Breezy Hill insights and examples of effective alignment strategies and their results
Marketing and sales alignment—while it’s a hot topic, what does that process really look like, and are the results worth the effort? It’s more than just sprucing up teamwork and communication between your teams. This process dives into the nitty-gritty, aligning brand messages, content strategies, and offerings for a partnership that benefits everyone involved. Aligning your marketing and sales teams ensures that every effort is geared toward supporting shared ROI and growth initiatives.
Keep reading to hear from Crystal Buessing, VP of Digital Strategy at Breezy Hill, on aligning marketing and sales and creating accountability using HubSpot.
The right sales and marketing tools make all the difference in aligning your teams and operations. If your tools are aligned, your teams are aligned.
For instance, when we initially collaborated with one of our clients, there was a distinct separation between the marketing and sales teams. Each team operated on individual projects without much communication overlap, which caused some challenges. As both marketing and sales independently engaged with the same prospects, recipients often received multiple emails from our company, sometimes even on the same day.
Beyond filling prospects’ inboxes, the lack of coordination meant the messaging was inconsistent. This situation created a scenario where prospects received daily emails covering various topics, creating a potentially confusing experience for email recipients and damaging any momentum regarding prospect confidence.
Our immediate goal was to overhaul the marketing and sales processes and procedures to eliminate siloed communication and create accountability. We did this by uniting marketing and sales under HubSpot. By moving marketing and sales under one digital roof, we were able to clearly build out the customer journey and ownership over a prospect through the funnel.
The journey would begin by seeing cold prospects warmed and nurtured by marketing, ultimately converting the prospect to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Once an MQL showed high engagement, marketing would then move the lead over to a sales-qualified lead (SQL). There were three common outcomes after the MQL-SQL transfer:
- If the lead becomes an opportunity & closes, this tells the marketing team they’re generating high-quality leads and continue the campaign this lead converted from if the ROI makes sense.
- If the lead bounces back to marketing but is still qualified, this tells marketing that the timing wasn’t right and to continue nurturing the lead with high-value content.
- If the lead is not qualified, marketing needs to take a look at the campaign targeting and messaging to uncover the reason for the unqualified lead.
With both teams using HubSpot, transparency and visible markers for agent engagement helped us grasp who was doing what and when. These capabilities clarified who should actively engage with prospects at different stages of their journey. It gave us a complete picture of prospect interactions and activities, laying the groundwork for a more informed and practical approach to managing engagement strategies.
The ability for marketing and sales to review SQLs and refine their sales funnel was a crucial piece of aligning these teams. It brought everyone to the table to ask, “Are we talking to the correct people?” and adjust as needed–and HubSpot made that possible.
With the right tools, marketing and sales teams can work smarter and streamline the customer journey for prospects. Uniting teams under one platform like HubSpot makes it easier to set up processes, expectations, and accountability, aligning marketing and sales as well as shared procedures.
Breezy Hill Marketing experts can help you foster alignment between your teams. Schedule a consultation with us today.
