Marketing Automation, Sales

A Step-by-Step Guide to Driving Marketing and Sales Collaboration in HubSpot

Originally posted on LinkedIn by Lydia Chadwick, Account Manager & Marketing Consultant.

HubSpot is a powerful tool to power marketing and sales integration—but there’s more to it than just setting up some automations. This article shares actionable steps to plan and execute effective collaboration between marketing and sales in HubSpot.

Picture this: Your inbound marketing campaigns are working just as intended, and after reading an insightful blog post, a prospect decides to download an educational eBook—and just like that, you have added another contact to your HubSpot database.

Now, between your sales and marketing teams, what happens next?

In an ideal scenario, our new contact would be gently brought through the buyer’s journey with a series of actions from marketing and sales. There’s no immediate sales pitch, just a thoughtful and well-timed stream of information, answering questions the prospect hasn’t even asked yet. When the time is right, sales reaches out with a personal touch, offering to discuss how your solution can address the specific challenges the prospect faces. It’s a warm, helpful call, guided by genuine understanding.

But what if the sync between marketing and sales is missing? Imagine the confusion for a prospect who, after showing initial interest, is bombarded with mismatched messages or premature sales calls (sometimes before they’re even done reading the eBook!) The gentle, well-crafted nurture process breaks down, leaving the prospect feeling overwhelmed, misunderstood, or downright annoyed.

The key to avoiding this disconnect lies in the strategic use of CRM and marketing automation tools like HubSpot. The decisions made in HubSpot impact every contact in the database. HubSpot processes can significantly improve efficiency for your sales and marketing teams and allow for a lead follow-up journey that feels personal and thoughtful, rather than automated and generic. But it’s also one of the areas where teams often stumble. Tools like HubSpot are incredibly powerful, but the nearly infinite flexibility and number of options for automation also make it easy to add confusion and inefficiency into the sales and marketing process.

Put the critical role of sales and marketing collaboration in practice: Let’s walk through a step-by-step guide that highlights challenges and shares actionable steps to seamless integration and efficiency in the database, with a specific focus on HubSpot.

Here’s to better sales and marketing collaboration!

Step 1: Talk it Out

When you first begin to work on improving collaboration between sales and marketing teams, it can be tempting to jump into HubSpot and start automating things right away. HubSpot offers a wealth of options for streamlining business processes, some built-in and some that you set up and customize to meet your needs. But before you start creating tons of custom lead sources or workflows to assign inbound leads to sales reps willy-nilly, take a step back: The most important first step happens outside of any database.

Make sure marketing and sales are on the same page about all definitions and table-stakes information—and document it with your other important processes. Aligning on processes helps reduce confusion and frustration. One example that happens frequently is when the sales team is eager to reach out to new leads right away—but based on their actions, the contact isn’t ready for a sales conversation and need to be nurtured and qualified before hearing from the sales team.

Here are some examples of conversations that you should have:

  • What are the official, agreed-upon definitions of the terms we use? For example, I’ve seen companies define terms like conversion, the various lead sources and lifecycle stages, lead fit or qualification, etc. differently company-to-company—and sometimes the sales team and the marketing team within the same company even define them differently.
  • When and how does the handoff from marketing to sales happen (and vice-versa, if sales is no longer pursuing a lead)? Does it differ by lead score, conversion, source, or qualification criteria?
  • What marketing activities happen to a contact when they enter your database? What about after they are handed over to sales? Likewise, what sales activities will happen to a lead once they are handed off?
  • At what point in the sales process is a deal created in HubSpot?
  • What is the agreed-upon turnaround time for manual actions (such as lead qualification and outreach)? How are both teams held accountable for these turnaround times?
  • Do both sales and marketing have SMART goals for number of MQLs, number of deals, or other metrics that need to be tracked regularly?

Note that this is not a one-time conversation—you’ll want to continue meeting and discussing your sales and marketing collaboration regularly as you set up your HubSpot processes and ongoing.

Step 2: Track It

Once you’ve defined the marketing-sales handoff process, you then need to put it into action. This step ensures that communication flows between the teams: Sales will know when they have a lead to reach out to, and marketing gets feedback on leads and information about leads that need to go back to nurture. You guessed it: We finally get to use HubSpot!

A lot of sales reps like to use HubSpot tasks to track their to-dos, like reaching out to a new inbound lead or setting their follow ups. Others find it helpful to work from dashboards, contact views or lists to categorize their outreach. In a smaller organization with just one or two sales reps, it’s easy to customize tracking and notifications to suit their style. On the other hand, organizations with a larger sales team may need to standardize their tracking—and in this case, choose the method that works best given your sales processes, document it, and provide training and support to be sure it works for the team.

HubSpot’s rich database holds a wealth of information about every contact, company, and deal that enters the database. Consider the following to be sure you have all the information you need at your disposal:

  • On the contact view, customize the properties that show by default. This can be done as a company-wide from the settings page, or individual team members can customize their view to see what they want—contact information, title, lead source, industry, etc.
  • On contact views, reports, and lists, set the columns and viewable information to show the relevant information like lead source, last contacted date, and lifecycle stage by default.
  • Make sure all marketing and sales staff are properly trained on how to use HubSpot properties, lists, and activity logs to find the contextual information, previous communications, and internal notes that they need to move a prospect forward.

Step 3: Automate—Simply

Now that your team is aligned on the terms and processes and set up for HubSpot success, you can begin automating repetitive tasks with HubSpot workflows. Workflows are a powerful and very flexible tool that power automation and bulk edits in HubSpot.

A word to the wise: Resist the temptation to over-complicate. Too many automated processes can create noise and confusion in the database, and with lots of different workflows running behind-the-scenes, it is easy to forget how changes you made a year ago will impact new additions. Plus, simplifying automations makes it easier for both teams to understand them—and stick to the processes. It’s completely OK if you can’t automate everything right off the bat—try to balance value-add automation with manual updates.

For example, let’s say that you decided in Step 1 that when a lead fills out your contact form, they are manually qualified, then sent to the sales team. Your simple process might look like this:

  1. A workflow changes the contact owner of people who fill out the Contact Us form to the SDR or other person doing the qualifying (and creates a task, or whatever criteria you decided on in Step 2).
  2. The SDR qualifies the contact, then manually changes their lifecycle stage to SQL.
  3. A second workflow takes all SQLs and updates the contact owner to the sales rep. Depending on your sales team size and process, this can be divided based on industry or other pre-set criteria, or you can use the Rotate Leads feature to split new leads between different reps.

If you want to set up a workflow to send contacts through a marketing email nurture first, perhaps in the case of a resource download, you might follow this process:

  1. When a new contact fills out a resource download form, it triggers a simple email nurture workflow. (Note: You can also narrow this down based on other automated criteria, so only contacts in your designated geography, industries, or size range receive nurture emails.)
  2. After the nurture is complete, a branch in the same workflow checks engagement based on lead score, number of marketing emails opened/clicked, or other criteria.
  3. Engaged leads are assigned to the sales team, similar to step 3 above.

These are just two examples of how we’ve seen companies handle their inbound leads. The nice (and admittedly, sometimes overwhelming) thing about HubSpot is that workflows are infinitely customizable to meet your team’s needs.

Step 4: Log Everything

Any CRM is only as good as its data. The more information that is stored in HubSpot, the easier it is to target the right people with the right message at the right time. For example, if the sales team is actively working a deal, the contact should not be enrolled in a marketing nurture campaign—but if the deal activities aren’t being tracked, marketing won’t be able to filter them out of email lists. Accurate records also help paint a picture of communication and engagement—the sales team see what messages have been sent to a contact, what campaigns the contact has interacted with, and how they responded to previous outreach so they can tailor their communications accordingly.

Both teams have accountability on this:

The Sales Team

  • Log every interaction with a prospect—every phone call, every email, and every meeting—including when the contact asked to be opted out of communications. Using sales sequences can help with this as they automatically log activities, as can connecting your email inbox to HubSpot via an integration or plugin.
  • Be sure deals and the pipeline are kept up-to-date so all team members can get a point-in-time view of where things stand.
  • Add as much information as possible to the contact record, including industry, company size, and more. Some of this is automatically populated by HubSpot—check to be sure all the information you need is easily available.

The Marketing Team

  • Ensure that all lead source tracking is accurate and descriptive.
  • Set up website tracking pixels to log website visits.
  • Sync ad accounts and social media accounts are to HubSpot.
  • Use the right campaigns and UTM parameters for marketing campaigns.
  • Ensure that lead scoring (if using) is working accurately.
  • Confirm that all information available from marketing sources is accurately synced to contact properties.

In addition, both teams should take care to filter out contacts who have bounced, unsubscribed, or asked to be removed from outreach from sales and marketing campaigns (HubSpot does some of this automatically).

Some communications are more challenging to log in HubSpot, and in this case, you’ll need to decide how important this communication is to track and if there is a workaround needed. LinkedIn messages, for example, do not integrate cleanly—as a workaround, you can manually log LinkedIn messages as an email, or create a property that indicates that you are currently targeting them on LinkedIn.

Special note: If you are integrating HubSpot with a separate CRM like Salesforce (versus using the built-in HubSpot CRM and Sales Hub for outreach), run tests to be sure all the information sync is working as intended and as much information as possible is transferred between the systems.

Step 5: Identify Opportunities

Here’s where real sales enablement within HubSpot comes in. With all your data flowing beautifully and your process working the way it’s supposed to, you can start to find opportunities for outreach. Again, this can be set up however works for the team. Here are a few ways I have seen teams identify and track potential opportunities in HubSpot:

  • Lead scoring: This built-in contact property calculates a numerical score based on contact activity that you determine—read instructions from HubSpot here. You can then assign workflows or lists to find contacts over a set lead score and send them to the sales team.
  • Engaged contact lists: Keep active lists of contacts who have recently engaged with marketing emails, social posts, ads, or the website, but have not received sales outreach. The sales team can check these lists to pick potential targets when they have downtime.
  • Notification workflows: Set up a workflow to email your sales team when a contact visits the website or clicks an email. This can help identify engaged contacts more immediately—and then the sales team can look through their activity log and gauge their interest in learning more.

Don’t forget to go back to Step 1 and align on how an engaged lead is defined. If the marketing team is pulling broad lists of contacts who have engaged in some way, but still aren’t ready for sales outreach, it will create a lot of wasted time and frustration for the sales team—not to mention annoying your database with sales calls when all they wanted was to read your blog.

Step 6: Regularly Revisit

Congratulations—your sales and marketing teams are aligned, HubSpot processes are automated, and you can move on to the next big initiative!

(Wouldn’t it be nice if it was that easy?)

It’s important to regularly revisit your sales and marketing collaboration processes to be sure they are working as intended. Get together weekly, monthly, or quarterly, depending on your lead volume and program maturity, to discuss questions such as:

  • Are our processes working as intended and adding value to our day-to-day workflow?
  • Are the contacts in our database receiving the right amount of information and communications? Are there segments who are being missed?
  • Are there any automations or processes in place that are not helpful (or even wrong)? (e.g. are they adding noise to notifications, falsely identifying engaged contacts, etc.)
  • Is there additional information we’d like to get out of the database? Any new automations or processes that would add value?
  • Are there any new features in HubSpot or our other sales and marketing tools that we’d like to incorporate into our processes?

The goal of these regular check-ins isn’t to overhaul your strategy every time, just to ensure you are aligned and the automations are working effectively—and you’re making progress forward if improvement is needed. And of course, these check-ins should be in addition to regular communication around goals and metrics, sales and marketing strategy overall, and other sales enablement initiatives.

Step 7: Regularly Clean Up Your Database

Duplicates, junk contacts, and scores of unengaged contacts still receiving the same old emails…that’s no way to foster effective communication. Keeping a clean HubSpot database could be a blog topic all on its own—in fact, HubSpot has their own blog on the topic, so I won’t cover the how-to in enormous detail here. Instead, I’ll share the most relevant benefits of keeping your HubSpot database clean:

  • Stay Within Your Pricing Tier: HubSpot’s pricing tier is based on database size, so keeping a clean database can ensure you stay within your tier so you aren’t charged extra. With the rollout of marketing contacts functionality, you don’t even have to delete a ton of contacts from your database—just mark them as non-marketing.
  • More Accurate Reporting and Analysis: A clean and accurate database provides reliable data for reporting and analysis, which helps you optimize campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and allocate your budget effectively. Plus, cleaning out your email lists will improve your open rate, click rate, and email deliverability.
  • More Efficient Outreach: If a contact has bounced, unsubscribed, or gone completely dark, chances are they don’t want to hear from your sales team—or the message won’t reach them. Removing these contacts from the database (or filtering them out of outreach) lets the sales team focus on contacts who are more likely to respond.
  • Improved Lead Nurturing: A clean database allows you to focus marketing efforts on leads that have the most potential for conversion—and ensure you’re sending the right message at the right time through segmentation and personalization.

Does anybody else feel unstoppable with a clean, tidy database, or is that just me?

Enjoy the Collaboration Journey

Setting your teams up for success is a big undertaking, but it’s well worth the effort. There’s nothing more satisfying than a CRM and marketing automation system—and the teams behind the technology—running like a well-oiled machine. So, keep communicating, optimizing, and aiming for better ways to connect with your customers. And don’t forget to celebrate your wins! HubSpot is an incredible tool to help foster sales and marketing collaboration, but the real magic happens when teams come together, collaborate, and work towards the same goals.