3 Powerful Ways to Align Marketing and Sales with HubSpot + HubSpot CRM
As a HubSpot customer, you know how valuable the platform‘s marketing automation tools are for streamlining your inbound efforts and delivering a better customer experience. But are you taking full advantage of everything HubSpot has to offer, especially when it comes to aligning marketing and sales?
By combining HubSpot‘s marketing software with the HubSpot CRM, you can unlock new opportunities to integrate your marketing and sales processes, share data between teams, and ultimately drive more revenue. Here‘s a look at three powerful plays to run with HubSpot and HubSpot CRM that you may not have considered before.
- Use Workflows + HubSpot CRM to Trigger Hyper-Relevant Sales Emails
One of the most impactful ways to align marketing and sales with HubSpot is by using marketing automation workflows in conjunction with CRM data to send incredibly targeted, relevant emails to prospects.
Think about all the valuable information your sales team is capturing in HubSpot CRM:
- Individual prospects‘ latest interactions with sales
- The specific products/services each prospect is interested in
- The sales stage each deal is currently in
- How long deals have been in their current stage
- Custom details captured by sales during the sales process
By connecting that CRM data to your HubSpot workflows, you can trigger automated emails that are personalized based on a prospect‘s unique buying situation.
For example, you could build a workflow that sends a specific email whenever a deal moves from one stage to the next – like from "Appointment Scheduled" to "Needs Proposal". Using a personalization token, you can mention the exact product the prospect inquired about. You could even use branching logic to alter the email content depending on which sales rep owns the deal.
The key is to work with your sales team to map out the common situations where a marketing touch would help move deals along, then use workflows to automate those communications. Your sales reps will appreciate not having to send one-off emails themselves, and your prospects will be impressed by the seamless experience.
To set this up in HubSpot:
- Have sales create custom deal properties in HubSpot CRM to capture the key information to use for triggering and personalizing emails.
- Build out email templates in HubSpot that align with the key sales scenarios you identified. Include personalization tokens for prospect name, product interest, etc.
- Set up workflows that are triggered when the appropriate criteria are met based on your CRM data, and add your personalized email templates to the workflow.
- Analyze the performance of your workflows and optimize over time based on open rates, click-through rates and impact on deal velocity.
Liz Moorehead, Content Strategy Lead at digital sales and marketing agency IMPACT, shared a great example of this in action:
"We had a client in the insurance space who used workflows and the CRM to automatically send personalized emails to prospects after their initial sales appointment. The emails recapped the specific insurance products the prospect and sales rep had discussed, offered additional educational content about those products, and prompted prospects to schedule their next meeting. It had a big impact on keeping deals moving forward."
- Keep Opportunities Engaged with Deal Stage Workflows
Another powerful way to leverage HubSpot workflows and the CRM is by triggering internal tasks and prospect nurturing based on which stage an opportunity is in.
Most companies have a clearly defined sales process with distinct stages (e.g. Appointment Scheduled > Needs Analysis > Proposal Presented > Contract Sent). But it‘s all too easy for opportunities to get stuck in a stage and go stale. By building workflows off your deal stages, you can automatically alert sales reps to take action and engage prospects at exactly the right times.
For instance, let‘s say you have a rule that all deals in the "Proposal Presented" stage need to be followed up with within 5 business days. You could create a workflow that checks the "Last Activity Date" property on those deals every day, and if it exceeds 5 days, sends a reminder email to the deal owner to follow up.
You can also use deal stage workflows to trigger prospect-facing communications. Going back to our insurance example, whenever a deal moves into the "Contract Sent" stage, you could automatically send the prospect an email with tips for reviewing their contract and a link to FAQ on your website. Little touches like this help keep deals on track while delivering value to prospects.
To implement deal stage workflows:
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Audit your current sales process stages and define the key milestones you want to set up workflows for.
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Create the assets you‘ll need for each workflow, like email templates for sales reps and educational content for prospects.
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Build workflows in HubSpot that are triggered whenever a deal enters the relevant stage. Use if/then branching to specify time delays, tasks for the deal owner, or prospect emails.
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Train your sales team on the new workflows and gather their feedback over time on what‘s working well or needs adjusted.
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Score Big with Prospect Revisit Notifications
Our third tip is all about using HubSpot and the CRM to alert your sales team of hot prospects they should reach back out to.
With HubSpot‘s Prospects tool, you can see which individuals are visiting your website, even if they haven‘t filled out a form and identified themselves. By connecting that data to your CRM and using workflows, you can automatically notify account owners when one of their prospects or customers returns to your site.
Here‘s how it works:
- Make sure you have HubSpot‘s tracking code installed on your website so you can capture prospect activity.
- Set up a workflow that is triggered whenever a contact visits your pricing page or high-value content offers.
- Add an action to the workflow to send an internal email notification or Slack message to the contact owner informing them of their prospect‘s activity. Be sure to include a link to the contact record in the CRM.
- Coach your sales reps to use those notifications as a reason to reach back out to prospects and re-engage them in the sales process. They can send a friendly, personalized email mentioning what the prospect looked at and offering to answer any questions.
This tactic is incredibly effective because you‘re reaching out to prospects at the exact moment they are showing buying intent. It works especially well for re-engaging old opportunities that went dark but are clearly still interested based on their digital body language.
Magdalena Georgieva, a former Product Manager at HubSpot, noted another beneficial use case for prospect revisit notifications:
"For many B2B companies, your existing customers are your best opportunity for driving additional revenue. You can set up revisit notifications for key pages that indicate a customer is interested in another product, then have their account manager reach out personally to upsell them at just the right time."
Bring It All Together for Maximum Impact
The common theme with all three of these plays is delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time. That‘s really what sales and marketing alignment is all about.
By combining the rich data in your HubSpot CRM with HubSpot‘s powerful marketing automation engine, you can provide a cohesive experience across the entire customer journey, from first site visit through closed-won and beyond.
But technology is just one part of the equation. To be successful, sales and marketing have to be on the same page about their goals, their processes, and who is responsible for each customer touchpoint. So start by getting the two teams together to map out your customer journey and agree on a plan. Then implement it in HubSpot and refine your approach over time.
The more you can integrate sales and marketing, the more efficient your funnel will be. And that means more leads, more deals, and more happy customers. That‘s something any business can get behind.
