How to Create Marketing
Campaigns Your Sales
Team Will Love
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 3
Chapter 1: The Challenges Marketing and Sales Teams face today ................ 4
Part I: Marketing Challenges ................................................................................. 5
Part II: Sales Channels ............................................................................................ 8
Chapter 2: Campaign Planning ............................................................................ 10
Part I: Asking the questions that will align your teams ..................................... 11
Part II: A single source of truth .............................................................................. 16
Chapter 3: Campaign Execution ........................................................................... 17
Part I: How work management enables you to deliver on campaigns ............ 18
Part II: Campaign execution: Tools and best practices ...................................... 20
Chapter 4: Campaign Reporting .......................................................................... 23
Part I: How to report effectively ............................................................................. 24
Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 28
Introduction
What does a successful marketing campaign look like? In this ebook, we’ll discuss the
tips, tricks and tools available to ensure marketing and sales can break down silos, and
collaborate smoothly.
Alignment between these teams can enable sales and marketing to better meet campaign
KPIs, from hitting organic traffic highs to converting a greater number of leads. Not only
that, but according to recent LinkedIn research1, 87% of sales and marketing leaders say
collaboration between the two enables critical business growth.
We’ll break down the planning, execution and reporting of a campaign, and how alignment
can result in smoother processes, greater efficiency and better results. But first, let’s take a
look at the challenges modern marketing and sales teams face.
1 [Link]
3
Chapter 1
The Challenges
Marketing and
Sales Teams face
today
4
Part I: Marketing Challenges
Marketing teams and the methods they use have seen significant changes in recent years.
There’s more opportunity and greater scope for creativity. But this opportunity also means
marketers have to navigate more channels, content, and tools than ever before.
As the wealth of tools at marketers’ disposal has grown, so has expectation around
marketing’s role. Organizations now expect marketers to be a master of all trades,
delivering excellent content across a suite of channels in successful, integrated campaigns
that have a demonstrative impact on the business.
Yet, while the increase in the number of digital tools has armed marketers with a broader
suite of capabilities, from audience analysis to tracking trends on social media, their
challenges are still pronounced.
Marketing technology overload is resulting in chaotic work
In the past decade, advancing technology helped marketers realize their ambitions of
delivering seamless, integrated campaigns. But the market soon became inundated with
solutions. Last year alone the number of tools on offer to marketers grew to over 8,000
different technologies2. This fragmentation adds to the chaos of context-switching (moving
quickly from one task to another) with 27% of knowledge workers saying switching apps
leads to actions and messages being missed.
Also, by embracing a number of tools to manage different parts of a marketing campaign,
silos emerge. Silos can form around simple processes. Imagine you’re writing an article on
SEO best practice using an offline word processor, which is then hosted on your Medium
covering Gen-Z branding techniques, with page views of the article tracked on a legacy
spreadsheet tool on a shared server. At each step, there’s no guarantee of shared visibility
within your wider marketing team.
2 [Link]
5
Marketers need a single system of truth to coordinate work and avoid silos forming around
tools. A centralized work management platform can do just this, integrating with key apps
and providing visibility on planning, organizing, and coordinating marketing activities.
What is a work management platform?
Work management platforms help teams orchestrate their work—from daily tasks
to cross-functional strategic initiatives—while providing the alignment needed
to hit their goals faster. As a living system of clarity for the entire organization,
best-in-class work management platforms bridge the gap between strategy and
execution to ensure teams are focused on their company’s most important work,
no matter where they’re located.
Multiple skill sets in marketing create a lack of clarity on roles and
responsibilities
Marketing encompasses so many skills, tools and capabilities: from PPC, to social, to
content. Meanwhile, with more channels to deal with, added responsibilities placing
marketer’s at the centre of the board-room and always-on consumers to reach, the
demands of the role are only growing.
A core challenge for marketing teams is keeping track of who is doing what. This is only
compounded when information is stored in an unintuitive spreadsheet. A role as dynamic
as marketing requires tools that can offer clarity over work and adapt to the ever-shifting
demands of the job.
It goes without saying teams should have clarity of key tasks and projects, who is
performing them and how they ladder-up to the company mission—helping them
to understand the value they’re bringing as they deliver on work. Further, this stops
individuals getting overloaded by helping everyone identify potential pressure points.
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Inability to find what you need, when you need it
As marketing functions grow, from affiliate to ambush, to behavioral to brand, it’s easy for
teams to become overburdened. While there are many resources available to help, it can
be tricky to understand where, when and how they should be utilized.
An inability to efficiently identify the resources a team needs can lead to missed deadlines
to employee burnout. The latter of which is now a pressing need, with Asana’s Anatomy
of Work Index3 finding that 7 in 10 (71%) respondents worldwide experienced burnout at
least once in the past year.
Too much work about work detracting from creativity
While teams have embraced digital technologies in the past year, coordination hasn’t
been rethought. In some cases, the move to digital has increased time spent on busy work.
Five minute informal conversations about the latest creative in the office have transformed
into 30 minute scheduled video calls, with further time wasted switching between apps to
schedule the call in the first place.
The Anatomy of Work survey found that 60% of a knowledge workers’ time is spent on
‘work about work’ (tasks like attending unnecessary meetings, chasing for updates or
searching for information), rather than the skilled jobs they’ve been hired to do (like
audience analysis or building creative assets).
Without streamlining and reducing work about work, marketers will see meaningful
activities disappear into a vacuum of busywork.
While all of these challenges can hinder marketers attempting to successfully integrate a
marketing campaign and meet their business KPIs, a sales team, who rely upon marketing
to attract the right people and pass on quality leads, face their own barriers to productivity.
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Part II: Marketing Challenges
For sales teams, it’s vital to define efficient processes and ensure close coordination with
marketing. With these processes in place, a sales team is empowered to better engage with
customers and drive long-lasting brand loyalty.
This, however, is easier said than done, with the research finding that 9 in 10 sales4 and
marketing professionals say they are misaligned across strategy, process, content and
culture. Meanwhile, a number of other challenges stand in the way of sales teams meeting
their KPIs.
Identifying qualified leads
For sales, quality over quantity is always the answer. Spending a great deal of time on
a doomed bid to win a tepid lead at the wrong stage of a buyer journey is a waste of
resources.
A lack of clarity into the different stages of a buyer journey, and where the lead fits, is one of
the greatest obstacles to ensuring a successful sales process.
4 [Link]
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Being bogged down by administrative tasks
Much like marketers, sales teams can find their time frittered away on tasks that drive little
value for their organization and its customers. Research shows sales teams spend just
32.5% of their time selling, with administrative tasks, like generating reports, draining their
day of focus.
Tools that can automate everyday tasks should now be embraced to free up time, and
enable teams to focus on more meaningful work.
Building a more engaging experience for customers
For companies that use a funnel model, in which customers are pushed through linear
steps from awareness (the top of the funnel – led by marketing) through to purchase
or repurchase (the bottom of the funnel – led by sales), it is very rare that the handover
between teams, from marketing, to sales, to beyond, is entirely frictionless.
A clumsy handoff between teams, where customers can feel the gap through delays or
unclear communication, results in poor experience. With a flywheel model that eliminates
bumpy team handovers, sales, and the rest of an organization, can see happier, more
fulfilled customers (you’ll learn more on the flywheel in our next chapter).
Over the past year, the challenges facing marketers and salespeople have only become
more pronounced. With increasingly complex roles, fragmented tools, and little time,
clarity has been lost and coordination made more challenging.
Let’s look at how these two teams can put in place processes that will help them thrive
during every stage of an aligned campaign in the months ahead.
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Chapter 2
Campaign
Planning
10
Part I: Asking the questions that will
align your teams
First, we’ll take a look at how to align marketing and sales during the campaign planning
stage. Here are some simple questions for both teams to address together in order to lay
firm foundations for the campaign’s success.
Who is my audience?
Marketers need to know who they are marketing to. Working with your sales team to
establish the right audience for your campaign by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP)
is an excellent way to get started.
An ICP is the process of defining the perfect customer for your business, and can be based
on a number of factors, including geography, industry and budget size.
ICPs help sales and marketing teams focus their audience, establishing a persona that
marketers can create content for, and sales teams are comfortable speaking to.
The next step to understanding your audience is building out buyer personas. Buyer
personas are more detailed profiles of people who would make good leads that also offer
guidance on how best to communicate with them. They can include information like day-
to-day challenges, who they report to, and the tools they use to do their job.
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Here’s an example of an ICP and buyer persona if you were running a
FinTech webinar:
Buyer persona:
ICP:
» Works for: FinTech company
» C-Level executive
» Company size: 300-500
» Goals: Automate workload; Save time
employees
& money
» Budget size: £5k or more
» Key challenge: Lack of visibility into
» Location: France
operations; Restrictive budget
around technology adoption
How can we attract quality leads?
A key part of a marketing campaign’s role is to drive strong leads to sales. To do that, forms
(which we discuss in more detail in the next chapter) should only gather the information you
need to qualify a lead.
For example, the budget size, sector, and location of the FinTech persona we discuss above
we know is relevant to sales. Meanwhile, the length of time in their current role might be
irrelevant, so you don’t need to gather that information. Focusing only on information that
matters helps ensure conversions will take place, and keeps the sales team happy by not
overwhelming them with unhelpful data.
Beyond streamlining forms, using a creative campaign format like quizzes to gather
information on prospects can also help increase the number of quality leads you are
engaging.
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How can marketing qualify leads?
Once you have gathered leads, it’s important to have a system in place that shows what a
strong lead looks like.
This process is called lead scoring, and helps both sales and marketing target their
efforts more effectively, in turn, improving conversion rates—a KPI for almost all marketing
campaigns.
Once you’ve got your ICPs and buyer personas in place, you can begin scoring leads by
assigning metrics, rated by importance, against different criteria.
Here’s an example of how we could score leads for that webinar
campaign, based on both demographic and behavioral information.
» Location +10 » Email opens +5
» Age +4 » Email subscription +7
» Company Size +7 » Landing page visits +6
» Department +9 » Form submissions +8
» Industry +10 » Content download +9
» Job Title / Seniority +9 » Webinar registration +10
By ensuring both marketing and sales agree upon these criterias, marketing can deliver a
clearer sense of who is a qualified lead, and sales will be able to focus their engagement
with key prospects.
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What is the campaign’s goal, and how do we measure success?
Marketing campaigns shouldn’t be executed without a clear understanding of what you’re
hoping to achieve, and how you’ll measure success.
When deciding upon KPIs it’s important to work with sales to set targets that are achievable.
Using qualified leads as a basis for KPIs makes clear business sense as it’s related to revenue,
can be measured against both marketing and sales performance, and is easily quantifiable
during the reporting stage.
That said, you’ll want to measure success on more than one key metric, and assessing where
conversion rates fall or rise can help identify strengths and weaknesses in your approach. A
simple, full funnel report, starting with 1,000 initial contacts.
Funnel Stage (Number of customers) Conversion rate
Initial contact (1000) N/A
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) (440) 44%
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) (80) 18%
Opportunity (45) 56%
Deal closed (10) 25%
In our fictional Fintech webinar we might choose to measure only:
• Number of sales qualified leads (SQL)
• Conversion rate between initial contact and sales qualification
• Lead value
It’s also important to consider how you communicate and align around your goals. This
should be a strong focus for all businesses, with just 16% of employees saying their 6
company sets goals effectively. A flexible system within a work management platform, that
provides a single source of truth for setting, tracking, and managing company goals, can
keep everyone aligned.
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Are the right assets in place?
It’s vital that both potential and existing customers have a consistent and engaging
experience throughout their journey during a campaign.
This is why, in the planning stage, marketing teams need to understand that content
doesn’t end with lead generation. This happens too often in businesses working with
a traditional sales funnel model, which places the emphasis on compartmentalization,
pushing customers through different sectors of a business.
The flywheel model, in contrast to the funnel, places the onus on every team in the
company to apply force in three phases: attract, engage, and delight. In doing so,
businesses can deliver a smoother journey and a remarkable experience for customers.
Those happy customers then drive momentum to referrals and repeat sales, keeping the
flywheel spinning. HubSpot has now realigned its entire company around the flywheel
methodology, embracing the momentum that builds from aligning an organization around
delivering extraordinary customer experiences.
In a flywheel model, it’s also easier to collaborate with other teams, namely sales, and
ensure assets are created and aligned at every stage of the journey.
That means collaborating on content like case studies, customer testimonials, infographics,
and more that create a consistent experience across every stage of the customer journey.
That way customers have a seamless journey from awareness through to conversion, rather
than having assets act as a way to attract initial interest, followed by a clumsy hand-off to
another team.
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Part II: A single source of truth
At this stage of planning for our Fintech webinar, we have confirmed:
• Who our audience is
• Our campaign goal and KPIs
• How we’ll qualify leads
• The assets needed for the entire customer journey
With these outlined, the campaign is starting to take shape. However, before we begin
executing the campaign, we need to map out step-by-step processes and tasks in
more detail. Each element of the campaign should have clear deadlines, owners, and
dependencies (for example, localized social ads might depend on having an original
image to adapt) before work begins.
As project managers, we need to ensure that everyone has access to the information
they need to complete each step, track progress, and keep sales and marketing aligned
throughout.
The key is in adopting the right tools. A platform like HubSpot, that offers real time CRM
data to power campaigns across all products, can offer a single source of data across sales,
marketing and CMS.
Alongside this, a work management platform like Asana can integrate that information,
mapping it to your plan’s Goals, deadlines, assets, and individual tasks that make up each
campaign, while giving everyone real-time visibility on who is working on what by when.
Together, this can help better track KPIs, share deeper insights into prospects, or enable
you to better connect with customers.
Now you’ve got your campaign planned, it’s time to move onto execution.
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Chapter 3
Campaign
Execution
17
How do you ensure marketing and sales are able to work together to smoothly run a
campaign with so many moving parts?
To successfully execute your campaign while keeping both sales and marketing aligned,
you’ll need to address several key issues. These include; providing easy access to campaign
information through internal channels, managing a smooth working process for marketing
and sales, and embracing the right CRM tools to accurately segment and score leads,
helping you to deliver a great customer experience.
Part I: How work management
enables you to deliver on campaigns
Tackling silos, embracing automation and choosing tools that integrate with one another are
key to ensuring sales and marketing stay aligned as campaigns get underway.
Silos can appear when different teams are working across different platforms like email,
spreadsheets, chat, and docs as they juggle the many elements of a campaign. By using a
work management tool, project managers can break down these silos and give everyone
visibility of work in a single space. This allows everyone to plan, execute and view the entire
campaign in ways that work for them, whether as a timeline, calendar, or kanban board.
Meanwhile, automation features can be used to easily gather input (like information needed
to brief an agency) or automate routine tasks (like ensuring branded assets are sent for the
right approvals). Enterprise-grade work management platforms offer the ability to create
custom, automated workflows like this, giving teams more time for focused work.
Finally, it’s important to be aware of how your different tools talk to each other. Marketers
and sales teams have to call on a range of different software, meaning integrations are key if
you want to avoid information getting lost or reduce time lost to switching between apps. In
fact, IDC found that teams who use three or more integrations save over 30 hours per week.
18
Here are some tips for executing a campaign through a work
management platform:
» Create a timeline to see how tasks and deadlines connect, and ensure your
campaign steps are mapped out.
» Assign tasks and set deadlines, so that owners understand their responsibilities
and carry out tasks effectively. Use automation features to easily gather the
information you need, and assign work automatically.
» Create templates that both teams can use to share campaign assets easily via
their own social channels or email, further amplifying your reach.
» Monitor progress to achieve visibility into each aspect of the campaign, and
ensure all deadlines are met.
» Improve the feedback process using integrations like Adobe Creative Cloud
and Litmus, to build a smooth approval workflow, and organize requests.
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Part II: Campaign execution: Tools
and best practices
Now, it’s time to look at some of the broader tools you need to execute a campaign
successfully, from forms, to landing pages to contact management.
Here’s a quick rundown of some of these solutions, and how a single platform can ensure
they run smoothly during a campaign.
Creating and using forms
Using forms in campaign execution is an important method for collecting information
around previously anonymous visitors and turning them into leads. All you need to do is
ask the right questions at the right times – a process that should be agreed upon by both
sales and marketing.
A tool like HubSpot allows you to create custom forms, populating them with your chosen
questions and then embed them onto a landing page or external website. You can
even block invalid forms if the email domains look suspicious, and sync the information
captured to your CRM.
Finally, you can ensure leads are efficiently captured and acted upon by quickly sending
alerts to your sales team, enrolling contacts in a lead nurturing campaign, or triggering
other actions automatically when a contact completes a form.
Building engaging landing pages
Campaign content and forms can’t exist in a vacuum. You should host these assets on a
campaign landing page that matches the appearance and branding of your company
website, is accessible on every type of device, and helps generate leads.
20
With a landing page created, you need a tool that tracks its performance at the campaign
level, helping you capture leads and assess whether you’re on track to meet your goals.
By capturing information from a landing page, you can feed it into lists, workflows, and
individual contact records, delivering important insights like customer roles to your
marketing and sales teams.
Driving successful multi-channel promotion
One of the benefits of modern marketing is the ability to promote a campaign across
multiple channels, from social media, to email, to blogs and more.
That said, managing a multi-channel campaign can become complex when it comes to
processes and visibility over performance. Having a platform that enables you to easily
create, publish and link different channel materials to your campaign will help avoid this.
Armed with the right knowledge, you can adapt channel output to lean into top-
performing content, and move resources away from areas that aren’t generating results.
Ensuring efficient contact management
Once a campaign starts to bring in leads, you’ll need a centralized resource that records
them, providing the sales team with the data required to contact them in the most efficient
way possible.
A single, integrated database will allow sales and marketing teams to see every detail of a
lead in a single profile, offering a chronological timeline of every type of contact between
them and your company, whether it’s a social media interaction, email open or a page visit.
This can empower marketing and sales teams to segment and nurture leads more
effectively, enabling you to build targeted lists and content, automate emails and more to
help deliver a consistent and remarkable experience.
21
Some tools can even automatically score leads, assigning them scores without manual
work, and based on your data.
There are countless tools and processes available to marketers and salespeople as they
begin executing their campaigns. Every organization will need to adapt and discover what
works for them.
However, choosing platforms that promote visibility, integrate with existing software
solutions and enable you to optimize campaigns in real-time are an essential basis from
which to start achieving your goals.
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Chapter 4
Campaign
Reporting
23
Your campaign is underway, following the rock-solid plan you created and tight coordination
between marketers and salespeople, the leads are flooding in. But what does this mean to
the business? Without effective reporting, all that hard work can get lost in the noise. It’s time
to communicate those results, share learnings and celebrate the wins.
Part I: How to report effectively
It’s important to have the basic elements of your campaign reports in place before you
begin. Think about the topic (campaign performance), timeline (campaign dates), and
summary (which should include wins, losses, and key takeaways for future campaigns).
Then, it’s time to establish its purpose, who the audience is, and how you’ll demonstrate
marketing’s effectiveness.
24
Who is your report for?
Understanding your audience is vital to ensuring your report is as insightful as possible. A
report that’s valuable for the head of marketing will be less so for the company’s CEO.
Here are some quick tips on how to tailor your report to your audience:
» Ask the Audience Whether it’s the C-suite or your team leader, find out ahead
of time what your audience wants from this report, and what information they
will find most valuable.
» Remain focused. You may not always be creating a report for a single
audience, and if that’s the case, it’s worth breaking up your insights to meet
the different needs. A one-size-fits-all approach to reporting can undermine
your campaign’s success.
» Cut the jargon. If you’re reporting to someone outside of your department,
with less of a handle on industry language, make sure you adapt your content
accordingly. While the figures may speak for themselves, it’s better if they
don’t have to.
» Use data to tell the right story. Not all project data is created equal. Rather
than overload listeners with numbers, create snappy visuals and report only
on the project data you need, leaving anything irrelevant aside.
Why are you creating your report?
Reporting shouldn’t serve purely as a function to show off results. It should provide the
recipient with clear, actionable learnings for future activities.
Beyond showing that KPIs were met, what else do you want to do with this report? Is it to
demonstrate the efficacy of a social channel you’ve used for the first time? Or make a case
for additional resources for paid activities?
25
Understanding this, and ensuring you have a couple of key data points to support your
report’s purpose, will be more useful than running through every minor detail of your
campaign.
How do you demonstrate marketing’s contribution?
Campaign reporting has to illustrate how marketing materials resulted in leads and
conversions if it is to provide the full picture of the campaign’s success or failure, and
inform future campaigns (or even wider business initiatives).
This is where marketing attribution comes in, allowing marketing and sales teams to see
how the former contributed to a specific goal, be it a purchase or sale. Is the campaign
blog post you wrote leading people to a conversion point? If so, marketing attribution can
help you find out and report it.
By pulling all the relevant interactions from customers’ journeys together you can
conclusively answer which channels and content are helping you meet your goals. With
marketing attribution included in your report, you can demonstrate how marketing helped
deliver ROI for the campaign – assigning real financial value to your efforts and improving
your relationship with sales.
Quick tips for marketing reporting:
» Schedule reports Ensure recipients receive reports regularly, and at
predictable times with recurrent scheduling.
» Work with your audience. If you’re sending regular reports while a
campaign is underway, ask your audience if the reports are actually useful.
Use their feedback to tweak reports as the campaign progresses.
» Put your findings up front. Nobody likes to be kept in suspense with a
marketing report. Start with the key findings, and work backwards.
» Keep it visual. Data can be boring, but it doesn’t have to be. Use
visualizations to bring figures to life.
26
Finally, it’s worth remembering that campaign reporting is not static. Rather than thinking
of reports as the end-point of a campaign, using tools like Asana and HubSpot can
integrate reports into a campaign’s ongoing lifecycle. With these tools, insights gleaned
during a campaign can help you coordinate and refine targeting and strategy not only for
next time, but while the campaign is still underway.
27
Conclusion
As silos grow and the demands on marketers increase, the alignment of sales and marketing
has never been more urgent.
Alignment drives tighter planning, more coordinated execution and higher-value reporting.
Most importantly, alignment between sales and marketing has a transformative effect on an
organization’s agility, and the customer experience it can offer.
With aligned, agile teams, organizations can build their marketing and sales efforts around
the fundamentals of iteration, collaboration and continuous learning. This agility makes
teams more able to manage curveballs, adapt to change, and build competitive advantages
at speed. And, it means the customer experience can always be improved upon, not only at
the planning and reporting stage, but throughout the campaign, from start to finish.
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To unlock the benefits of aligned, agile teams, businesses need tools that can create clarity
and ensure marketing and sales have everything - from deadlines to localized assets - that
they need to coordinate work effectively.
Meanwhile, embracing methodologies that streamline the buyers’ transition from marketing,
to sales, to customer service, can result in more leads, help keep existing customers happy,
and nurture the momentum needed to reach those all important goals.
By marrying work management, collaborative technology and business methodologies like
the flywheel, salespeople, marketers, and businesses as a whole can create organizational
clarity, deliver incredible campaigns, and unlock the power of alignment.
The Seven-Step Sales and Marketing Alignment Check-list.
Have you:
1. Taken stock of the challenges each team might face?
2. Interrogated your goals and built shared target audience personas?
3. Built and executed campaigns through work management platforms that act
as a shared source of truth?
4. Collaborated on creating campaign assets that enable the sales team?
5. Assessed campaign performance to ensure it is delivering qualified leads?
6. Used the flywheel approach to build momentum and make the customer
journey seamless?
7. Created reports to share learnings and celebrate your success with the
business?
29
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