Gaining insights into marketing & sales outcomes

The Problem: marketing didn't know where leads were going

A SaaS company was generating a healthy number of qualified leads and handing them off to sales. The challenge was that Sales were using a separate CRM to track interactions, so marketing had no visibility into where leads were actually ending up.

While Sales were putting pressure on marketing to deliver more leads, marketing was at a loss for why they needed more when they didn’t see activity from the ones they did pass over.

They needed to build reporting capabilities in HubSpot to understand what was happening with marketing qualified leads before they could determine the best way to generate more leads.

Marketing wanted to measure how many leads were being handed off to sales each month and to understand the outcome of each of those leads.

To accomplish this we:

• Aligned lifecycle stages with marketing and sales activity
• Implemented a lead score strategy
• Utilized workflows to automate appending data for insights
• Built customized reporting, pulling in data from both HubSpot and their sales CRM

The marketing team was able to discover that sales were not tracking data or lead statuses on marketing-generated leads. Through reporting, we uncovered opportunities to train sales and close process gaps.

The data armed marketing with the information they needed to make a case for greater alignment between sales and marketing processes. They are now on their way to getting better results together!

43% of sales and marketing people said "lack of accurate/shared data on target accounts and prospects" was the biggest challenge when it comes to aligning sales and marketing departments. -Inside View, 2018

 

The Strategy: Align Marketing & Sales through lifecycle stages

 

The sales CRM that the team was utilizing was already integrated with Hubspot, but there were still a few gaps in the context around the data. For one, it was difficult to understand how long a lead has been in a stage or to measure movement of sales accepted leads without some kind of timeframe involved.

 

That is where lifecycle stages came in. First we implemented a lead score system to move contacts from leads to marketing qualified leads based on known attributes and activities.

 

Next, we assigned the stage of SQL to those leads that have been passed over to sales, triggered by a known lead status. Last, we automated opportunity and customer statuses based on sales pipeline stages.

 

Utilizing workflows to automate data

 

Taking this system, we utilized workflows to automatically trigger a change in the lifecycle stages of contacts in HubSpot based off of the sales CRM data.

 

Automating the lifecycle stages in HubSpot gave us exactly what we needed: a timeframe. When an MQL changed to an SQL, HubSpot would give us a “Became an SQL date” from which we were now able to build reports!

 

Customized reporting for sales outcomes

 

Utilizing the“became an X date” property as the timeframe settings on our reports, we were able to build a dashboard to show exactly what was happening with leads.

 

For example, we compared “became an SQL date” of this month versus last month, crossed with the lead status to understand how contacts were moving through the stages. Over time, we expected to see 0 “New” leads in our report from the previous month if sales was using this correctly.

 

With this data, marketing is now able to see exactly how many leads are moving on to the sales process. This also opened new opportunities to nurture stalled or dead leads for sales.