Aligning Sales and Marketing Processes and Integrating Data Enrichment Tool Unleashes Success
Enriched sales data to enable faster sales
Reduced number of contacts to viable leads only
Optimized lead scoring, workflow nurturing and sequencing
The Challenge
An incomplete and disorganized database, the result of years of neglect and a lack of firm protocol and best practices for working, auditing and cleaning up contacts and company records, was holding the sales and marketing teams back.
Salesforce and HubSpot were siloed from one another. Further, once a contact was removed from Salesforce, the marketing team had no ability to re-engage them. In addition, integrating a new sales tool that would help the director of sales and also leverage sales data for the marketing team in a compliant manner was essential.
The Tools Available
The Strategy - Back to Database Basics with HubSpot
Services Utilized: RevOps and Database Management
The main goal was to educate sales and marketing teams across the global enterprise so that they could maximize data capture, better deliver services and increase brand awareness. These elements are key toward driving conversions and demo requests.
During a discovery session with both the sales and marketing teams, it became clear the processes weren’t reflected within both their HubSpot and Salesforce portals. In further examining both platforms, Kuno found that their HubSpot instance was not tailored to their contact/company processes, causing data to be left incomplete and not able to be properly worked. To correct this, we met with both teams to walk Kuno through their customer and buyer’s journey.
From this point, the Kuno team began to align the process to HubSpot’s lifecycle stages, identifying how and when a contact would move to the next stages, and also communicate this progress between HubSpot and Salesforce. Kuno was also able to establish and outline responsibilities to assist their teams with future creation of workflows for marketing campaigns and sequencing for business development and sales opportunities.
Next, to clean their database, Kuno identified the criteria each contact must have in each lifecycle stage. A combination of behavior and demographics helped to identify the data and interactions each lead needed to progress through lifecycle stages. Using this exercise to clean their database allowed Kuno to develop thresholds for a lead scoring system and leverage automation to advance qualified contacts through the buyer’s journey.
The Black Hole Between HubSpot and Salesforce
Often when setting up synchronized instances of HubSpot and Salesforce, contacts move from HubSpot to Salesforce (or vice versa) and are never heard from again.
That’s why Kuno’s initial discovery session with the client identified the process of when a contact is handed off to a sales representative and initiates what happens after that handoff occurs.
While discussing the process with sales, Kuno found that when a marketing qualified lead (MQL) became a sales qualified lead (SQL), sales would either work the lead, disqualify it or let the lead sit in the Salesforce database without the marketing team ever finding out what happened to it.
All Kuno needed to do was develop a process to either push a contact back to MQL status for further nurturing, or develop SQL automation campaigns to help push those prospects into opportunities. Clients that work with Kuno often find that unifying and streamlining sales and marketing operations is an unexpected benefit of working through HubSpot optimization or synchronization with other platforms.
After developing an easy-to-use field in Salesforce, Kuno’s automation specialists were able to push contacts’ lifecycle status in HubSpot, segmenting them into different automated workflows for nurturing and stuck campaigns to help sales gain fresh opportunities or traction on leads that may have gone quiet.
ZoomInfo and HubSpot for Better Marketing and Sales
Leveraging ZoomInfo and HubSpot together as a supercharged integrated data enrichment engine for better marketing and sales is ideal.
After completing our database audit and correctly moving records into their rightful spaces in lifecycle stages, Kuno sought to fill in missing data to help marketing and sales best leverage ZoomInfo.
Integrating ZoomInfo RevOS to HubSpot enriches company and contact information at certain points of their respective lifecycles, allows marketing to create better-segmented emails and content without asking the contact for additional demographic information.
As a bonus, since the data enrichment process happens prior to sales qualification, contacts that previously entered the BDR and sales teams with only five or six data points and limited history of web behavior now come in with over 50 data points as well as behavioral information. This provides the sales team a wealth of information to base sales pitches on, prepare objection-busting responses and customize more-relevant use case stories to nearly any contact’s circumstances.
Kuno was able to reduce the number of marketing contacts in their portal by nearly 8,000.
The Results
Kuno’s guidance and expertise in revenue operations (RevOps) and database management worked to help the client realize a much clearer, more efficient and integrated workflow for sales and marketing. Highlights include:
An optimized database enables sales to close deals faster
Number of contacts are reduced to promote accuracy, saving the client time and money
Tools like maximized lead scoring, workflow nurturing and sequencing are fully integrated for seamless lead management
