Rachael

9 Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices

Posted on by Rachael

When you’re not meeting your revenue goals, the finger-pointing starts between your sales and marketing teams. Sales blames marketing for not generating enough leads. Marketing blames sales for not converting the leads into customers. Sales and marketing alignment is missing. This can go back and forth, creating hostility between two groups who need to be working together. Sales and marketing have the same goal – to increase customers and revenue. To achieve this, you need to curb the finger-pointing and get the two teams to align and work together.

Use these best practices to align your sales and marketing teams.

Increase communication

First, get out of silos and learn about the other team’s goals. The easiest way to do this is to schedule regular meetings with both teams. During these meetings, sales can educate marketing on their process and review quotas and metrics. Marketing can then share what initiatives they are working on, what campaigns are running, and what metrics they are tracking.

Create a Content Process

Marketing should include sales in their content brainstorming process. Together, the teams can generate content ideas helpful for sales to gain new leads. From there, sales can promote content in conversations with prospects, and on their personal social media channels. Video is a great way to promote new content with prospects. The use of video is growing as a marketing tool. It is an effective, personal way to communicate that builds trust and increases sales.

Related Reading: How and Why to Incorporate Sales Videos into Your Selling Process

Image Source: HubSpot

Promote the Sales Team

When marketing focuses on promoting thought leadership and expertise at the company, they should not overlook the sales team. Make sure to include sales in new content. These are the individuals that prospects interact with the most, so marketing can promote them through guest blogs and social media posts.

Understand Your Roles & Goals

It’s critical for sales and marketing to truly understand what each team member’s role is, and how it helps the company achieve its goals. Sales might not understand why someone writes a blog, and how that content helps generate leads. Marketing might not know how sales breaks down each person’s responsibilities – whether they sell to specific regions, or they each sell a specific product. It’s important to break down any misconceptions, create clarity around what each person does, and how it helps sales and marketing alignment.

Related Reading: 6 KPIs for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Identify Your Target Audience

To hit company goals, it’s essential for sales and marketing to understand which potential customers they are targeting. Marketing needs to know who to target with their content, keywords, and ads. Sales needs to know who they are selling to. Get everyone on the same page by creating buyer personas and a buyer’s journey map showing how they make purchasing decisions. The buyer personas should include the buyers’ demographics, size of the organization they work at, type of organization, role, priorities, and challenges. In the journey map, make sure to document what activities the buyer engages in, his or her objectives, what information he or she consumes (or needs), and what types of communication he or she uses to get the information.

Image Source: Unsplash

Share Feedback

It’s important for sales and marketing to share feedback they get from clients and prospects with each other. When the marketing team gathers data from surveys or feedback forms, they must share the results with the sales team. It’s also important for sales to share what they’re learning on calls with prospects, such as what questions they have about the product or company, what misconceptions they have, what they like about the product, and more. This will help marketing figure out what gaps need to be filled with their content, on their website, and in their campaigns to better promote the company and attract qualified leads.

Share Access to Documents

Does your marketing team have a plethora of blogs, white papers, and even one-sheets and brochures that they keep within their marketing files? This content is meant to fuel the sales team, so they must have access to it. Create a shared space (whether it’s on Teams, Slack, or another platform) where the two teams can share content. This will help your sales team feel more enabled, and it will help demonstrate what marketing is doing to help them.

Socialize

To get the sales and marketing teams to work together better, they need to get to know each other. Organizing social activities with both teams can help improve the relationships between team members. This helps cultivate a collaborative environment where everyone feels included.

Understand Each Other

Finally, one of the most important ways to achieve sales and marketing alignment is to create an understanding that both teams are trying to help the company – and each other – achieve their business goals. While both teams have different tasks, their end-goal and intentions are the same.

About Sales & Marketing Alignment Services at Lake One

At Lake One, technology is at the core of all our sales and marketing thinking.

  • We work with our partners to make sure their basecamp is “right sized” for their organization.
  • That the goals and strategy are leading the technology choices and not the other way around.
  • But most of all – that the technology is embraced and providing value to the organization.

For additional tips on how to align your sales and marketing teams, contact Lake One to talk to our experts.

Why the Inbound Marketing Methodology Works

Posted on by Rachael

Do you have a great company with superb services, yet you’re struggling to attract new customers? It’s probably not your product – it’s more likely an issue with your marketing strategy. This is where using an inbound marketing methodology can help. This strategy focuses on turning strangers into customers and building your brand presence.

Learn more about this strategy, and more importantly – why it works.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing focuses on four key stages to better promote your business: Attract, Convert, Close and Delight. Each stage has specific methods to convert casual observers of your company into customers, and ultimately, brand promoters.

  • Attract: This first stage attracts strangers through blogs, social media posts, keywords, and web pages.
  • Convert: The next stage turns visitors into leads through calls-to-action, landing pages, lead forms, and contacts.
  • Close: The third stage focuses on converting leads into customers. This can be done by sending email campaigns, creating workflows, conducting lead scoring, and integrating with a CRM.
  • Delight: The final stage is to turn your customers into promoters of your brand. You can do this through social media posts, smart calls-to-action, emails, and workflows.
inbound marketing

Why Inbound Marketing Methodology Works

Now that you know what inbound marketing is, it’s time to talk about the part you really care about – why this method works.

It increases your website traffic

Inbound marketing focuses on increasing your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and your content marketing efforts with robust pages. Doing this can drive more targeted traffic — and qualified leads — to your website. Creating more content (like blogs, articles, and pages) tied to the specific keywords that are relevant to your customers can help increase your ranking on search engines, like Google.

It enhances your qualified leads

With inbound marketing methodology, you are not just creating content for the sake of producing content. Under this strategy, you are creating content to attract your targeted audience. To do this, you want to think about what your potential customers are interested in and what they might be searching for. This can include blogs on industry trends and how-to articles that can drive them to your site. Your audience now has a much better understanding of who you are and what products and services you provide, so they become a more qualified lead than someone who just clicked on an ad.

There is also another perk to creating good content – it can get picked up by other websites and publications. This puts your content in front of their audience as well, to attract more leads.

marketing qualified leads
Image Source: HubSpot

It allows you to show them what you do

When you publish engaging, quality content on your site, your leads will associate that same level of quality with your company. Your content also demonstrates your business’ expertise, and how your products and services can help your customers. This allows leads to have a clear understanding of what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.

It lets you control the content and the costs

Inbound marketing can be a cost-effective way to promote your brand. When you run an ad, you need to pay for the ad spot and the creative. With content, you can likely create it in-house. It will only cost time. Plus, you own the content, so you can keep it on your site and reuse it as you need it. You can use one blog on your website, in social posts, emails, and more. This makes inbound marketing campaigns more effective than outbound campaigns – getting as much as three times the ROI on inbound campaigns, according to HubSpot.

It helps you build relationships with your customers

Inbound marketing methodology involves creating quality, relevant and useful content that will help your customers – and potential customers – do their jobs better. This content helps them learn to turn to you when they need answers. They will start to build a relationship with your company and will become loyal to your brand. Engaging with customers on social media and reading and responding to any comments they leave on your content will also help enhance this relationship.

It moves leads through your funnel faster

When you make a new purchase, you likely research the product first, right? So, if we do it, then we should expect our customers to do the same thing. Inbound marketing methodology accounts for this and helps you capture leads and move them through the sales funnel by offering targeted content at various stages. For example, you might provide general product information and calls to action to those at the top of the funnel. Then at the middle of the funnel, you might provide content specific to your company’s products and services and encourage them to fill out a lead form or subscribe to your blog or a newsletter. And finally, you might provide pricing information to those who are at the bottom of the funnel and are close to closing a deal.

marketing funnel
Image Source: HubSpot

It provides you with metrics to measure your marketing efforts are working

One of the hardest parts about marketing is showing your ROI. Inbound marketing can resolve this. This strategy allows you to get measurable results on your campaigns, website, and individual content items. You can pull metrics through Google Analytics to get page views, the amount of time people spend on your site and demographics on your visitors. You can also use your CRM, like HubSpot, to track information on your campaigns.

While it can take some planning to execute an effective inbound marketing strategy, it can be very effective in turning strangers into customers. If you need help getting started, contact Lake One to help you create your inbound marketing strategy, execute it, and measure it!

HubSpot Like a Pro: Our Top HubSpot Training Recommendations

Posted on by Rachael

I know it might sound cliche, but we genuinely are lifelong learners over here at Lake One, and one of the best training academies around is HubSpot. Their platform is top-notch, and their training is too. It includes software how-tos, practical exercises, plus tips, and strategies to take your skills to the next level.

What does HubSpot training entail? HubSpot has two types of training – certifications and individual courses. Certifications result in a literal badge and certificate. The courses tend to be more digestible and focused on a specific topic area. As far as the material, you can expect a video with an adjustable play speed, study guides, quizzes at the end of lessons, and, if applicable, an exam. It’s self-guided, so it’s easy to walk yourself through the material at your own pace.

According to HubSpot, there are over 165,000 professionals who have grown their careers by getting certified with HubSpot Academy. And there are a lot to choose from. As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, we get asked which HubSpot training courses we recommend quite often.

Below you’ll find a list of our top HubSpot training recommendations.  

Building the Foundation

There is a certain base level of understanding needed to embrace HubSpot – regardless of your practice area. You need to get Inbound. Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. Elements of Inbound can be applied cross-functionally. 


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HubSpot Inbound Certification

Time: 2 hrs

This certification gives an overview of inbound and gives you the essential base needed to understand the HubSpot methodology and why the platform functions the way it does. You’ll learn the fundamentals of inbound, the methodology, and about the flywheel. This course talks about inbound as it applies to marketing, services, and sales. 

The Flywheel Model

Image Source: HubSpot.com

HubSpot Reporting

Time: 5 hours 

At Lake One, we don’t shy away from the numbers. That’s why this is a must on our list of HubSpot training recommendations. No matter your role, we believe you should have a basic understanding of HubSpot reporting, and it’s capabilities. In this training, you learn how to incorporate data-driven decision-making using HubSpot reporting tools. It will cover reporting tools for the CRM, Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, Sales Hub, and Service. Sounds like overkill? Even if you don’t complete the cert, pick and choose the lessons that pertain to your role and the reporting you’ll need. 

Note: This certification does require a HubSpot Professional license to obtain. 

HubSpot Training Recommendations for Marketers

Whether your role is the high-level strategy or you’ll be in the weeds, the courses below will give you the knowledge needed to rock HubSpot and plan for success. 

HubSpot Marketing Software Certification

Time: 5 hours

If you plan on functioning within HubSpot, this is a must. HubSpot is a big platform with many tools, and to get the most value, you need a foundation of knowledge and an understanding of how they all work together. These lessons will literally help you do marketing in HubSpot. 

HubSpot training recommendations

Email Marketing

Time: 4 hours

No doubt, if you have HubSpot, you plan on leveraging marketing emails. From contact management and segmentation to email deliverability and analyzing your email sends, you’ll learn how to build an email marketing strategy. By the end of the course, you’ll be able to leverage the marketing tools on the platform to send and analyze emails. 

HubSpot CMS for Marketers 

Time: 2 hours

This is a specialty course, but still makes the cut for our HubSpot training recommendations. Why? This course is beneficial if you want to take your landing pages to the next level. Understanding HubSpot’s CMS is your ticket to customization and high-performing pages.

Note: This certification does require a HubSpot CMS Hub Professional account to complete. You can sign up for a sandbox account if needed. 

HubSpot Training Recommendations for Sales

From the CRM to leveraging HubSpot’s sales tools, partake in the courses below to get the basics and level up your HubSpot sales skills. 

Related Reading: Turn Your Website Into a Lead Machine with HubSpot Lead Flows

HubSpot Sales Software

Time: 2 hours

The HubSpot Sales Software Certification will help you organize your records in the HubSpot CRM to identify the best contacts to reach out to and get the most out of your Sales Hub tools. 

Sales Enablement

Time: 6 hours

According to HubSpot, the Sales Enablement Certification will teach you how to develop a marketing-driven sales enablement strategy. This course was designed with marketing managers in mind, but other marketers and sales leaders can benefit from learning the principles involved in this approach to sales enablement.

Frictionless Sales

Time: 2 hours

Are you looking to enable your sales team to spend more time selling? Or better align them to your target buyer? To help your sales team grow better, you need to find ways to remove friction from your flywheel. This course helps you learn the frictionless selling framework so your team can spend more time actually selling.

HubSpot Individual Courses

All of the training called out above are certifications. Depending on your day-to-day responsibilities, you may want to take a lesson specialized in Account Based Marketing, content strategy, or social media. We recommend just picking an area of interest and getting started!

ABM Planning Template Download

Making the Time for Professional Development

Underutilization of HubSpot is more common than you might think. Don’t let a lack of training be the reason it happens to you. We know better than anyone that it can be challenging to make time for professional development. So here are a few tips from the Lake One team – who are actively working on practicing what we preach 🙂

  • Document a Training Plan: Whether it’s the training courses listed above or others available in HubSpot Academy, decide which ones make the most sense for you and then document a training plan.
  • Give Yourself a Deadline: After you’ve documented a training plan, give yourself a deadline. A little accountability can go a long way.
  • Chip Away at the Training: It can be tricky to block a day, so try blocking off an hour-long block or even 30 minutes to chip away at training.
  • Make It a Team Event: Tie your training into a company goal or, better yet, bring along a coworker and turn it into a friendly competition!

Ultimate Library of B2B Marketing Automation Recipes

Posted on by Rachael

With B2B marketing automation, you can serve the right content to the right person at the right time – at scale. You can also drive consistency and efficiency with internal processes. And not to mention, it just might be my favorite tool in our marketing tech stack. 

So, how does marketing automation apply in the real world? Here are some of our top tried and true must-have B2B marketing automation examples.

What is B2B Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a technology that allows you to automate, streamline, and measure your marketing tasks and workflows.
However, its true power comes through sales and marketing alignment combined with a well-utilized B2B CRM.

Sales & Marketing Alignment in Automation 

If it feels like your sales and marketing teams are on different planets, adding automation to the mix won’t solve that. Ensure your teams align by outlining responsibilities, defining key terms like lead statuses and lifecycle stages, and aligning your team goals.

Reaching total harmony among teams can be a process, but at a minimum, it should be an active joint effort.

B2B Marketing Examples for Sales Collaboration and Internal Processes

Marketing automation helps to facilitate collaboration between sales and marketing in real time. It’s the conduit between the two teams. These processes within B2B businesses center around sales collaboration and the facilitation of internal processes.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Automation for Sales Collaboration 

Sales collaboration occurs in various ways, but some of the marketing automation examples outlined below are the most common.

Lead Scoring

Not all leads are created equal, and for that very reason, we leverage lead scoring. Lead scoring ranks lead readiness to convert based on the lead’s behavior. The idea behind lead scoring is that a lead can take specific actions or engagements which speak to their sales readiness. For example, a user who is highly engaged on the site, downloading multiple offers, visiting key pages (like pricing), and signing up for the blog, etc., is, in theory, more ready to purchase than a user who visited one or two pages on the site a couple of times. 

Lead scoring allows a sales and marketing team to work together to develop criteria identifying leads likely to purchase so that Sales can follow up with them. How to do this will be different for each CRM. In HubSpot, you set up your behaviors and scores and then create a workflow or a list to send all leads who meet your threshold to sales automatically.

Setting Leads to Marketing Qualified & Assigning to Sales 

This next section applies to setting any lifecycle stage or lead status. However, we’ll focus on Marketing Qualified Leads because that lifecycle stage is a must and a big factor in measuring marketing ROI.

Again each CRM will be different, but in HubSpot, our favorite way to achieve this is by creating an MQL List. The list includes all of our specific MQL criteria like the following:

  • The role is (insert the desired role)
  • The company name is known
  • The phone number is known
  • The industry is (insert the desired industry)
  • And the lead source is none of offline 

Note: MQL criteria setting is part of the sales & marketing alignment process and should be revisited at a minimum twice a year.

Once your list is built with your set criteria, you can create a workflow that notifies sales or makes a task for the MQL to be reviewed by sales.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Recommended Reading: 5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Boost Lead Volume

Automation for Internal Processes 

B2B companies often have complex business processes. B2B marketing automation can drive efficiencies and allow real-time routing, task creation, and follow-up across functions and channels.

Lead Routing 

Is your sales team divided into territories or divided by certain products, services, or areas of expertise? If so, lead routing is your ticket to removing the manual review of leads and automatically routing by key differentiators. You’ll always start with a form submission and follow with if/then branches or conditionals to route leads. 

For example: If a contact fills out the “Demo Request” form and their country is set to the U.S., then assign Frank as the contact owner and create a task for Frank to review.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Data Governance/Management

It’s also common that workflows be used to ensure your CRM stays up to date and with as many properties completed as possible. We can use workflows to manage some of the following: 

  • Subscription Types: If contacts fill out forms such as a newsletter sign-up, a webinar, product updates, etc. You can manage their subscriptions on the back end with workflows.
  • Opt-Outs: If you want to keep a running master opt-out list, you can create a workflow that states if a contact opts out of communication, add them to a specific list. 
  • Contact Owners: Similar to the lead routing scenario, you can use workflows to ensure all contacts have an owner. Or, if they don’t, use a workflow to create a task for a sales leader to review.

Copying Across Property Types: This might vary depending on your CRM, but you are likely using different types of properties or objects to store your data. For example, a company record or contact record. In some cases, the information should be the same in both places. Rather than duplicating efforts, use a workflow to copy the value from one property to another.

B2B Marketing Automation Examples for Lead Nurturing 

Lead nurturing is cultivating relationships with potential buyers at every stage of the sales process and through the buyer’s journey. It focuses on meeting buyers where they are, listening, and providing helpful, relevant information.

B2B marketing automation allows you to create lead nurturing campaigns, also known as email drip campaigns. These are a series of emails spread over time that help buyers move from awareness to consideration to decision. 

When it comes to what emails to include, how many, and what frequency, it depends on your persona’s needs, your buying cycle, and the action the contact took. Nurturing campaigns are not ‘set it and forget it.’ Email open rates and engagement through marketing attribution reporting will be your workflow gut check and point you toward areas for optimization.

Lead to MQL Nurturing & Beyond

Lead to MQL nurturing is a common point in the buyer’s journey in which nurturing can start. It is initiated by a contact downloading a piece of content. From there, you offer the lead relevant information that may help them solve the pain point that initially brought them to your site. Along the way, you give them plenty of opportunities to convert with additional content and CTAs.

The goal is to nurture the lead until they become a Marketing Qualified Lead and meets your set criteria. From there, queue sales!

B2B Marketing Automation Examples

Form Submission Follow-Up

Depending on the type of form a contact submits, you might not need a full-blown workflow, maybe a simple thank you will suffice? If so, workflows are your ticket. They can easily go from a 10-email sequence, as mentioned above, to a one-and-done thank you for your submission email.


Pro Tip: Take your ‘Contact Us’ form submissions to the next level by sending a follow-up email post submission letting your contacts know when they can expect to hear from you in response to their inquiry.

Date-Based Marketing Automations

If you have a CRM like HubSpot, workflows don’t have to be based solely on a contact property; they can be date-based too! This is perfect for webinars, trade shows, and other events. Date-based workflows can handle the following:

  • Leading up to an event
  • During an event
  • Post-event follow up

Marketing Automation Optimizations 

Okay, you set up all of the B2B marketing automation above. That means you’re done and can move on to the next initiative, right?

via GIPHY

If the ‘how about no sloth’ didn’t give it away, the answer is ‘no.’ The setup is only the beginning. Sales and marketing automation tools typically come with better reporting capabilities, and you should totally use them. Whether it’s lead flows, MQLs, or subscriptions, reviewing and optimizing your B2B marketing automation workflows are a must.

Also, it’s worth noting that a part of the story can’t always be seen in the data. Take the time to talk to the teams and solicit feedback. Is automation working? Is it missing the mark? Meeting on a regular cadence will help uncover those issues too.

Lake One Can Help With B2B Marketing Automation

So tell us, did you like the examples? Are we missing one of your favorites? Sales and marketing automation can save you time and help your B2B business scale. We’d love to chat if you’re considering incorporating automation into your sales and marketing strategy.

 Book Your Consultation Now

B2B CRM Strategy: 6 Ways It Can Drive Sales & Marketing Alignment

Posted on by Rachael

The B2B buying environment is complex and often multifaceted. With heavy workloads and high goals, one thing remains consistent across the board: strong business relationships help close deals and drive company growth. But how do you keep track of contact history and provide visibility company-wide all while keeping your sales and marketing teams aligned? Queue Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and B2B CRM strategy.

CRM software revenues are now the largest of all software markets with revenues expected to reach over $80 billion by 2025. 

B2B CRM Software Revenue Chart

Image Source: SuperOffice

What is a B2B CRM

According to Salesforce, a B2B CRM stands for Business to Business Customer Relationship Management and refers to systems, technologies, strategies, and processes that help B2B companies manage their relationships with existing and potential customers. It helps companies better understand contacts, their needs, and where they are in the buyer’s journey as it relates to your business. 

Why Invest in a B2B CRM

B2B CRMs should really be thought of as a strategic way of understanding, managing, and delivering on business customers’ needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. They really are what you make of it, but here are three main reasons why you should take the plunge and invest in a CRM and drive alignment for your internal teams. 

Better Visibility

B2B CRMs provide visibility system-wide and are single-handedly the best solution for keeping a real-time pulse on your contact database and sales cycle ecosystem. Even smarketing meetings (sales and marketing alignment team meetings) can’t provide you with the same kind of real-time feedback across teams. 

Have a question on a contact? Or are you wondering overall how leads that come from paid media are performing? Your answers lie in the CRM.

Working Smarter

We’re big fans of working smarter and not getting bogged down with busy work or meetings for meetings sake. You might be thinking that CRMs create more work because of all the necessary input which is only partially true. It does take time to adjust your daily processes to a CRM, but once you do, your teams will likely find that they are more efficient with contact follow up and reporting, and actually are able to spend more time selling and focusing on target accounts. And as an added bonus, marketing has better insight into marketing qualified lead performance as well, resulting in the ability to hone in lead quality vs quantity. 

Data-Driven Decision Making 

Whether you’re looking for a bird’s eye view or you like getting down and dirty with the details, CRMs undoubtedly provide insight into the data. You can view account activity, pipeline, close rates, and more. You’ll also be able to turn your hunches into a data-driven decision. For example, let’s say you think that the majority of your prospects in a certain industry sign when you can get them to a demo. A CRM would allow you to confirm that in the data and then you could spend your time focusing on how to get more prospects in the said industry to demo faster.

Getting Started with Your B2B CRM Strategy

B2B CRMs should really be thought of as a strategic way of understanding, managing, and delivering on business customers’ needs at each stage of the buyer’s journey. The CRM technology itself is what enables the strategy and makes it possible.  

So where to start? Here are our 6 proven B2B CRM strategies that fuel sales and marketing alignment and business growth. 

Related Reading: Is a HubSpot CRM Right for You? 7 Questions to Consider

Get Teams Speaking the Same Language

CRMs are great, but they’re only as good as in the information you put it in and it’s really difficult to increase usage if everyone has different definitions of some of the basics. Everybody needs to be speaking the same language and have a common understanding of what is critical for your CRM. And trust us, it’s better to iron out the basics sooner in the process rather than later.

Lifecycle Stages & Lead Statuses 

Lifecycle stages and lead statuses may differ slightly in naming depending on your platform, but the purpose behind them likely doesn’t. Lifecycle stages signify what stage your contact is in the buyer’s journey and lead status provides an extra layer of detail as to where they are at exactly. Here are the most common definitions we use across our partnerships.

Lifecycle Stages

  • Subscriber: Contacts who know of your business and have opted in to hear more from your team. This is likely visitors that have signed up for your blog or newsletter.
  • Lead: Contacts who have shown sales-readiness beyond being a subscriber. An example of a lead is a contact who signs up for a content offer from your business.
  • Marketing Qualified Lead: Contacts who have engaged with the team’s marketing efforts, but are still not ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who responds to a specific form in a marketing campaign.
  • Sales Qualified Lead: A contact that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer.
  • Opportunity: A contact who is a real sales opportunity.
  • Customer: A contact with a closed deal(s).

Lead Statuses

  • Prospect: No marketing automation. Contacts with this lead status are being hunted by sales.
  • New: All new leads will be assigned this status by default.
  • Open: A lead that is currently being worked by sales.
  • In Progress: A connection has been and the lead is in progress.
  • Open Deal: There is an open deal with the contact.
  • Attempted to Contact: Sales is attempting to contact or follow up with a lead.
  • Connected: Sales has connected with the contact.
  • Unqualified: Lead is not qualified to do business.

Pro Tip: Identify your lifecycle stages and statues as part of your Service Level Agreement. Learn more about Lake One’s SLAs here.

Contact Field Basics & Defaults

You’ll also want to work with key stakeholders to define your default required fields. For any field that has a dropdown, you’ll want to make sure those are well-defined among internal teams as well. The basics range from specific contact information needed down to current solution provider, market or buying role. Most CRMs will allow you to customize fields to your business needs.

Pro Tip: Think wisely about the field ‘type’ you select when creating properties as it’s nearly impossible to use a single line text field in list segmentation or workflows. This is due to the room for error in data input. For workflow usable data, dropdown selects are one of my favorites! We reserved single line text for fields like phone numbers, addresses, notes, etc. 

Segment Contacts for Personalized Communication

Personalization in a B2B email can improve click-through rate by as much as 14% and conversion rates by 10%. Personalization starts with list segmentation. Of course it can come in to play via the actual insertion of personalization tokens (names, role, etc.), but deciding who you are communicating with is the first step. 

B2B CRMs allow you to segment contacts by where they are at in the buyer’s journey (lead, customer, MQL), their product interest, industry, etc. without needing to think about each contact and manually emailing a custom communication. This is also critical for sales and marketing alignment and allows both teams to tailor communications. Get more tips on writing B2B sales emails here.

Close the Feedback Loop in Real-Time

A key component of sales and marketing alignment is closing the feedback loop between sales and marketing. It’s absolutely essential that sales provides feedback on lead quality and lead status in real-time. 

Closing the feedback loop entails:

  • Sales communicating a lead is rejected
  • Sales communicating why a lead is rejected (poor timing, bad contact information, no budget, etc.)
  • Communication on when lead nurturing is taking place
  • Communication on if and when to resume lead nurturing once it’s been paused 

All of the above is made possible by a B2B CRM in a relatively quick and painless way. 

Leverage Lead Scoring That’s Based on Engagement

Lead scoring is a systematic and scientific way of ranking leads based on their readiness to purchase a product or service from your company. Scores are assigned to certain criteria such as a lead’s fit for your product or service, expressed interest through different activities like filling out a form or watching a webinar, and position in the buying cycle.

Lead Scoring provides a reliable, predictable, recurring means for deciding which leads are sales-ready, and ordering them by importance takes the guesswork out for both teams.

Lead scoring can be done by either using explicit data/demographics and/or implicit data/actions or behavior. A B2B CRM allows you to track and gather implicit data more easily such as: email opens, click-through-rates, key page views, and form fills. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to track and leverage the data across teams. 

Related Reading: Lead Scoring Basics 

Universal Deal Stages & Pipelines That Reflect Sales Cycles

Pipelines and deal stages help to break down complex B2B buying cycles into a measurable process that’s easily digestible. Whether you have an established sales process or you’re starting from scratch, B2B CRMs like HubSpot make it easy to create your ideal process.

HubSpot B2B CRM Strategy

Image Source: HubSpot

Most processes of course start with a meeting and end either in closed won or closed lost. The pipeline gives you visibility into what’s in process, when things will hit, and most importantly, what’s stuck in the process. 

Use Forecasting & Reporting to Better Manage Teams

B2B CRMs like HubSpot really shine when it comes to taking your data inputs and turning it into dashboards and usable reporting. Maybe you could create manually? But the time savings and accuracy that come with CRMs are too good to pass up. Here are a few ways to leverage CRM data for forecasting and better managing your teams.

Related Reading: 6 KPIs for Sales & Marketing Alignment

Sales Team Activity: View activities by sales rep on a rolling basis. Activity includes number of calls, meetings, emails, new contacts, deals closed, etc. It’s easy to see top performers and those who might be phoning it in.

HubSpot B2B CRM Strategy

Image Source: HubSpot

Forecasting Deal Revenue: Get a clear view of what’s coming down the pipe associated with the deal stage and its likelihood to close. The benefit of these reports are two-fold. It keeps your sales reps accountable knowing that their estimates will be used in reporting and it also allows you to better forecast. 

HubSpot B2B CRM Strategy

Image Source: HubSpot

About Sales & Marketing Alignment Services at Lake One

At Lake One, technology is at the core of all our sales and marketing thinking. We call these services basecamp.

  • We work with our partners to make sure their basecamp is “right sized” for their organization.
  • That the goals and strategy are leading the technology choices and not the other way around.
  • But most of all – that the technology is embraced and providing value to the organization.

 Book Your Consultation Now

Building Blocks of a Quota Crushing Sales Enablement Program

Posted on by Rachael

Sales enablement is quickly gaining traction across organizations. High-growth companies are finding that in order to grow the business and hit revenue targets, sales teams need more support. 

According to HubSpot, Sales Enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales teams with the resources they need to close more deals. Resources include content, tools, knowledge and the information needed to effectively sell and close more deals.

Source: Demand Metric

Although sales enablement programs aren’t one size fits all, successful programs have these building blocks in common.

sales enablement program

Strategy

A successful sales enablement program almost always starts with a good strategy. In order for a program to make an impact, it needs to be aligned with the needs of your organization, but in order to do that, you need to understand where your team is at today. Your baseline.

  • What current challenges is your company facing?
  • What are the teams’ pain points?
  • Where is there friction in the buying process?

Open dialogue should start to unearth areas of opportunity for team alignment, streamlined processes and content creation. 

Sales Enablement Content

There are two key areas when it comes to sales enablement content – content alignment and content management.

Content Alignment

Sales enablement content can be for both internal sales support and for b2b lead generation. Marketers are hyper-focused on the buyer’s journey and who better to bring back information from the front lines than the sales team? Sales can share insights into knowledge gaps, buyer objections, and content performance. Some examples of sales enablement content are:

  • Internal Sales Support Content: Product sheets, competitor comparisons, email templates and snippets, one-pagers, presentation support, and social messages.
  • Lead Generation Content: Blog posts, white papers, case studies, and videos.
Source: Uplandsoftware.com

Creating content that is underutilized and undervalued, doesn’t benefit anyone. Aligning your content strategy with buyers to further support sales efforts is a win-win across the board.

Content Management

According to Inc., the average salesperson spends about 440 hours each year trying to find the right content to share with their prospects and customers. Yikes.

Creating the content is only half of it. Take it the extra mile by making the content easily discoverable by sales. This can be as easy as a shared file system, a Google Doc, or as sophisticated as creating trackable documents and leveraging marketing technology. You want your team to spend their time selling, not tracking down assets.

Pro Tip: At Lake One, we do a hybrid approach for sales enablement content that consists of a workbook that we call a “Content Audit” along with trackable sales documents in HubSpot. We often categorize the assets by industry, service area, and persona, for easy lookup.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

The alignment of sales and marketing teams for sale enablement isn’t just necessary- it’s the entire point. When creating your strategy, keep that at the heart of it all. Ultimately, you want to create a symbiotic relationship between both teams. Sales should be communicating their needs and knowledge to marketing as we mentioned. This includes what assets would be most helpful in their sales process as mentioned, but it also includes what feedback they receive from leads, how long their sales process typically takes, etc. At the same time, marketing should be communicating back to sales about up and coming events, relative data points and new assets on the horizon. 

You’ll hopefully kick off your strategy creation with a meeting of the minds from both teams, but plan to make this a recurring event. The aim is to have regular check-ins to keep communication open, analyze data, and optimize your efforts.

Learn more about marketing’s role in B2B Sales Enablement 

Training & Reinforcement

We understand busy schedules more than anyone, but training and reinforcement is a must and is non-negotiable for making your sales enablement program stick.

Source: Brainshark.com

According to the Harvard Business Review, salespeople lose 80 to 90% of what they learn after one month. 

Training doesn’t have to be a days-long convention on solution selling. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Frequency and consistency are key. Not sure what to train your teams on? Here are a couple of suggestions to help you flush it out.

  • Review the team stats. Do you have a stellar performer that is standing out about the rest that could share some pointers with the team? Or is your team performing below industry benchmarks?
  • Just ask. Chances are your team has areas that they’d like to improve if given the opportunity.

The Role of Technology in Sales Enablement

According to Forbes, the term “sales enablement technology” refers to a software or system that allows the sales team to access content that is relevant to their target consumer and appropriate for the consumer’s position in the sales funnel. It also makes content accessibility and reporting a heck of a lot easier.

From notifications of initial interest all the way through to closing deals, consider how you want your sales and marketing teams to work together. How can you streamline the process, using technology? Where can you automate a manual process? 

The specific role technology plays in your sales enablement program can vary, but will likely consist of a few of these basics.

Source: 6connex.com

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

A CRM helps manage and organize your company’s interactions with prospects and clients. It’s your central source of truth for account ownership, account activity, and the state of the state. It’s critical for alignment.

Of course though, CRMs these days aren’t just CRMs. There is an opportunity to integrate your B2B CRM with your marketing automation software. A CRM, like HubSpot does this seamlessly and can bring your sales enablement strategy to the next level because it allows your team to see, nurture, and report on leads. Thorough contact records are kept up to date automatically with the actions leads have taken on your website including things like content downloads, email opens, and page visits. These insights help to bring your content full picture.

Related Reading: Is a HubSpot CRM Right for You? 7 Questions to Consider

Additionally, a CRM allows for progress tracking of sales or deals. It’s really where your sales enablement strategy is able to come to life as a shared information access point for better visibility and better forecasting. 

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the use of technology to automate elements of your sales and marketing processes. It’s the clincher in a sales enablement strategy and how you can make the most out of your CRM. Marketing automation can be used to aid in prospecting, lead nurturing, sales follow up and streamlining internal processes. 

Marketing Automation for Manufacturing

Related Reading: Sales & Marketing Automation: What it is & what it can do for B2B

Getting Your Sales Enablement Program Started

Now that you know the basics, here are a few tips for getting started.

  • Start with the end in mind. Know your goals and work backward, determining which levers you can pull to make an impact. 
  • Don’t develop your strategy in a vacuum. Sales enablement is a team effort so make sure you have buy-in and agreement from key stakeholders.
  • Progress over perfection. You’re going to have bumps and you’re going to face challenges. That’s okay! We’re big believers in learning as you go and going forward.

If you’re considering building a sales enablement program, we’d love to chat. Contact us.

Marketing Automation for Manufacturing: How to make it Your Firm’s Unfair Advantage

Posted on by Rachael

Manufacturing is an industry that can often rely heavily on trade shows, in-person meetings, and product catalogs. However, like many industries, there’s a pressure and need to survive and thrive in the digital marketplace we’ve all become accustomed to. One tool manufacturing companies can have in their toolbox, is marketing automation. Marketing automation helps manufacturers simplify complex b2b processes while personalizing and scaling their digital marketing and sales efforts. 

With 48% of Marketers using marketing automation, it is one of the 4 most popular methods to create personalized customer experiences. – House of Marketing “Yearly Marketing Survey 2019” (2019)

By definition according to HubSpot, marketing automation is a tactic that allows companies to nurture leads through the buyer’s journey using personalized and valuable content. It also supports scale and growth within organizations. In this post we will talk about five key areas marketing automation can fuel your modern marketing strategy.

marketing automation for manufacturing

But First, Strategy.

Marketing automation is all about using software to automate manual processes and activities. These activities can include email, lead routing, social media, managing contact data properties, lead scoring, contact follow up, and more. But those are all features and functions. Technology is a solution. Not a strategy. 

Marketing automation is most effective when it’s driven by a persona-centric, buyer-focused, process founded strategy. 

Looking for help with strategy? Book a free consult.

Marketing Automation for Email Marketing

Marketing automation is so much more than email, but it’s likely what comes to mind first when you think about marketing automation. When done correctly, it allows for personalized emails to be sent to a segmented list from your contact database.

Why is this important? Manufacturers can have massive contact databases that house leads, vendors, reps, distributors, and customers alike. Personalizing communication and tailoring your message to your personas is key for engagement and effectiveness.

List Segmentation

List segmentation is pulling contacts that meet a certain set of criteria at a given time based on the information you have in your database. When potentially crawling through tens of thousands of contacts, automating list pulling is a must. 

For example, if you want to send an email to all of your customers who are engineers, who have an interest in product XYZ and reside in the U.S., list segmentation is the way to go. With a few clicks, you’ll have the list you need to provide relevant, timely, and helpful information in your communication.

Personalization

Automated marketing emails don’t have to ‘feel’ automated. Marketing automation allows for email personalization at scale. Here are a few examples for manufacturers.

  • Addressing your recipient by name in the greeting
  • Referencing their company name when giving an example of how their company could benefit from your product
  • Referencing their role or job title when discussing pain points or solutions pertinent to their role
  • Referencing the last piece of content they downloaded by name and asking if they are finding it helpful
  • Customizing the sender information per contact by contact owner
  • Referencing product or product category of interest
  • Referencing examples and case studies

When using platforms like HubSpot, you can pull in nearly every property as a personalization token within your email. 

Pro Tip: It’s a good idea to test your email internally, prior to sending your full list to confirm the personalization tokens rendered in the copy as intended. 

Marketing Automation for Manufacturing
Found on  HubSpot, Research by Jupiter Research.

Marketing Automation for Lead Generation

Marketing Automation facilitates lead capture and lead generation most commonly through forms and landing pages. Leads can take all sorts of forms for manufacturers. New distribution partners, new suppliers, all the way to end users and customers. But they all start their journey at contact with your firm. 

Landing Pages

Landing pages are web pages that are optimized for conversion and focus on a clear call-to-action for your personas such as downloading an ebook, requesting a catalog, signing up for a newsletter or requesting a quote.

Manufacturing websites can be robust because they house many product pages so providing dedicated landing pages that cut out the noise and drive one action becomes really important. 

Forms

One key part of landing pages that is so fundamental it deserves a call-out of its own, is forms. Forms provide the chance for your personas to share information with you in exchange for something (an ebook, a purchasing quote, etc.) Selecting which form fields appear in your forms is a part of a sales and marketing aligned strategy. Here are some form fields for consideration for manufacturing:

  • Job function
  • Location
  • Company name
  • Product interest
  • Readiness to buy

Although I’m sure there is a lot of information you’d like to know about our contacts, be selective and make sure the number and type of questions you ask is equivalent to the value the user gets in turn for completing the form. 

Pro Tip: Platforms like HubSpot allow you to leverage progressive fields which means you aren’t showing repeat questions for the same lead. This allows for you to continue to collect valuable information for repeat form fills.

Marketing Automation for Manufacturing

Marketing Automation for Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the process of cultivating relationships with potential buyers at every stage of the sales process and through the buyer’s journey. It puts a focus on meeting buyers where they are at, listening, and providing helpful relevant information. 

On average, 50% of the leads in any system are not yet ready to buy (Marketo). 

Marketing automation allows you to create lead nurturing campaigns, also known as email drip campaigns which are a series of emails spread out over time that help buyers move from awareness to consideration to decision. Here are a few examples of actions that can initiate a lead nurturing campaign for manufacturers. 

  • A lead downloads a piece of premium content like an ebook
  • A lead attends a webinar
  • A lead requests more information on a specific product 
  • A lead downloads a case study or a buyers guide

When it comes to what emails to include and how many and what frequency, it really depends on your personas needs and your buying cycle. Nurturing campaigns are definitely not ‘set it and forget it’. Email open rates and engagement all the way through to marketing attribution reporting, will be your workflow gut check and point you towards areas for optimization.

Marketing Automation for Sales Collaboration & Internal Processes

Marketing automation is a major element of sales collaboration and simplifying internal processes. 

Marketing Automation

Sales Collaboration

At  Lake One, we bleed sales and marketing alignment. Marketing automation facilitates collaboration between sales and marketing in real-time. It’s the conduit between the two teams. Manufacturers can use marketing automation for the following sales collaboration oriented workflows:

  • Lead scoring
  • Assigning lifecycle stages and lead statuses
  • Handing off Marketing Qualified Leads to sales
  • Closing the lead quality feedback loop

Related Reading: How to Marketing Qualify Your Manufacturing Leads

Internal Processes

Manufacturing companies often have complex business processes. Marketing automation can drive efficiencies and allow for real-time routing, task creation, and follow-up across functions and channels. It’s made possible again through workflows. Here are some examples of workflows leveraged by manufacturing companies to drive efficiencies.

  • Routing leads by sales rep territory
  • Sending custom ‘Thank You’ emails by country
  • Routing internal requests like samples, RFQs or catalogs
  • Creating custom tasks by sales rep for lead review
  • Automatically setting subscription types
  • Setting product interest categories

The possibilities are nearly endless when it comes to creating custom workflows to support your internal processes. 

Marketing Automation for Reporting & Attribution

At the end of the day, it’s about numbers. Marketing automation platforms give you the ability to create dashboards for your organization to view the reporting that matters most. Typical reports manufacturers can leverage include:

  • Contact lifecycle funnel (from a lead all the way to a customer)
  • Lead source
  • Traffic sessions
  • Email performance
  • Landing page performance
  • Sales pipeline

Is Marketing Automation Right for Your Manufacturing Company?

We realize marketing for manufacturing can be complex, especially when you add marketing tech. Building a revenue operations machine with the technology to automate and support the complexities of your customer channels can come with plenty of questions.

Interested in exploring if marketing automation is right for you? Book a free 1-hour consultation with Ryan, our lead strategist.

 Book Your Consultation Now

Sales & Marketing Automation: What it is and what it can do for B2B

Posted on by Rachael

You likely know that sales and marketing alignment is our jam. We are all about the two teams communicating openly and working towards common goals. But did you also know that we are all about working smarter? Sales and marketing automation can help you with some of the heavy lifting allowing you to scale and spend your time on the things that matter most to your business.

Despite the joint naming, sales automation and marketing automation serve distinct purposes within an organization. In this post, we’ll define both sales and marketing automation and share some of our top tips for implementation. 

Sales & Marketing Automation

What is Sales Automation?

HubSpot defines sales automation as the mechanization of manual, time-consuming sales tasks using software, artificial intelligence (AI), and other digital tools. 

With the sales team focused on one to one communication, automation can help with prospecting and outreach and cut down on response time, making sales uber efficient. More specifically, sales automation helps with:

  • Lead distribution
  • Lead follow-up emails
  • Meeting scheduling
  • Sales quotes/proposals
  • Customer onboarding
  • Lead scoring
  • Approvals
  • Lead qualification

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is using software to automate marketing activities such as email marketing, social posting, and reporting. 

With the marketing team focused on communicating to a group of people, (ideally targeted to personas), automation adds scalability and also personalization. Without marketing automation, it’s nearly impossible to include personalization at the scale needed for most B2B businesses. 

Marketing automation helps to accomplish the following:

  • Updated tracking
  • Real-time alerts
  • Automated lead-hand off
  • Forms
  • Landing pages
  • Social post scheduling
  • Emails 
  • Lead nurturing
  • Lead qualification

Did we mention you can use marketing automation to outsource lead gen? Read more.

Sales & Marketing Automation Tips for B2B

If you’re either considering sales and marketing automation for your business or your current efforts aren’t going so well, this next section is for you. Here are our top five sales and marketing automation tips. 

Tip #1: It starts with alignment

If it feels like your sales and marketing teams are on different planets, adding automation to the mix won’t solve that. It’s best to have a meeting of the minds first. There you should outline responsibilities, define key terms and align your goals. 

Alignment can be a process, but at a minimum, it should be an active process.

MarTech Assessment

Tip #2: Don’t overbuy

Underutilized technology can be a costly expenditure. Not every company needs sales and marketing automation and not every company needs all the bells and whistles of enterprise-grade solutions. Being aligned as a team will help you hone in on the features that are necessary.

Here are some questions for consideration when evaluating the needs of your teams:

  • Are you struggling to segment and prioritize leads?
  • Do your leads require nurturing?
  • Is your sales team struggling to find the time to follow up with leads?
  • Are you leveraging your content?
  • Do you know where your teams are coming from?
  • How are leads handed off?

Tip #3: Have a plan 

Sales and marketing automation can be great, but not without a plan. Having an agreed-upon strategy of what matters to your organization will help you select the tech that meets your needs and execute day to day.

Automation isn’t the entire strategy, but it’s part of it.

Tip #4: Who owns automation?

Bringing on new technology can sometimes have people asking, “Who’s on first?” We strongly recommend appointing an automation internal champion. This person is responsible for adoption, consistency and holding teams accountable.

Tip #5: Don’t forget you’re marketing and selling to humans

When it comes to automation, you can have too much of a good thing because at the end of the day, you’re still marketing and selling to humans. No one wants to engage and converse with a robot, especially if the buyer is in the decision stage. 

 Make sure to:

  • Monitor replies to your automated your messaging
  • Use personalization
  • Practice social listening 
  • Analyze the data and optimize

Avoid these B2B email nurture mistakes that will leave your leads dead in the water.

Tip #5: Automation isn’t set it and forget it

C’mon. Is there anything in sales or marketing that is set it and forget it? The answer is no. There isn’t. Sales and marketing automation tools typically come with better reporting capabilities. Use it! 

Also, there’s part of the story that can’t always be seen in the data. Take the time to talk to the teams and solicit feedback.

Sales and marketing automation can save you time and help your B2B business scale. If you’re considering incorporating automation into your sales and marketing strategy, we’d love to chat.

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