How 8 Brands Mastered Marketing and Sales Alignment I've written about the importance of sales and marketing alignment before, but the point can't be understated: businesses undeniably have better success when they align sales and marketing teams. Plus, having strong alignment between sales and marketing is mutually beneficial for both teams — in fact, sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals, and can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing. If you're anything like me, however, it's likely helpful to learn through example. Which is why we've reached out to eight brands to learn how they mastered marketing and sales alignment. I'd encourage you to use the following examples as inspiration for your own process as you work to better align your teams, but remember — marketing and sales alignment will be unique to each individual company. For that reason, you'll find the most benefit from this post if you pick-and-choose from these strategies which aspects feel most authentic to your own company culture and business goals. Let's dive in! 1. Crossbeam rolled out company-wide OKRs. Robert Moore, Co-Founder and CEO at Crossbeam, told me: "At Crossbeam, we've rolled out company-wide OKRs that change each quarter and can be measured using sales, marketing, and product data from HubSpot." He adds, "Everyone at Crossbeam has access to dashboards that update in real-time with our progress toward these key results, and our progress also auto-posts to Slack each morning to keep people in...

The 4 Key Signs Your Marketing and Sales Teams Aren't Aligned I like to think of marketing and sales as the leads in a buddy cop movie.  Sales is the grizzled veteran on the force who keeps reiterating that they're "too old for this" whenever some zany misadventure gets started. And marketing is the hot-headed rookie with a chip on their shoulder looking to prove to everyone that they have what it takes to become the department's first-ever bow-legged sergeant or something. There's a lot of potential for a pretty compelling story if the two of them get along, but let's imagine a movie where they don't. In this film, the two have no chemistry nor mutual respect. They let most criminals get away due to lack of communication, and they don't riff any back-and-forth wisecracks throughout the movie. And worst of all, they don't end the movie on a freeze-frame of them jumping in the air, locking into a perfect high-five before the credits roll. No one would want to see that kind of dysfunction on film — just like no one wants to see that same kind of misalignment between sales and marketing in business. That's why it's crucial to stay on top of it when it comes to your company. Here we'll cover the key signs of marketing and sales misalignment and see some of the best ways to help remedy it. 1. Your marketing department only cares about MQLs. According to Troy Arias, Marketing...

How and Why You Should Run a Customer Panel for Your Marketing Team As a marketer, we typically ask ourselves the following question at least a dozen times a day: "Would our prospects and customers like this?" Ideally, you'll use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to arrive at the answer to that question. But one great place to know what your customers like (and love … and hate … ) is directly from the customers themselves. At HubSpot's department-wide marketing team meetings, for instance, we often host customer panels. There's good reason for this. As Senior Product Marketing Manager, Katriona Heaslip, notes, "A good marketing strategy should always incorporate the voice of the customer — you could have the best product in the world but you won't see any growth unless you're positioning it in a way that appeals to the customer." Additionally, Amanda Whyte, HubSpot's Director of Voice of the Customer, says, "Customer panels are such an important way for feedback to be heard, especially for teams that are non-customer facing in their day-to-day job responsibilities." Whyte adds, "Hearing from a customer what their experience has been, in their own words, creates empathy among decision-makers in a way they couldn't get from looking at data alone. It drives more customer-centric content and communications." A customer panel is an exceptional opportunity to learn more about your customers' points of friction and success stories. And, along with using that material to inform your future marketing strategy,...

The 5 Key Components of a Killer Customer Marketing Strategy It's easy to see marketing as a process specific to attracting and converting prospects — the practice of generating and capitalizing on potential customers' interest. But once that potential has successfully been removed from the equation, and the prospect of winning a prospect's business is no longer prospective, are you supposed to stop marketing to them altogether? Absolutely not. Your current customer base is a perfectly lucrative wellspring of new and sustained business opportunities that you should constantly be tapping into. That's where the concept of customer marketing comes in — a school of marketing that allows you to get much more out of your customers than their initial business. Let's take a more thorough look at what customer marketing is and a picture of the five key elements of a successful customer-driven marketing strategy. Customer marketing is, in large part, the art of building customer loyalty and enthusiasm in the hope that those elements will ultimately translate to new business. And in the context of the practice, the term "new" takes on multiple meanings. "New" business could mean existing customers buying new products or services as you develop them. It could mean current customers upgrading the products of yours they currently leverage or upping the tier of your service they subscribe to. Or, and perhaps most importantly, it could mean customers being enthusiastic enough about your business to evangelize to their friends and family about how awesome...

Integrations: The Newest Addition to Your Marketing Ops Marketing isn't just about campaigns, content, and creativity. There's a whole lot of "getting things done" that needs to happen behind the scenes for campaigns to roll out on time and performance to scale. This is where marketing operations comes in. Also called marketing ops or MOps, marketing operations is how a marketing team is run. It's the processes, technology, data, and people that power a marketing strategy. Of these key pillars of marketing operations, data sounds like the most abstract one. But getting the data right in your marketing ops is crucial. How do you do this? By cleaning, organizing, and enriching the data in every app as well as integrating data between your apps. An increasingly important role for any team or Marketing Operation Manager is maintaining data quality and connectedness. This not only includes marketing apps but also bridges to other departments in the organization. Let's dig into how to make this happen so you can scale the impact of your marketing ops. What Are Integrations? Integration brings different pieces of software together and enables their data to interact. When done well, integrations enable your marketing team to: Create the most holistic marketing ops strategy across your software ecosystem. Allow data to seamlessly flow between key platforms and enrich each one. Automate more tasks and free up time. Provide stronger customer experiences with more accessible and insightful data. Remove data silos and other barriers to...