No matter the industry, customers drive business. For technical and industrial businesses, gaining a following in simultaneously competitive and niche markets can prove difficult without a well-informed strategy. Marketing and sales programs work with such industries to build and implement plans that utilize empirical research and cutting-edge technology to meet business goals.
“We work directly with sales teams to implement a repeatable process, coupled with a marketing plan designed to bring in qualified leads that our clients can turn into customers,” said Highway 9 President Kevin Brady in a recent interview with CIO Applications. In partnership with HubSpot, Highway 9 utilizes holistic, competitive, and top-end customer relationship management (CRM) software to provide long-term, lasting relationships and solutions that will yield improved marketing and sales outcomes.
What is a Sales and Marketing Program?
Sales and marketing programs guide businesses toward sales and marketing strategies that help improve sale outcomes and generate more qualified leads. Not only do sales and marketing programs give businesses a formulaic approach to their business problems, it ensures that marketing and sales teams are on the same page when it comes to identifying and recruiting qualified leads.
The Hubspot platform combines marketing, sales, service, and operations all in one platform. HubSpot offers businesses powerful software solutions that allow teams to communicate and problem-solve all aspects of the sales and business process. The platform helps companies generate and convert more leads to customers with landing pages, blog posts, and targeted campaigns; sales software tracks and reports analytics related to transactions and profits.
Prospects, Leads, and Customers: Understanding the Sales Funnel
The path from prospective to active customers follows a funnel-shaped pattern, starting at the broad range of potential leads at the top to customers at the bottom. This Sales Funnel starts with a lead. A lead is someone who has expressed interest in the company in some way, like reading a blog, downloading a white paper, or signing up for a newsletter.
At these beginning stages, leads are often not sales ready, meaning that they do not yet demonstrate enough interest to be approached by sales. Depending on the lead’s interests, marketing teams can tailor their strategies to gather more engagement, such as email campaigns, writing engaging posts that encourage readers to reach out to sales, or highlighting a free trial on the company website. When leads demonstrate a high level of engagement, they become marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and are handed off to the sales team for follow up.
MQLs are further qualified by the sales team and if they pass this test become Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). Based on their engagement with marketing, sales teams can narrow in on the aspects of a product or service that their prospects find important, such as budget, timeline, and how well a company’s product can solve their business problems. When they complete a purchase, they become a customer.
HubSpot’s marketing software can help businesses identify and prioritize potential leads based on your business’s goals. By using HubSpot you can track all customer interactions and communications to measure interests, help your business streamline outreach efforts to gather engagement, and create personalized content through customizable segments. As leads continue further into the sales funnel, integrated dashboards allow you to monitor progress and track when leads turn into customers.
The Benefits of Implementing a Sales and Marketing Program
Well-developed marketing and sales programs build brand awareness and trust by implementing consistent, repeatable processes. Repeatable sale processes create the foundation of a successful marketing plan. Efficient marketing plans create a blueprint for sales teams to ensure that they focus their efforts on the right types of leads, identify new kinds of prospects, and know when to avoid leads that will end up costing the company time and money.
The more helpful qualified leads find the information from your site, the more likely they are to find something else, like a product or service, also useful. Various types of content, such as blog posts, videos, and posts on social media, both help educate and entice.
Strategies for Creating a Successful Sales and Marketing Program
Creating a successful sales and marketing program means that your marketing and sales teams need to understand each other; this means that they share the criteria of what a qualified lead entails. Sales teams also need training on how to ask the right questions to identify qualified leads, figure out their values, and understand how your products can help solve their problems.
The HubSpot platform help you create a targeted approach toward generating qualified leads and converting leads into loyal customers. Its sales and marketing software allows businesses to track every lead interaction from website visits to inquiries to demo requests.
Marketing teams can further qualify leads through automated email campaigns based on the lead’s identified interests through website engagement, landing page visits, form submissions, and more. When the time is right, sales teams can reach out with a tantalizing offer on a useful product to convert the lead to a lifelong customer.
Conclusion
The complex nature of technical and industrial businesses can make it difficult to effectively advertise their products or services. Sales and marketing programs help bridge the gap between the complex and the desirable by pairing businesses with effective marketing strategies to attract attention, gain business, and generate profit. HubSpot's software allows companies to identify well-qualified leads, encourage engagement via targeted marketing campaigns and outreach to create prospects, and entice prospects to close a sale.
With over 30 years of experience, the Highway 9 team utilizes HubSpot’s tools to help businesses improve their sales and marketing outcomes, produce higher-quality leads, and close more sales. HubSpot and Highway 9 assist in identifying problem areas, developing strategies and content that attract the right business, and tracking leads throughout the marketing and sales processes to ensure companies stay relevant and competitive. This partnership ensures that Highway 9 can assist in helping your business meet today’s challenges.
Contact us today to find out more about how we can drive your company forward.
