As a Professor at HubSpot, I’m constantly working with Marketing and Sales teams, preaching the importance of a smooth handoff. Automation is the key to ensuring the right teams are working the right leads at the right time without duplicating efforts. Don’t let your team waste effort, and let me tell you how I recommend customers set up their automated marketing-to-sales handoff in HubSpot when they ask me in a Small Group Coaching session!
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Define your buying signals: Each business is unique, which means you need to map out what signals show that someone may be ready for a sales conversation. Sales and marketing teams should work together to define these key signals, which could be anything in HubSpot from properties (job title, industry, etc.) and events (email replies/clicks, website visits, etc.). You could even use the Data Agent to pull details hidden in your CRM’s call transcripts and emails or available publicly online.
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Set up Lead Scoring: Take the signals you defined in step one to use as criteria in your lead scoring. So your CRM contacts are continuously scored around these key signals—the more positive engagement and demographic signals a lead has, the higher the number. Use these scores to prioritize who is sales-ready vs. needs more nurturing.
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Use Lifecycle Stages: Lifecycle stage is a property in HubSpot that tells you where a contact or company is at with your business - are they a lead, customer, marketing qualified lead? They can be customized to fit your business and we can connect it back to lifecycle stages. Define a number threshold for your Lead Scoring to connect to each Lifecycle stage before Opportunity, which is when there is a deal open for this individual/account. So for example, Lead Score is 0-10 = Subscriber, 10-25 = Lead, and so on.
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Automate Lifecycle Stages & handoff with Workflows: I highly recommend using AI to create these workflows; learn more about building workflows using your Breeze Assistant.
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Lifecycle Stages: Set up a workflow to update the lifecycle stage property when the lead score changes so your data stays clean and your team always has real-time visibility into where someone is at with your business.
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Marketing-to-sales Handoff: Set up a workflow to notify sales a lead is ready for personal follow-up. Helping to ensure no lead falls through the cracks and your sales reps are spending their time on leads worth their time, positively impacting revenue.
Now that we covered my recommendation on the tools to leverage for the hand-off, that may leave the question for some of you: where do Marketing and Sales teams normally find their own leads in HubSpot?
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Marketing Teams: Use segments to distinguish and track different audiences in your CRM based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or intent. Segments are your centralized place in HubSpot to track, organize, and activate groups of contacts for personalized marketing.
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Sales Teams: Use the Lead Pipeline to manage those sales leads that have shown interest or are a potential good fit but have not yet been qualified as an opportunity. Leads is your centralized place in HubSpot to track, manage, and organize your prospects with advanced reporting and automation capabilities.
Learn more about segments and the lead pipeline from a HubSpot Professor by signing up for a Small Group Coaching session: here for Marketers and here for Sales!