5 Tips to Set Up Your Business for Sales and Marketing Success

Ellie Mirman
Ellie Mirman

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We're lucky at HubSpot that the marketing team and sales team have a great relationship . Sure, there's always some tension about lead quality or lead follow up, but our marketing and sales teams have constant communication and an SLA we've developed together to ensure we can help each other be more effective. What's the key to success? I shared a few tips with the AMA Tampa last week specifically in regards to lead nurturing campaigns, but these tips can be applied more broadly to any marketing campaign when working with sales.

Tip #1: Communicate Campaigns

Let your sales team know what campaigns are running and who they're going to. The sales reps are the ones connecting with your leads and having conversations, so they need to know any background information of what information their leads are downloading.

Tip #2: Provide Soundbites

As the marketer, you know your content and offers infinitely better than anyone in your organization. Help your sales team understand how to take a lead opt-in to a productive conversation by providing follow up soundbites. If someone downloaded a particular ebook, what does that say about a particular problem they're trying to solve? At HubSpot, our marketing team sends an email every week to the sales team about what are this week's active campaigns with a one-line description of what's included and a follow up soundbite that helps start off that sales conversation.

Tip #3: Share Results

Sometimes we assume that sales doesn't care about what campaigns the marketing team is doing. Just get me my leads, and more of them, we might think they're going to say. But sharing results is a key step to ensure smarketing success. Sharing the results of your campaigns - what worked and what didn't - can give you and your sales team insight into which topics are hot in your industry at that moment. These learnings may surprise you! Also, sharing your results shows that you are constantly experimenting with different campaigns, learning and improving. Marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it job and you should share what you're learning through your marketing experiments.

Tip #4: Score Leads

If you're doing all the right things, you're generating lots of leads for your sales team. But your sales team has limited time and they need help prioritizing their time. You know best which lead behaviors are good buying signals, and you should use this intelligence to score your leads so that your sales team can first focus on your hottest leads. In the meantime you can continue to nurture your lower quality leads so that they become even more sales-ready.

Tip #5: Ask for Feedback

Gather qualitative feedback from your sales team by asking what they thought of lead quality and lead quantity. This helps you understand the perception of the leads you're generating for your sales team and may also give you early indicators of marketing campaign results. As a marketer, you typically have to wait for the data to come in - total response rates, conversion rates, etc. But a sales person can call their first 5 leads and if all 5 are terrible or if all 5 are fantastic, you can get some early indicators of your campaign's success to react even faster.

These steps are essential to establish a productive and open relationship between sales and marketing. And you need to rely on each other to make effective use of each other's time. Unless you're a fully ecommerce company with no sales team, these two roles need to work together to achieve business goals.

How are you doing on the steps above? Do you have any other tips to ensure smarketing (sales and marketing) success?


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