Your sales team isn’t just part of your business – they’re your biggest differentiator. Find out how to ensure sales and marketing are working together and how to measure their effectiveness.
Buying is more difficult than ever before. With an increased focus on risk avoidance and uncertainty, buyers are more selective in their decision-making. According to Gartner, a staggering 53% of buyers say that the sales experience (not price, product or brand dominance) is the key factor influencing their purchasing decisions.
Companies that deliver an exceptional buying experience usually grow twice as fast as those that offer an average one. In today’s competitive landscape, your sales team isn’t just part of your business – they’re your biggest differentiator.
When a sales team underperforms, the consequences go beyond missed targets. Not only does revenue get flagged as a concerning issue, but the overall customer experience also suffers. Inefficient processes, wasted time on unqualified leads, and low team morale can stem from poor sales performance.This often causes a ripple effect into marketing, damaging your brand’s reputation and ultimately having a severe impact on growth.
High-performing sales reps are known to be buyer-centric and rely on a methodical approach. In fact, top sales performers are 588% more likely to follow a proven sales methodology. They instinctively gather insights from discovery throughout the sales process to help them overcome objections and accelerate deals.
Although achieving sales excellence isn't just about hitting quotas, it’s about consistency and strategic execution. To improve your sales team's performance, it's essential to:
1. Define Key High-Performance Behaviours:
Outline the behaviours that drive success to map your sales process to the buyer’s journey. For example, a top-performing rep might research each lead thoroughly to tailor their messaging, ensuring that educational content is delivered during the awareness stage and solutions are presented during the decision stage.
2. Prioritise Identifying Unqualified Leads:
Rather than spending time trying to qualify every lead, focus on filtering out those who aren’t a fit. Implementing strict lead qualification criteria helps ensure that your team concentrates on high-potential prospects, thereby streamlining the sales pipeline and reducing wasted efforts on deals unlikely to close.
3. Break Down Revenue Targets into Measurable KPIs:
Instead of viewing revenue as a single goal, deconstruct it into measurable key performance indicators such as sales velocity (how quickly a del progresses through the pipeline) and win rates (the percentage of sales opportunities that result in a sale). HubSpot’s reporting tools allow you to track these metrics in real-time, enabling your team to monitor deal health and make quick adjustments as needed.
Marketing plays a crucial role in equipping sales teams with the tools and insights needed to close deals. By creating targeted content like buyer guides, case studies and personalised email campaigns, marketing ensures that sales reps have the materials they need for sales enablement and lead nurturing. HubSpot allows marketing to track lead behaviour and engagement, providing a snapshot of insights that can be fed back to sales. This collaborative approach not only enriches the customer journey but also helps sales engage prospects with the right information at the right time.
It’s no secret that sales and marketing teams struggle to get on the same page. This can be drilled down to one clear reason: different priorities.
Marketing is typically focused on generating leads and building brand awareness, while sales is concerned with closing deals. Without a shared understanding of what defines a ‘qualified lead’ or a clear communication strategy, team misalignment leads to friction, inefficiencies and missed revenue opportunities.
When marketing and sales aren’t aligned the fallout can be significant. The miscommunication and separate goals can result in low-quality leads, wasted resources and lost revenue. And not only is the cost of misalignment financial but can also cause poor customer experiences and reduced team morale.
Picture a scenario where marketing and sales operate as a unified team. Both teams agree on what constitutes a highly engaged, quality lead, establish a clear handoff process and regularly review shared KPIs. Marketing nurtures leads through personalised content and automated workflows, while sales provides continuous feedback on lead quality and conversion challenges. Both teams can track progress, analyse key metrics and pivot strategies with HubSpot - creating engaging interactions that help them meet their revenue goals.
HubSpot serves as a bridge between marketing and sales by providing an integrated platform that tracks key metrics for both teams. Marketers can monitor lead behaviour, engagement levels and conversion rates, while sales teams can keep a close eye on velocity, pipeline health and win rates.
This single view of shared goals helps both teams collaborate to identify trends, optimise strategies, and maintain a data-driven approach to performance improvement, driving revenue growth.
A smooth lead handoff is critical to maintaining momentum throughout the buyer’s journey. To achieve this, establish clear protocols for when and how leads transition from marketing to sales. Implement standardised lead scoring criteria and set up an automated workflow within HubSpot to notify sales when a lead is ready for follow-up, and enforce an SLA on response time. Regular collaborative meetings to review and reiterate the handoff processes by adjusting the criteria based on performance data can further optimise this process. By sticking to these best practices, you can ensure that both teams work together, reducing friction and optimising conversions.
Create a culture of collaboration and alignment by utilising a tool like HubSpot to optimise the performance and alignment of your sales and marketing teams. This will help your business develop a more efficient, responsive and successful revenue engine that stands out in today’s competitive market.
If you feel like you’re wasting time buried under the weight of firefighting in your CRM over focusing on strategic business growth – you might need to reassess your marketing operations.
Learn how HubSpot's integration with Apollo will improve your Go-To-Market strategy and save your team at least an hour of work per day.
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We discuss the reasons behind marketing and sales alignment issues, and how to resolve them.
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