4 Notification Emails Critical to Sales & Marketing Alignment

Laura Sheptoski
Posted by Laura Sheptoski on October 17, 2016

notification-emails.jpg

We've all heard of the classic office feud: the marketing and sales departments just can't seem to get along. Marketing gets frustrated when Sales doesn't follow up on a lead, and Sales tends to feel like Marketing is volleying random leads over willy-nilly without proper qualification or context.

Since the advent of inbound marketing and sales, however, it's become easier for the two departments to function more like a well-oiled machine. Marketing strives to attract, nurture, and convert leads to fully qualify them prior to handing them off to Sales, and Sales has a better list of hot leads to work with who are getting ready to make a purchase decision.

IMG_1961.jpgLead handoff and communication between Marketing and Sales can be a manual process, but with marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can use automated workflows to send automatic notification emails to ensure your internal team is getting the important information they need when they need it—keeping the lines of communication open and making sure the right people are informed at the right time.

Here are four automated notification emails we've found to be especially helpful to aligning marketing and sales:

1. New Leads 

This email serves as a way to alert your team whenever there is a new lead to be aware of. Your notification can be set up based on the specific properties or behaviors that make up a lead to your organization, such as showing interest by filling out a form to access one of your awareness-level content pieces. In the same regard, you can set up emails to notify your team when a lead moves through your sales funnel to a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) or sales-qualified lead (SQL).

Here's how it works: once you have a new lead, MQL, or SQL, your team will get an email notifying them of the important information they need to know about the contact. You can set up your notification emails to include the specific contact properties that you deem most important to your organization.

2. Contact Has Shown Specific Interest 

Similar to the email above, this specific email can be set up to notify your team when a lead shows very specific interest on your website. Perhaps you want to be able to know when a lead visits a certain web page (such as your pricing page), or when a lead fills out a specific form that shows a particular level of interest (such as a free consultation request).

You can customize and modify this automated email based on a lead's activity and what makes sense to your specific buyers' journey and sales process.

3. Re-engagement Notification 

Perhaps you had a lead that just didn't pan out. By changing a lead's lifecycle stage to a custom property such as "disengaged," you can set up an email to notify your team whenever a contact in that lifecycle stage becomes re-engaged in your content.

With this type of email notification, your sales team can easily and quickly follow up on leads who begin to show interest in your product or service once again.

4. Contact is Waiting for Sales

While this email could be a little trickier to set up, it could serve as a critical way to ensure that each of your leads is being properly followed up on. By using custom contact properties (such as "Contact Has Been Contacted by Sales") in both your marketing automation software and your CRM (and making sure the two are properly integrated), you can set up a notification email to send a day or two after a new lead, MQL, or SQL notification email was sent based on contacts who haven't been marked as followed up by sales in your CRM.

Using an automatic email to remind sales that there's a lead who has yet to receive any outreach provides another check-and-balance to ensure that your leads are properly followed up on in a timely manner.

When there's critical information to be passed from marketing to sales, using workflows and automated emails is a simple and effective way to make sure that the key stakeholders on your team receive the information—quickly. Marketing and Sales are two functions that rely heavily on one another for ultimate success, and using the tools that marketing automation provides to help align the two will help set everyone up for success.

A Guided Tour of Marketing & Sales Service Level Agreements

Topics: Marketing Automation, Inbound Sales, Marketing & Sales Alignment

click here to take the state of industrial sales and marketing survey