Women from across the US joined Theia Marketing as we hosted our Women in Revenue HUG event. Our guest speaker Victoria Harkes, the marketing manager at School Bundle, spoke about how she used HubSpot to pop the departmental silo bubble and integrate goals across the sales, marketing, and customer service channels. She single-handedly streamlined organizational growth and created a cohesive customer experience from start to finish by the use of customized landing pages.
First a little background on our speaker. Victoria is the Marketing Manager at SchoolBundle, designing and developing sales, marketing, and customer success from the ground up. Victoria graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology. Coming into her marketing career from her previous work as a BDR, Victoria brings a particular understanding of the full customer journey to her role. Splitting her work between in the trenches work and big picture strategy, Victoria spends her free time pursuing her many hobbies, from baking to video games.
It's long been known that sales and marketing alignment is dead, sure they're different departments but holistically they're ALL ONE TEAM. By ditching alignment of departments and accepting integration, teams become holistically driven towards success.
How Marketing: Sales: Customer service: weekly 1 on 1s help
This begins with the top, leaders taking time to integrate initiatives thought processes, and goals so that each can bring the team strength to the table. From senior leadership to individual contributors- no team should exist in a bubble.
Victoria meets with her executive team once a quarter to plan and integrate the upcoming marketing strategy, sales initiatives, and goals as well as the customer service plan. Weekly one-hour meetings with her peers help to keep goals and plans integrated while providing time to plan ahead.
Most notably, by bringing customer success to the "party" Victoria found that retention and customer experience drastically benefited. The customer experience team is key to keeping clients happy and engaged. According to the time-old adage, it costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one. By bringing the customer experience team into the team integration not only are you gaining valuable insight into the customer needs you are setting up your marketing and sales team for success in targeting exactly what the customer is looking for from your company.
Why Lead Magnet Marketing Materials can't always generate the right type of Leads.
Once your team's goals are integrated it's important to differentiate lead magnets and quality over quantity. The traditional approach of developing gated top-of-funnel content to collect leads results in quantity over quality leads which causes a misalignment between the marketing and sales team. While this thought process allows marketing to hit their lead capture goals, in turn, it slows down the sales team because the leads generated are poor candidates. So how do you solve this problem? Simple, un-gate your content, unless it's a piece that you know generates quality leads for the sales team.
Victoria made the analogy that gated content is like a speed bump on a road. It slows down progress and forward momentum. You as a traveler will avoid a road with a lot of speed bumps just as a customer will avoid content if it's not easily assessable. Now there are still benefits to gating content, just only gate the content that has shown results in providing good leads for the sales team. It's important to as yourself "are these true indicators of interest?".
One way to navigate this road is to perform a content audit or develop a content plan. Evaluate your current content to better understand what pieces customers are engaging with as well as which have created the most viable leads. Keep the content that provides good leads gated and un-gate the rest.
Wonky workaround workflows to support sales, marketing, and customer success
It's time to conceptualize workflows, they're so much more than an automation tool. Consider how you as a marketer are currently using workflows- for nurture campaigns, newsletters, and event registrations, right? These tools help to automate these processes making your job easier as well as the branding, messaging, and experience consistent across all facets of the company. In a day and age where tools like HubSpot can automate just about any process, why not look for alternative ways to use these tools to save time for your sales or customer service team.
That's right, Victoria talked about leveraging workflows to automate aspects of the sales and customer services teams' work and partnering with each team to develop flows that they genuinely need. It's due time that marketing shares the amazingness of workflows with the rest of the team. Remember, workflows can fill a gap while your team and company grow.
What SQL Focused marketing support on HubSpot looks like in Landing Pages
Landing pages are a marketer's best friend, they're personalizable, beautifully branded, and can easily be updated when using a CMS like HubSpot. But have you ever thought about landing pages built for sales and customer service? Victoria did and she successfully utilizes landing pages like workflows, to support everyone.
Personalized landing pages bring ABM into the sales and customer success parts of the customer journey creating a beautifully branded customer data room where any information they might need about the partnership can be found. It's a personalized single point for information and communication that can be updated given the lifecycle stage of the client. Keeping the content fresh it builds trust and reliability maintaining a healthy customer relationship.
Keep in mind when creating landing pages to serve this purpose to:
- Outline your goals
- Weigh your options
- Design the page with ease of use in mind
Always keep the customer experience in mind when designing landing pages like this. It is also very beneficial to utilize templates for easy updating throughout the process.
How to have a smooth transition from customer acquisition to customer retention with Hubspot Marketing Pro tool
RETENTION is the only way you really grow an organization. Successful marketing teams should work backward from customer success through sales to get to Top of Funnel content and campaigns. Yes, this is probably backward from everything you've been taught, but take a minute to think about it.
As mentioned earlier it costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to retain a current one. How do you retain current customers? By the use of your excellent customer success team and salesperson managing the client's needs and wants. If you start with what the customer wants and work backward it's a surefire way to create content that will capture the eye of the right customer, not just any person looking for content. This then fills your lead pipeline with quality over quantity. provides you with content that attracts exactly who you're looking to sell to and in turn assists in the growth of the company and initiatives.
Putting it all together
From acquisition to retention, it's important to leverage workflows, landing pages, and 1:1s to develop an integrated team. Prioritizing content that can be utilized by the customer success team and sales, not just marketing or the client, will skyrocket your company to the next level and create an all-in-one inclusive customer experience that will keep them coming back for more.
Victoria's Roadmap for Success
- Break the Bubble with 1:1s- Connect with your counterparts and book your first meeting
- Re-Evaluate your content- Gate only direct buying indicators. Un-gate the rest of your content and provide specific ways for prospects to ask for more information. ie: CTA's
- Re-Think your workflows- These aren't just for marketing anymore, create customized flows that empower your customer success and sales team
- Utilize Landing Pages as Customer Data Rooms- Build a page that can be easily personalized and decide on the interchangeable content and notes
- Build from the bottom up- Create content that customer success and sales need to retain and sign new customers.
.png)
If you're interested in attending more events like this, we invite you to join the Women in Revenue HUG group.
