HubSpot Wins Sales 2.0 Award for Best Alignment of Sales & Marketing

Are your company's marketing and sales teams aligned? HubSpot's are, and we're pleased to announce our recent honor as the recipient of the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Award for Best Alignment of Sales & Marketing.

The Sales & Marketing 2.0 Awards honor excellence in leveraging SaaS technologies. This year’s winners were announced live at an awards ceremony on November 9 at the close of the Sales & Marketing 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, and while HubSpot was unable to attend, HubSpot customer and partner Rebekah Donaldson kindly accepted the award on HubSpot's behalf. Rebekah is CEO of Business Communications Group, a B2B marketing agency based in Sacramento, CA.

So how does HubSpot make sure its sales and marketing teams are working in tandem? We use a Marketing and Sales SLA (service level agreement) to align Sales and Marketing and help the two teams work together seamlessly and efficiently to generate inbound leads and close sales. The Marketing SLA defines the expectations that Sales has for Marketing with regard to lead quantity and lead quality, and the Sales SLA defines the expectations that Marketing has for Sales about how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead.

The HubSpot SLA

HubSpot establishes its SLA by...

1. Running a closed loop analysis on historical inbound lead segments and calculating the profitability of each segment,
2. Classifying profitable lead segments as “workable leads,” which are ready for sales, filtering out and/or nurturing “non-workable leads,”
3. Determining the number of “workable leads” per sales rep per month that Marketing is accountable for (this metric is the Marketing SLA),
4. Defining the number and frequency of attempts that Sales will make against each “workable lead” (this metric is the Sales SLA), and
5. Automating the daily monitoring of the process. Key metrics HubSpot monitors include “workable leads” produced per sales rep, attempts per “workable lead,” connect rate per “workable lead,” and conversion rate to forecasted pipeline per “workable lead.”

In addition to the SLA, the HubSpot's sales and marketing teams work together closely on a regular basis so Sales is aware of marketing campaigns and can provide feedback to Marketing. Sales and Marketing also come together for a weekly SMarketing meeting to keep the teams aligned with various activities/goals.

HubSpot’s implementation of the Sales and Marketing SLA has led to a number of positive results. Overall, the SLA has significantly increased sales productivity, improved communication and set better expectations between the sales and marketing teams, as well as lowered HubSpot’s cost of customer acquisition (COCA).

For a complete list of Sales 2.0 categories and winners, visit http://www.sales20conf.com/collaboration/awards.html. A special thank you to the Sales 2.0 for recognizing HubSpot with this award!

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