What We Lose When Marketing Data Is Siloed (and What We Gain by Integrating)

Doing marketing well requires so. much. data.

👉 We engage prospects through various channels (ads, emails, webinars, content downloads, sales emails, etc.).

👉 We score these prospects based on their interactions with these channels.

👉 We pass them to sales when data indicates they are ready to convert.

So we miss out on a lot when data isn’t connected in one platform. We miss indications when prospects are ready to speak to sales. Or we over-index on the few channels of data that we can access. And we can miss the opportunity to send the perfect offer to the perfect segment of our email list. 

Recently, Arrows hosted the first (of many!) Happy Customers Festival–in which we hosted two great marketing companies (Reveal, and Wistia) to dive deep into how their integrations with HubSpot enable marketers to leverage the automation and process power of HubSpot, and better tee up leads to send to the sales team. 

First, we’ll walk through what can go wrong when marketing tools aren’t integrated back into HubSpot, and then we’ll share what can be done using Reveal and Wistia data in HubSpot.

Customer Marketing:

If you’ve been in SaaS marketing for any length of time, this scenario will sound familiar. A new feature is launched, and the product team wants to tailor different messages for prospects and customers. After all, the calls-to-action are different for these groups.

But, your CRM doesn’t have good data about customer health, and you’re not even sure if contacts are accurately categorized as customers or prospects. You face a dilemma: Do you send in HubSpot knowing that some people might get the wrong email?

Or do you try a workaround and send the email some other way, then sacrifice the ability to track the campaign’s performance in HubSpot?

Ultimately, you download the list of users who have logged into the platform in the last 90 days from Intercom, as it covers almost everyone. You can’t filter out accounts with bad NPS, and you’re missing a bunch of contacts at customer accounts, but you send anyway.

Most customers are excited to learn about the new features. However, those struggling with your customer service team do not appreciate the promotional email. They make a mental note that your company is either disorganized or indifferent to their experience.

How could this be avoided with better integration?

Integrating all customer and marketing data into the CRM would enable the marketing team to segment the audience effectively and exclude anyone who shouldn't receive the message, such as at-risk or low NPS customers, or those currently negotiating renewals.

Additionally, having all engagement data in HubSpot would facilitate relevant follow-up nurturing, and allow performance comparisons against previous campaigns.

Sending Leads to Sales: 

Every marketing team eventually reaches a stage where they need to implement a qualification process to streamline the leads they pass on to sales, ensuring only the most purchase-ready prospects make the cut.

As you develop this process, you consider various actions that might indicate a contact's buying intent, such as:

• Downloading whitepapers and reports
• Reading case studies
• Viewing pages on your site (with a higher emphasis on bottom-of-funnel research)
• Engaging with ads
• Watching webinars
• And more...

However, without a comprehensive source of truth for tracking a contact's engagement with your marketing materials, the leads you forward to sales are limited to the data available in your CRM—a mere subset of potential engagement metrics.

This is a good start, and could in some cases be better than having no marketing qualification system, but it disproportionately focuses on a limited range of engagement types. Consequently, you might overlook significant buying signals from contacts interacting with content not integrated into your CRM.

So, some accounts that are ready to buy are not sent to sales because there's no evidence of their readiness in the CRM.

How could this be avoided with better integration?

If all data about a prospect were integrated into your CRM, the qualification process would be more accurate, and you'd be sending better leads to the sales team.

You could leverage previously-overlooked buying signals, and high-potential accounts would no longer slip through the cracks.

The results? You don't miss out on prospect engagement, you send better leads to sales, and the friction between marketing and sales is eased.

Nurturing Leads: 

Integrating all marketing tools into the CRM (in addition to sales and success) drives better personalization. 

Personalization here means two things: 

1. Incorporating individual contact information into your communications, (i.e. content they've interacted with or partners they work with).
2. Tailoring the types of offers you send based on their prior actions or stage in the buyer journey.

Without integrating your marketing systems into your CRM/automation source, nurturing efforts can suffer significantly. 

• You risk sending content that recipients have already consumed, eroding trust.
• Emails fall flat because they're so generic.
• Targeted campaigns become impossible, since essential filtering information—such as partners your contacts collaborate with, content they've already engaged with, and features they use—isn't in the CRM.

How could this be avoided with better integration?

When it’s done well, though, both types of personalization are strong.

You can serve ads to specific subsets of contacts based on their previous actions or stage in the buyer journey. 

You can send campaigns to only the most relevant possible audience. And outreach can be personalized based on actions contacts have taken.  

Integrating all marketing data into the CRM powers great nurture programs.

Integrate Partner Data Into The CRM To Promote A Joint Campaign

When Reveal and HubSpot are integrated, we can run impactful campaigns targeting a specific segment: customers and prospects of our partners.

We use Reveal data in the CRM to create targeted contact lists. There are different types of overlaps between us and our partners:

• Customers of both
• Our prospect, partner's customer
• Our customer, partner's prospect
• Prospects of both

We can build a list for each overlap and send targeted emails with specific messages.

For example:

Hi <<Name>>,

Join us this week as XX Joint customer XX demos how they use the Company X Company integration to achieve ZZ outcome!

(Personalized message about their pain) If you have XX problem solved but want to improve in this area, this webinar will show you how.

When contacts register, your SDR/sales team will see the partner relationships of each account, allowing for more informed outreach. A previously cold email will be richer with information on existing software usage. Marketing follow-ups can also be automated or personalized based on partner relationships.

Without partnership data in HubSpot, marketing would have to ask the success team about partner org customers, manually segment lists, and miss many contacts for the webinar.

Integrate Video and Webinar Data Into The CRM To Send Better Leads To Sales

Integrating Wistia with HubSpot showcases how integrations boost marketing performance. You can create lists of engaged prospects for top-of-funnel campaigns and use video and webinar data in your qualification process.

As prospects interact with your video content—attending webinars and watching product videos—data from Wistia flows into HubSpot. This combination gives deep insight into a prospect's interest and readiness to buy.

Marketers can create lists of high-intent leads by targeting individuals who attended a webinar and watched a product demo video.

When sales reaches out, they have a full list of the prospect's engaged content to personalize their approach.

Access our step-by-step walkthrough of how to build a high-intent lead list with Wistia and HubSpot here.

Better Integrations Mean Better Targeting, Nurture, and Lead Lists for Sales

Integrating data from your favorite marketing apps like Wistia and Reveal maximizes the outcomes that marketing can drive, and ultimately helps you send better leads to your sales team. 

With data unified into HubSpot, you can more easily target the right people with your marketing campaigns. You can nurture people with more context and relevance, based on the actions they’ve taken. And you can identify more easily when a lead is excited to talk to the sales team. 

Next up, the sales session covers how to accelerate the sales cycle using integrated tools for SDR outreach, auto deal qualification, and document creation.