The CMO's Guide to Sales Enablement and CRM

CMOs are on point when it comes to blazing new trails and mastering digital strategies. Yet there’s one place we sense you’re feeling a little hesitant: your mastery over the sales stuff.

How do we know? A question we’ve been hearing a lot is:

“DO YOU HAVE ANY LITERATURE ON HOW TO USE [INSERT CRM HERE]?”

We hear this all the time from some of the smartest CMOs we have the pleasure of working with. And we get it. Customer relationship management is so many things. It’s the way you prove your marketing is working. It’s an ongoing negotiation with your sales team. It’s something you have to personalize to your preferences.

That’s why we created this eBook: to offer you a little advice as you figure it all out.

Who Should We Target?

For B2B businesses, there are two considerations: the type of company that’s ideal for you (buyer profiles) and individuals involved in the buying cycle (buyer personas). Sales and marketing should identify the most important metrics and look for relevant sales patterns.

How Do We Define Lifecycle Stages?

What does an MQL or SQL mean to your business? The answer to this question must be clearly defined so leads are properly handed-off between marketing and sales. It’s up to your company to decide how you want to structure this workflow.

How Do We Document Our Efforts?

SLAs, or service-level agreements, are simple contracts between the sales and marketing teams. By documenting specific goals, SLAs can help the two departments work together more efficiently while keeping both accountable for their efforts.

How Should We Use Our CRM?

When CRM solutions are well-thought-out, they can do wonders for an organization, from saving time to increasing sales effectiveness. The key is to know how to leverage the right functionality for your needs—something that we’ll help guide you through today.

The Perfect CRM...

Let’s picture what a perfect marketing automation/CRM setup/sales enablement trio looks like in an ideal world where everything is fabulous.

It’s Monday morning. You log into your marketing automation platform and find that…

Traffic is up? #winning / Leads are up? Woo-hoo! / Landing page conversion rate is over 50 percent? AMAZING!

Even better, the leads you’re nabbing are automatically logged into your CRM, giving you a crystal-clear view of how well your campaigns are working.

Because your CRM was so perfectly customized, your new leads automatically get routed to either a lead nurturing campaign or sales rep, depending on the triggering action. Your reps get notified when a lead is ready for contact and the connection gets made right away, with no intervention necessarily from you.

Once your sales rep calls that hot new lead, he either moves the lead to the next deal stage or re-enrolls him back into the nurturing funnel, making sure to note any useful information he learned during the qualifying conversation into the CRM.

Best of all, your CRM software helps you figure out the number of qualified leads and closed sales for each of your campaigns. That means you can look back on all the things you did right that made it easy for your reps to land that big sale, and you can replicate your magic formula.

That’s definitely your reality, right? If it’s not, you’re not alone.

To make your situation match up to the one described above, here are some things you can do.

CRM CHALLENGE

“My contacts won’t sync.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

Issues syncing contacts between your CRM and marketing platform.

LIKELY CAUSE:

The sync list. If a contact isn’t on the list information, it won’t get synced.

QUICK FIX:

Set up this list using Lead Score or Lifecycle Stages. Dictate which contacts you want to sync (MQL, SQL, Customers, etc). Anyone not listed in this lifecycle stage will not be synced between the two systems.

The Joys of Integration

You already know your CRM should integrate with your marketing automation platform. This significantly reduces the amount of data entry by the sales team while showcasing the effectiveness of individual marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a look at how this works with the HubSpot CRM.

HubSpot’s CRM natively integrates with HubSpot Marketing and doesn’t require any kind of setup. As soon as you start using HubSpot’s CRM, information about contacts becomes visible from HubSpot Marketing (and vice versa).

CRM CHALLENGE

“My data isn’t getting updated in the CRM.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

Data isn’t accurately updating between your CRM and marketing platform.

LIKELY CAUSE:

There’s a discrepancy within the update rules for your property types.

QUICK FIX:

First, determine which system will be the primary record and which will be the secondary. Next, determine how you want the data to be updated between the two systems (at the property level).

CRM CHALLENGE

“I’m over
my API call limit.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

Notifications of API Call Limitations.

LIKELY CAUSE:

CRM integration solutions generally have a limit to the number of API calls you can log within a specific time period.

QUICK FIX:

Avoid overages for large list syncs by syncing records in batches. Note: If your CRM is attached to other platforms, calls from those platforms will also count toward your total. Setting a limit to HubSpot API calls per day will help you manage usage and avoid overages.

“My property types won’t map.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

Non-compatible property mapping types.

LIKELY CAUSE:

Often, the definitions for properties can vary between two systems.

QUICK FIX:

To sync properties between two systems, make sure the data types in both systems are consistent. This will vary depending on which systems you use.

Create Filters

Filters come standard or can be customized to help you manage your leads.

Filters give you the ability to quickly view a segment of your database right from the contacts, companies, deals or ticket dashboard. You can use any default or custom property in your HubSpot account to segment your objects. After a filter is created, you then have the option to save that filter as either viewable only to you or to your entire team.

Additionally, for objects such as Deals, Tickets and Tasks, you can use “Table” vs “Board” views to see your default or customized filters. "Table" is your default view and is essentially a list overview of the records. Meanwhile, "Board" gives you the ability to change an object’s status by dragging and dropping the item to a new column.

Create Tasks

As your reps work a lead, tasks can be created to keep them on track. Use the given fields to define the task (status, due date, assigned to, description) and associate tasks with specific contacts, companies or deals.

Standard & Customizable Deal Stages

Deal stages are a default property of HubSpot’s CRM, and will ensure that marketing sees when contact is made and whether the lead was qualified during the initial contact. You can use the standardized deal stages, which include:

Appointment scheduled
Presentation scheduled
Contract sent
Closed lost
Qualified to buy
Decision maker bought-in
Closed won

Or you can customize your deal stages by going to Settings > Sales Dropdown > Deals > Edit. If adding a new deal stage, give it a name and probability score to indicate how likely it is that a lead will buy at this stage. This will help with lead flow and lead management. Once finished, click out of the box and drag the new deal stage to the appropriate spot on the stages list.

CRM CHALLENGE

“My reps aren’t adding contacts to their opportunities.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

Opportunities are created without a primary contact attached.

LIKELY CAUSE:

Many CRMs allow sales reps to create an opportunity without a primary contact.

QUICK FIX:

Before integrating CRM opportunity records, it’s essential that each opportunity is attached to a contact record in your CRM. This might require a process change for your sales team, but it will ensure that HubSpot can assign the correct contacts to opportunities.

Prospect tracking

HubSpot offers a proprietary prospect tracking tool (as do other CRM solutions). Prospect tracking allows you to see who visited your website and what pages they viewed. You can also determine whether multiple people from the same company have interacted with your website.

Lead intelligence collection

This lead intelligence should consist of everything you discover about your leads through form submissions, website page views, email marketing analytics and social media interactions.

Lead scoring

As we pointed out earlier, lead scoring facilitates a healthy lead flow and organizes leads based on sales readiness to support the proper timing of lead hand-off to sales reps.

Customer relationship management

Also discussed above, CRM includes basic setup, integration and customization to create a powerful and automated closed-loop reporting system.

Ongoing lead nurturing

Targeting leads with personalized, relevant, contextual information and content to help them reach sales readiness.

Getting Actual Humans to Use Your CRm

You can do everything we’ve already talked about right and still run into issues.

The truth is, your CRM is only as good as the people who use it.

THE FACTORS THAT AFFECT YOUR CRM STRATEGY’S SUCCESS INCLUDE THINGS LIKE:

The age and sophistication of your marketing and sales technology
Your sales team’s comfort level with technology
The degree to which your sales reps understand the inbound philosophy
The leadership team’s buy-in to your CRM strategy

So, to find out how to handle the sticky human issues involved in CRM adoption, we turned to people who have been there.

Keep It simple

Most marketing leaders we interviewed agreed wholeheartedly on this point: Above all, simplify your process as much as possible.

Says Courtney Wilson at CloudFactory,“Younger reps are more comfortable with technology, whereas older reps often don’t want to deal with it and also don’t take it very seriously. Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.”

Many salespeople view CRM as a necessary evil. Give them too much or unnecessary functionality and you’re likely to perpetuate their negative outlook.

“Use workflows and formulas to automate things,” Wilson says. “Don’t ask for data that isn’t relevant to moving the business forward. Also, use HubSpot to drive automation in your CRM.”

Christine Hanson-Ehlinger at Avadyne Health, adds, “Owners and teams in any size business have so many hats to wear. The simpler you can make the CRM and the sales process, the easier it is to put more focus on what’s important—your customers, building new business and delivering great service.”

Show Sales the Value... and Support Them

Oh, the irony. You’re a marketer, but one of your major jobs is to sell sales on how CRM adoption and a sales enablement strategy can:

Simplify their job
Shorten the sales cycle
Produce higher quality SQLs
Earn more money
Reduce lead saturation
Reduce lead saturation
Improve their ability to communicate effectively with leads
Help them consistently meet quota

Says Transonic’s Miriam Tenorio, “Our initial challenges included poor follow-up notes and dispositioning of leads. It seems like having someone whose sole focus is CRM follow-up, tracking and training sales is key to gaining acceptance.”

FoodLogiQ’s Kubitschek says, “I make it a point after every campaign to report on the success and ask sales specifically how we can help them better do their job. What can we change that makes their job easier? We make sure that sales is aware of what marketing’s trying to do end-to-end and how we’re trying to help them do their job more effectively. We’re trying to hand them as much information as possible to inform their conversations with the lead. That’s how we approach it. It’s definitely a relationship rather than two teams working separately.”

Choose the Right CRM

There are dozens of quality CRM solutions from which to choose. To pick the right one for your team, you have to understand your needs.

Tiffany Rivers at iOffice says, “Choose a platform that will grow with your needs and don’t manipulate it to work for your processes. If you have to make changes to the backbone of the CRM to do what you want it to do, then it isn’t the right tool—or you need to look at your processes to see if they really make sense.”

Peter Mollins at KnowledgeTree suggests that marketing leaders must “understand the friction points in the sales process and the buyer’s journey” before choosing a CRM.

The key was finding a CRM that was “robust, but right-sized and innately simple to use,” says Hanson-Ehlinger at Avadyne Health.

Spring Cleaning

Before bringing sales reps into the process, marketing should first get its ducks in a row.

“I’d advise marketers new to CRM to get their house in order first in terms of the plumbing of marketing automation and CRM,” suggests CloudFactory’s Wilson. “In terms of the campaign tracking, field mapping, lead scoring, personas, lifecycle stages... document all of it in a playbook. Then move on to the actual lead process and help sales think about the flow. Sit down with the sales team and leadership and really map out the sales process and buying journey from start to finish. That will help in setting up processes.”

Train Sales as Clearly as possible

Our discussions with marketing leaders about training unearthed two key themes. First, keep your training simple and make sure it’s ongoing.

“Keep training tools simple, such as screenshots of CRM functions along with easy to understand tips or directions in one small guide specific to your company that the sales team can access within the CRM,” says Hanson-Ehlinger.

“Include a revision date so you can update with new information as common questions arise. An hour or two of group training suffices with the sales team, then follow up for one-on-one specific questions as they come up. Provide a resource they can go to for answers and to solve problems as they happen. The more you make it easy, the better the adoption.”

Another important theme was getting sales to understand the inbound methodology and how marketing automation platforms and CRM systems work together to benefit sales reps.

Says Kubitschek, “In terms of inbound, reps want to know why we’re doing it. How does it help us, versus outbound cold calling and cold emailing? What we try and do is show them the wealth of information that we have from our inbound efforts. How these people are requesting to have a conversation with us—they want to hear from us. We already established a relationship and that makes it easier for sales to sell. It’s really pitching inbound as a way that we’re helping them and enabling them.”

Make No Exceptions

At some point, it is very likely at least one of your top sales reps will ask to be an exception to the rule. He’ll have a great argument for why your proposed process doesn’t work.

It’ll be hard to say no—but do it anyway.

Says Hanson-Ehlinger, “I’ve always felt that the CRM’s importance beyond pipeline management is being a repository for the intellectual assets of the company—the client list, the prospect list, making it simple for sales and customer service teams to capture crucial information. Let’s face it: salespeople or customer teams can come and go. In order to not disrupt customer service or the business as a whole, it’s critical to enforce accountability by using a CRM, so you know the status of an account at any time.”

Be Transparent with your Marketing Data

Sales is under close scrutiny once CRM adoption gets under way. It’s only fair that marketing should be, too.

Marketing should make its performance data just as visible as the sales team’s performance data to level the playing field and illustrate accountability in the same way that sales does.

“Be sensitive to the fact that every win and loss for a rep can be seen in the CRM,” says Wilson. “Also, incentivize your marketing team to focus on revenue and quality leads, put out goals and make them visible. If everyone has a quota, it breaks down the divide between the two teams.”

Getting Everyone on Board

When you set up your sales enablement strategy and CRM system right, your sales team is more productive and your reps get the support they need to work the leads you generate.

On the flip side, you get to see the value of your efforts and receive the feedback you need to refine your campaigns.

Most importantly, leads are connected with sales reps at exactly the right moment—when they are truly ready to take the next step. It’s a world where everyone wins, and that’s what makes sales enablement a must-have for both teams’ success.

The CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement & CRM

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The CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement & CRM

Advice From Top B2B Marketing Leaders.

CMOs are on point when it comes to blazing new trails and mastering digital strategies. Yet there’s one place we sense you’re feeling a little hesitant: your mastery over the sales stuff.

“DO YOU HAVE ANY LITERATURE ON HOW TO USE [INSERT CRM HERE]?”

Building a Foundation that Supports Sales Enablement

Who Should We Target?

How Do We Define Lifecycle Stages?

How Do We Document Our Efforts?

How Should We Use Our CRM?

The Perfect CRM...

Prep Your CRM for Greatness

HubSpot Users:

Set Up Your HubSpot CRM

1

2

3

CRM CHALLENGE

“My contacts won’t sync.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

LIKELY CAUSE:

QUICK FIX:

The Joys of Integration

Let’s take a look at how this works with the HubSpot CRM.

CRM CHALLENGE

“My data isn’t getting updated in the CRM.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

LIKELY CAUSE:

QUICK FIX:

Most CRM systems will organize your contacts into different types.

CONTACTS

COMPANIES

DEALS

CRM CHALLENGE

“I’m over my API call limit.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

LIKELY CAUSE:

QUICK FIX:

“My property types won’t map.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

LIKELY CAUSE:

QUICK FIX:

Using Your CRM In Real Life

Once you have the CRM up and running, with fields mapped and lists synced, here are some everyday actions you’ll want to take when you log in.

Create Filters

Create Tasks

Standard & Customizable Deal Stages

CRM CHALLENGE

“My reps aren’t adding contacts to their opportunities.”

WHAT’S GOING ON:

LIKELY CAUSE:

QUICK FIX:

Creating Lead FLOW

50%

21X

To set up a simple lead scoring system,

follow these steps:

Determine what your ideal lead looks like

Determine point values for each of the factors you listed in Step 1.

Score leads

Set a score threshold to indicate when a lead is ready to be passed to sales.

Don’t expect this scoring and grading system to be accurate the first time around.

The Proper Care & Feeding Of Leads

LEAD MANAGEMENT IS HOW YOU HANDLE LEADS THAT AREN’T READY TO BUY YET.

Here’s a zoomed-out view of what your lead management might consist of:

Prospect tracking

Lead intelligence collection

Lead scoring

Customer relationship management

Ongoing lead nurturing

Getting Actual Humans to Use Your CRm

THE FACTORS THAT AFFECT YOUR CRM STRATEGY’S SUCCESS INCLUDE THINGS LIKE:

We’ve Been In Your Shoes

OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS INCLUDE:

Here’s what they had to say...

Get Buy-In From the Beginning

Leading a successful CRM integration means getting buy-in from both company leadership and the sales team. Most marketers agreed that the CRM directive must come from the top.

The CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement
& CRM

“I’m over
my API call limit.”

Set a score threshold to indicate when a
lead is ready to be passed to sales.

Request a Consultation
with Kuno today!