analysis paralysis” by focusing on your established KPIs and answering the key questions that are going to help your team to reach your business goals.

Our thanks to HubSpot Customer Success Manager, Meghan Lowell, who presented at the 2018 Q4 TCHUG at the A-Mill Artist Lofts on Wednesday, November 7.

Want to attend the next meeting?

The Twin Cities HubSpot User Group (TC HUG) offers a great way to interact with other inbound marketing professions in an informal group setting. Meet city-wide professionals who want to learn best practices and share tips about getting the most out of HubSpot software.

Come join us in 2019 if you want to:

• Experience an a-ha! moment
• Know what works for your business and other businesses in the area
• Connect with speakers from HubSpot
• Learn more about how to utilize HubSpot software to its fullest potential
• Connect with peers in an interactive group setting

We hope to see you at the next TCHUG event in the New Year!