Despite the rumors of being fundamentally incompatible, marketing and sales teams are a perfect match for each other. Think about it for a second. Both of them want the same end goal – revenue.
Marketing leaders strive to build trust in their brand, create a unified experience, and delight customers. In addition, sales leaders aspire to achieve pipeline growth, a higher conversion rate, and customer retention.
So what creates the strife you've heard so much about?
Like most interpersonal conflicts, the crisis stems from a lack of communication and disconnected teams.
Sales and marketing teams: the yin and yang
We've seen it play out in the real world time and time again. Marketing leaders don't know where their leads are coming from. Sales reps have no idea when someone fills out a form on their website and have limited visibility in sales analytics.
Nobody seems to know which opportunities close, and inconsistent and disorganized data leaves everyone with a different idea of what's happening.
The fractures between the teams grow, prospects and customers fall through the cracks, and everyone is left in the dark.
And you can see where this is going: Sales performance is chaotic, pipelines stall, revenue drops, and everyone suffers.
Perfect duo: Marketing Hub + Sales Hub
But when sales and marketing are aligned, this dynamic duo is simply unstoppable. They're both working off the same data set, so everyone knows where the company's most profitable leads are coming from.
Choosing the right CRM ensures excellent lead management: the sales professionals can easily prioritize the prospects who are the best fit, and marketing can send the right message to the right person at the right time.
The result? An unparalleled customer experience that keeps them coming back for more.
If this story of disconnected teams resonates, you're probably wondering how to stop the fighting and create that blissful, harmonious yin and yang relationship.
The answer is simple: Hubspot. More specifically, Hubspot Marketing and Sales Hubs. With this combo, you can:
- Align teams
- Expand your services and fuel business growth
- Spend less time, money, and resources
- Connect your data and systems all-on-one CRM Platform
Like your teams, these two hubs create a beautiful partnership – that leads to increased revenue.
Those who use both see a 144% increase in deals closed after 12 months, compared to a 58% increase for those who only use Sales Hub or a 51% increase for those who only use Marketing Hub.
When the powers of each Hub combine, your team empowers customers to trust your brand by creating unparalleled experiences. Your teams unite to fuel business growth – and reduce costs.
The bottom line: Spend less time, money, and resources connecting your data and systems with a custom, all-in-one CRM platform.
Hubspot customers who use the Marketing and Sales Hubs together get more significant results than the sum of their parts.
Those who use both see a 144% increase in deals closed after 12 months, compared to a 58% increase for those who only use Sales Hub or a 51% increase for those who only use Marketing Hub.
Considering an alternative to HubSpot?
Once marketing and sales leaders understand the need to work together, they have a few ways to achieve the bliss of a harmonious and connected team.
Before we get too far into the paths you can choose, we want to lay our cards on the table.
We're crazy about Hubspot. We've built our company – and our sterling client reputation – by helping companies like yours increase their revenue and connect disjointed teams with the platform.
Now that we've gotten that bit out of the way, you have a few alternatives to HubSpot to connect your teams. Here are a few of the most common ones we see – along with the pros and cons.
Adding More Members To Your Team
As a first step, business leaders often consider hiring someone to solve a critical business challenge. This might mean adding a new position or readjusting someone's responsibilities.
Pros:
- Having a specific person manage a growing workload or challenge takes the pressure off of busy marketing and sales teams.
- When one person is tasked with gathering data and sharing reports, marketing and sales can trust that they're working off a consistent set of analytics.
Cons:
- Adding salaries and benefits can be expensive and prohibitively for some companies – especially in this economy.
- One person tasked with wrangling data isn't scalable and may cause bottlenecks. If there's a specific report you need to analyze a KPI, you'll have to ask someone to compile it. Depending on the number of systems you use and the data points you're requesting, this could take a long time.
- To err is human. Even the best people make mistakes. It could be as simple as transposing two numbers in a report or entering data in the wrong cell of a spreadsheet.
Evaluating Technology Alternatives: Marketo vs Salesforce
Hubspot may be our preferred solution, but others are available: Salesforce and Marketo. So let's take a closer look.
A few positives from Salesforce:
- Because Salesforce offers both CRM and marketing automation solutions, the two sides communicate well.
- The Salesforce suite offers all the standard functionality you're used to, including pipeline tracking, marketing tools to support lead generation, and robust reporting capabilities.
- Many enterprise organizations use Salesforce solutions, one of the most extensive CRM and marketing automation tech players.
A few negatives:
- The Salesforce ecosystem was built through acquisitions, which might feel "cobbled together" and have a steeper learning curve. To circumvent the learning curve, you may also need extra admin resources – and budget – to make the most out of your technology investment.
- Salesforce charges you for every user and add-on, including an extra cost for support, maintenance, and more.
- Salesforce isn't incredibly user-friendly. In our experience, a marketer can easily create a new email template in Hubspot. That same marketer must be tech-savvy and have coding knowledge to build the same template in Salesforce.
Marketo is another major player in the search for CRMs. Again, a deep dive into Marketo vs. Hubspot is available here. What follows is a quick summary.
A few pros of Marketo:
- Marketo specializes in creating custom marketing solutions for enterprise-level organizations – which is excellent if you have a large team and a larger budget.
- Marketo offers all the standard marketing automation functionality and supports lead generation with the ability to create landing pages, emails, workflows, and a/b testing.
- Marketo has robust reporting capabilities (that require manual set-up).
Cons of Marketo:
- Marketo is marketing-only, so you'll need to build and maintain connections to the rest of your tech stack, including your CRM, service platform, CMS, and more.
- Customizing your templates for emails and landing pages often requires a developer.
- Setting up workflows in Marketo is far from intuitive. It has a steep learning curve – even for those experienced with solutions like Salesforce and Hubspot.
Why Go HubSpot vs Marketo Or Salesforce?
In our pre-Origin 63 professional lives, our team has helped clients who used a variety of solutions – including Salesforce, Marketo, and more.
But there's a reason we went all-in on using Hubspot to help organizations break down data silos, reduce uncertainty, and enable efficiency in their processes.
Hubspot is an all-in-one solution to manage your marketing, sales, and service operations. The Marketing and Sales Hubs align teams for a seamless marketing-to-sales handoff. Centralized data makes it easy for all your teams to work from one source of truth and connect the dots.
An aligned team creates a unified customer experience that builds brand trust and fuels business growth. It's easy to stay ahead of change by driving more substantial relationships with leads, prospects, and customers – no matter their lifecycle stage.
You can also measure the ROI of your efforts using custom reports and dashboards to keep track of shared goals.
Finally, you'll spend less time, money, and resources. Hubspot allows you to eliminate repetitive and manual tasks with automation – and your existing team can manage day-to-day operations without involving admins or developers.
With Hubspot, your marketers can focus on strategy, and your sales team can focus on closing deals.
Learn More: Why go Hubspot? The Ultimate Guide
Getting Started With HubSpot: What to Know
Although your HubSpot investment will pay off in the long term, making a significant change to your tech stack comes with short-term challenges.
Origin 63 is a HubSpot Diamond solutions partner program member– which means we've spent a lot of time offering consulting services to organizations like yours to manage every part of the onboarding process.
Here's how we support our clients through HubSpot consulting:
Seamless HubSpot Onboarding
We offer expert-led migration services that include planning, marketing or sales hub implementation, and training. This includes planning, implementation, and training, along with:
- Complete migration of your data/contact records, whether you want to move all activities, emails, and logged calls or start with a clean slate.
- Custom integrations to manage the data flowing from all your apps into a central Hub.
Create a Winning HubSpot Strategy
Origin 63's Hubspot implementation services break down the complexity of your B2B inbound sales processes to create repeatable and scalable practices for your team.
We help our clients create a sales enablement strategy that increases their efficiency through HubSpot set-up, training, and reporting/performance analysis. We also provide ongoing support to help you make the most of your technology investments.
Customize HubSpot to Fit Your Unique Data Needs
Using Hubspot's Custom Objects feature offers greater flexibility in capturing critical data in your CRM.
Custom Objects are perfect for organizations that need a specialized data architecture to track and capture key data points and associate that information with contacts, deals, companies, and tickets.
Our in-house development team can advise and build the customizations to give you the visibility you need for critical insights.
Training and Support for Your Team
Training and onboarding your team on a new platform is daunting. Whether you're looking for a hands-on, "done-for-you" approach, or expert guidance to streamline the process internally, we've got you covered with a tailored solution.
No matter which services you choose and how much support you need, working with Origin 63 will give you the solutions to:
- Customize and optimize: Your Hubspot is tailored to the needs and goals of your organization.
- Break down data silos: Seamlessly share, update and sync data everywhere in one centralized location.
- Make confident, data-driven decisions you can trust.
- Accelerate productivity and minimize errors with automation.
Get Expert Support From Origin 63
Whether you're looking for a complete migration to Hubspot, or a smaller project, you'll get tangible results.
Origin 63 uses a proven, validated 4-step process to help our clients solve their most pressing business concerns:
- Discovery: We'll conduct a deep discovery of your organization's needs. Our approach may include an audit of your account.
- Blueprint: We'll map out a blueprint to identify key activities to accomplish to meet your needs.
- Present: We'll present our blueprint to all stakeholders for feedback and approval.
- Build and support: Our team will follow the blueprint, make your project come to life & provide ongoing support if required.
Ready to learn more about how our custom Hubspot solutions can align your marketing and sales teams? Contact us today to speak directly with a certified Hubspot expert.
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