Use Hubspot Analytics To Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

One of the main issues with misalignment is the creation of information silos, where important information is not shared between teams, resulting in a lack of collaboration and coordination. Symptoms of misalignment can include unproductive sales and marketing meetings, complex buying cycles, and complex workflows.

 

For example, a misaligned sales team may ignore up to 80% of marketing leads, instead spending their time on unproductive prospecting, or a marketing team might create content that is irrelevant to the buyer audience.

 

In this article, we will discuss the importance of sales and marketing alignment, the cost of misalignment, common issues and symptoms, and examples of how it can impact a business. We will also look at how the use of Flowtrace HubSpot analytics can help achieve team alignment and improve overall business performance.

 

If you are interested on learning how Flowtrace helps improve the sales pipeline deal flow via cycle time analytics, you are also covered.

 

The Cost of Misalignment: How Information Silos Impact Business Performance and the Customer Experience

Information silos can be a major obstacle for organizations, as they impede team productivity and lead to inefficient processes. When sales and marketing teams are not communicating effectively, it can also negatively impact the customer experience.

For instance, when a sales team receives valuable feedback from a customer about their value proposition and only logs it in Hubspot, but fails to share it with the marketing or product teams via the correct public Slack channel, it can lead to a number of problems. This may result in an information silo, where the marketing and product teams are unaware of the feedback, leading to the creation of irrelevant content and preventing the product team from gaining further feedback to improve their offerings.

A survey by the Content Marketing Institute reveals that up to 70% of B2B content goes unused due to irrelevance to the target audience, while Hubspot's research indicates that 79% of marketing leads fail to convert due to a lack of lead nurturing.

However, with effective cross-team communication and alignment, productivity can be improved and this can have a positive impact on the overall customer experience. To overcome these common challenges, one of our high growth tech company clients implemented Flowtrace to improve sales and marketing team alignment.

Other challenges that can be overcome by improving sales and marketing alignment

The complex buying cycle of today's market presents challenges for both marketing and sales teams. However, when these teams are aligned, many of these challenges can be overcome.

• Ignoring up to 80% of the leads: A common problem that improving sales and marketing alignment can solve is the inefficiency of lead management. Research from Marketo and ReachForce suggests that sales teams may neglect up to 80% of leads generated by marketing, instead focusing on unproductive activities. However, by enhancing team communication, fostering effective collaboration and aligning teams' goals, objectives and handover processes, this problem can be resolved.
  
  
• Unproductive sales and marketing meetings: Another common issue is unproductive sales and marketing meetings. Alignment between these teams is essential for growth and customer satisfaction. Clear agendas, shared goals and purposes in these meetings can improve communication and workflow, overcome obstacles, and share important knowledge.
  
  
• Process and tool complexities: The complexity of sales and marketing workflows can also be a problem. Misalignment often arises when teams use different tools. By using the same dashboards and tools, including customer engagement platforms, this problem can be avoided.

Transforming sales and marketing alignment with advanced analytics

Progressive companies are taking steps to align their marketing and sales teams, as well as their inbound and outbound marketing strategies. As customer buying needs evolve, the significance of team alignment and shared objectives becomes more crucial. With the changes in the B2B buying cycle and advancements in technology, the volume, variety, and speed of business data have increased, analytics and decision intelligence will play an even more vital role in improving sales and marketing alignment, and ultimately benefit the customer experience.

Enhancing Meeting Productivity

The way in which meetings are conducted should not be taken for granted, particularly in rapidly growing companies. The practices and culture surrounding internal collaboration meetings often stem from the habits of the company's early employees. However, the reality is that early employees in a high proportion of startups have many other priorities that outweigh developing a good internal meeting culture.

360-Degree View of Meeting Productivity: By integrating Hubspot data and Google Calendar Analytics into Flowtrace, you can gain a single viewpoint of both internal and external meeting culture. These combined analytics can be used to understand sales and marketing team alignment, the productivity of meetings with commercial teams such as sales, marketing, product, and customer success.

Meeting Metrics by Flowtrace

This information can also be leveraged to gain deep insights into customer meeting health. By combining internal and external meeting productivity, it is possible to quickly identify ways to improve productivity, collaboration, and business performance. Our clients have seen amazing results when leadership teams have used analytics to make improvements in sales and marketing alignment and meeting culture.

Balancing Communication Methods for Improved Sales and Marketing Alignment

Finding the optimal balance between emailing, instant messaging, information sharing, and team meetings can be challenging, but it is essential for sales and marketing alignment. By integrating Husbpot, Slack, and Jira with Flowtrace, valuable insights can be gained into how your sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams collaborate effectively and where relationship communication could be improved.

Flowtrace simplifies understanding work productivity patterns through dashboards that allow for the segmentation and analysis of workday activity. These dashboards provide real-time insights into every workday, such as time spent on:

• Emailing
• Chatting
• Internal meetings
• External meetings
• Focus time
• Out of hours
• Multitasking

By accessing the Team Productivity report, even more insights can be gained on each team's levels of activity and how they focus their time during any given workday.

Details of the team relationship

Our 'Relational Network' map provides a detailed understanding of the communication dynamics between your sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams. This powerful tool allows you to quickly identify which teams have stronger relationships, which teams are more influential, the sentiment of cross-team communication, and the direction of communication flow.

For example, if you find that the sales team has a stronger relationship with the product team, it could indicate that they are working closely together on product development and customer feedback. Additionally, if you notice that the customer success team has a high level of influence on the communication dynamics, it could indicate that they are playing a key role in driving cross-team collaboration and alignment.

The map also allows you to identify potential communication bottlenecks or areas where teams may not be communicating effectively. By understanding the relationship dynamics between teams, you can take steps to improve collaboration and alignment, ultimately leading to better customer experiences and increased revenue.

Team Relationship Map by Flowtrace

Improve team efficiency with integrations

Here are 4 easy ways you can use HubSpot, Slack and Flowtrace integrations to improve cross-team communication and align your marketing and sales teams more efficiently.

Streamline tasks with HubSpot and Slack Integration

You can easily create, view, update and analyze tasks and tickets from a single platform by integrating HubSpot and Slack. This allows your team to manage tasks more efficiently and gain insights into task handover efficiency through the Flowtrace integration.

Search, share and analyse HubSpot information in Slack

You can search for important information using Slack slash commands. This means information like HubSpot contacts, target company activity, deals, knowledge base articles, playbooks, tasks or content is easily accessible for every team via public channels in Slack. 

With the Flowtrace integration you can gain further communication insights on public and private Slack channels, including channel sentiment and information flow. 

Use Slack notifications and Hubspot workflows to share information

You can create workflows in your HubSpot account. These workflows can send notifications to specific Slack public channels so your teams can stay on top of deals, customer feedback and important new content.

Benchmark lead and opportunity handoff process

You can create more intelligent notifications from HubSpot to your Slack public channels which improve sales and marketing alignment and drive better efficiency in shared team goals. How quickly leads, form submissions or collateral downloads are followed up is an important part of improving sales and marketing alignment.

Using Flowtrace HubSpot Analytics to Achieve Team Alignment and Improve Business Performance

As we have demonstrated, sales and marketing alignment is a crucial aspect of any business, yet it is often overlooked. Misaligned sales and marketing teams can result in costly inefficiencies, lost revenue, and poor customer experience. The cost of misalignment can include wasted time, lost leads, and decreased productivity.

One of the main issues with misalignment is the creation of information silos, where important information is not shared between teams, resulting in a lack of collaboration and coordination. Symptoms of misalignment can include unproductive sales and marketing meetings, complex buying cycles, and complex workflows.

To overcome these common challenges, organizations can use tools like Flowtrace to improve sales and marketing team alignment and achieve better overall business performance. By using analytics to better understand team communication patterns, lead and opportunity handoff processes, and team productivity, organizations can gain valuable insights that can help improve overall collaboration and coordination.

In addition to using tools like Flowtrace, organizations can also take other steps to improve sales and marketing alignment. These steps include enhancing team communication, fostering effective collaboration, and aligning teams' goals, objectives, and handover processes. By taking these steps, organizations can overcome common challenges like ignoring leads, unproductive meetings, and process and tool complexities to achieve better overall business performance and a better customer experience.