Achieve Sales and Marketing Alignment with Marketing Automation and CRM

06/08/2012 3 min read Written by Lynton

Where do your good sales leads go to die? 

How much time are your salespeople wasting by prospecting bad leads? Are your leads exhibiting buyer behavior? What is the most visited page on your website by leads that have turned into sales?

More generally, how are you, as a CEO, Sales Director, or CMO aligning your sales and marketing efforts? What marketing automation and CRM tools do you have in place to determine your current business strategy and sales efforts are indeed working?

Sales and Marketing Alignment - A Website First Focus

Your corporate website should be at the core of your sales and marketing efforts. Regardless of how a visitor first lands on your site, their website navigation behavior should be monitored once they are there. Marketing automation software will attach a unique identifier, called a cookie, to your visitor to track their referral source. This helps you understand where your visitors are coming from. You might find that visitors who come from LinkedIn become high priority leads and turn into large sales. You won't know, of course, unless you have a system in place to track this. 

If your website offers useful content, your visitors might choose to download this content in exchange for their contact and other useful information (e.g. role in company, size of business). Once a visitor offers additional identifiable characteristics by converting on your website, they become a lead. 

Once you capture a lead, you'll have to determine the viability of that lead. Is the lead a tire kicker, a mom and pop shop that doesn't currently have the revenues to support your product or service, or is the lead (based on the information you have) at the right level and at the right size company to warrant additional sales and marketing efforts?

When a visitor converts to a lead there are both automated and manual actions that should occur. Some automated actions to take:
  • Assign the lead to a nurturing campaign aligned to a buyer persona. This will typically be determined by the type of content the lead downloads. A CMO will be seeking different content than a graphic designer or web developer. Subsequent email offers via marketing automation should include content relevant to the lead. 
  • Sync the lead information in your marketing automation system with your CRM. This is a critical step in achieving sales and marketing automation. Passing lead information to your CRM is typically done with a CRM connector that maps standard contact fields and lead intelligence fields from your marketing automation tool (e.g. HubSpot) to your CRM (e.g. Microsoft Dynamics). 

On the manual end of things:

  • You'll want to review the lead in your CRM. You may want to mark the lead as high priority and then create a custom report containing all high priority leads or leads that have converted multiple times in the last week or month. 
  • Call the good leads. It's important to find out where in the buying cycle they are and how you can help them move down the funnel. You also want to confirm you're speaking with the decision maker in the organization.
  • Mark the lead as a closed (or lost) sale. Closing the loop from initial visitor to sale is the only way to truly track your marketing ROI and understand how to best use your website as a sales tool. 
Need some help connecting your CRM or optimizing your marketing automation? Fill out our handy-dandy form and we'll give you a call. 
By: Lynton

Lynton is a HubSpot Elite Partner that provides certified knowledge and tools to grow your business through integrated inbound marketing, including lead generation strategies, website designs and development, and CRM integrations.

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