What comes first, the marketing investment or the business growth?
Working in the SaaS and B2B space, we see first-hand the challenges your innovative and agile teams face. You must attract new customers but may not have a dedicated in-house marketing department or feel pressured to produce a seemingly impossible ROI on a tight budget.
In this blog, we explore how account-based marketing using the HubSpot CRM platform can drive growth (even with a limited budget), enable your sales team to work more efficiently, and ultimately help your business reach the enterprise level.
If you’ve seen our previous account-based marketing blog series, you’ll know we’re huge fans. ABM has many all-star qualities, from enhancing marketing and sales team alignment to improving the customer sales journey and dialling in on ROI tracking.
To recap, account-based marketing (ABM) is an approach to B2B marketing that targets specific companies (or 'accounts') within a market with tailored messaging—rather than trying to reach and convert a mass audience. It's a bit like spearfishing. Instead of casting a wide net and hoping to attract as many leads as possible, ABM focuses on the big fish—a few high-value accounts most likely to convert into customers.
Resources and marketing efforts aren’t wasted on people who will never be your customers. As a component of an inbound marketing strategy, ABM is particularly effective for B2B and SaaS companies due to the smaller customer pond, longer sales cycles, and hand-holding required throughout the conversion process.
Marketing is an investment, and selecting the right CRM platform will support current and long-term business growth. If your current marketing strategy has plateaued, HubSpot could be the answer to implementing a high-return single-customer approach. Here’s how.
Streamline the marketing-to-sales handoff—arguably one of the most significant pain points for scaling B2B businesses. Determining when to hand the lead off to sales and how this technical handover process happens within a segmented tech stack can get messy.
HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Sales Hub exist to solve this joint misalignment. Still, to see the full results of these powerful tools, you’ll have to understand your customer journey, the lifecycle stages and their criteria, and ideal customer profiles. HubSpot consolidates previously siloed teams and helps establish an ABM framework, which will identify what information gaps need to be filled and result in an automated, accurate, and aligned customer experience. (Read: more customers, less hands-on effort, and increased ROI.)
The other common culprit of stagnant sales growth is inconsistent data. Accurate campaign evaluation establishes the ROI proof needed for continued marketing investment and enables crucial data-driven decision-making. Our previous blog, Account-Based Marketing: Measuring Success and ROI with HubSpot, breaks down HubSpot’s data management functionality and implementation. We’ll jump right into how these tools will amplify your growth strategies.
Data drives revenue, period. A lack of trustworthy data means you’ll not only be in the dark making decisions that impact your customers (lack of personalisation, poor handoff, wrong segmentation, etc.), but it will also be impossible to forecast your sales team’s pipeline, which can have huge impacts on lean teams. Aligning disparate systems within an integrated system, such as HubSpot, will improve data quality and empower marketing and sales with automated processes to keep data clean.
Regarding pipeline management specifically, HubSpot has a few secret weapons to ensure your organisation has a clear overview. Within Sales Hub, the forecasting tool zooms out to quickly give your team a projection of the entire pipeline and an opportunity to discuss details to stay on track for the quarter ahead. For each sales team member, the prospecting workspace enables daily integrated task management to stay organised and accountable for reaching those aligned company goals.
HubSpot is a powerful B2B marketing tool, but it can also be overwhelming for this exact reason. We work with many clients who already use HubSpot in some capacity but are looking to unlock its full potential as a B2B account-based marketing powerhouse. This partnership often begins with a HubSpot audit, which gets under the hood to understand what’s going on in your HubSpot suite and identify optimisations to get the most out of your data. The steps following a HubSpot audit vary for each client based on business goals. Still, the big-picture benefits come from increased ROI through improved automation, streamlined internal processes and seamless customer experience. We’re here to guide you through the journey and prioritise activations based on your timeline and budget.
On the flip side, if your B2B business is considering a CRM move, our HubSpot Consulting services exist to help assess whether HubSpot suits you and guide you to leverage HubSpot to achieve full revenue potential. Unlike other one-size-fits-all agencies, we will always go the extra mile (or ten) to understand where you’re at in your marketing journey. How else could we provide bespoke support for your growing business?
We’d be thrilled to discuss our HubSpot consulting services, tailored account-based marketing strategies, and how we can support your business growth goals. Contact us here.
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