ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Matt Milligan – Co-Founder at Uhubs

Introducing our 29th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

Our 29th guest is Matt Milligan, Co-Founder at Uhubs.

Owen and Matt discuss ideas around how a SaaS Founder transitions from selling and increasing revenue to growing a sales team.

Including:

– Who Matt and Uhubs are

– Where to target new business during the first couple of years for a start up

– How much time you should be spending as a Founder generating sales and growing revenue vs other things in the first 12 months

– Why Matt prioritised discover over revenue and product for the first 12 months

– Matt’s key learnings taken from the first 12 months of found Uhubs

– Matt’s advice for Founders looking to move away from sales to growing a sales team.

– How to Let go of control of the buying process and accepting failure

– When you think about the brand of buying experience

– The benefits of a Mentor and why you should invest in it

– Matt discusses the challenges new Founder will likely face during the first 12 months.

The benefits of working with a HubSpot Solutions partner: getting the maximum value out of your HubSpot investment!

HubSpot is a powerful platform that delivers valuable results, but it takes expertise to get to grips with it – like anything complex and feature-rich. For organisations that want to explore their options before jumping in feet first, free HubSpot is a great way to kick things off and allows you to try out some of the platform’s features with no upfront cost. And maybe that’s more than you need right now, but if you want the full functionality and the full benefits HubSpot has to offer, you’ll need to invest in a paid subscription. 

If you decide to go down the route of a paid subscription, there are many CRM options available: each with a different feature set, cost, and level of expertise required to implement them. HubSpot split this functionality into Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS and Operations.  

For example, HubSpot’s Sales Hub is designed specifically for sales teams looking to drive more revenue from existing customers through lead nurturing campaigns that map out multiple stages of contact between buyer and seller. The Sales Activity Hub provides a centralised view of all sales activity across your team with detailed reports on opportunities and pipelines. The result is enhanced insight and a closer understanding of your customers. 

So if I can buy directly from HubSpot, why would I work with a partner? 

Money will buy all the functionality you need, but without the knowledge and experience to properly manage it, you won’t get the most out of your investment. Working with a HubSpot Solutions Partner is the best way to improve your marketing engagement and ultimately increase conversion rates. An experienced partner will create custom solutions that will help you get more leads, convert those leads into customers, and turn them into long-term clients. 

All the support you need, from implementation and strategy to live campaigns 

A HubSpot Solutions partner can offer you that additional level of expertise and assistance when implementing your marketing strategy. That means looking at all the teams that need access to HubSpot and rolling out onboarding and training that ensures everyone is engaged and understands the processes for getting the most out of it. They will have experience in the change management aspects of implementing a new system and can work with you however you want – whether that’s providing advice, strategic direction, or creating and delivering the strategy for you. That means you get professional assistance with content, strategy, and implementation, ensuring your team uses HubSpot successfully. 

Save time and empower your sales and marketing teams! 

Working directly with a HubSpot Solutions provider can also save valuable time for your in-house development teams to focus on what they do best, while bringing excitement back into work by being more creative about their approach to marketing campaigns. This is hugely empowering for teams and is the perfect starting point for marketing and sales alignment. Because HubSpot’s reports and analytics provide such a detailed and accurate picture of what works well (and what doesn’t), you can see where you need to optimise at any stage of the funnel. 

Access a depth of experience and get up and running right away 

A solution partner’s additional (reassuring benefit) is that they will typically have an existing customer base across multiple sectors and draw on their depth of experience in helping customers fast track getting started. Meaning you can get up and running efficiently without the need to build extensive knowledge from scratch. 

In a recent episode of ON AIR: With Owen hosted by Air Marketing’s Founder & CEO, Owen Richards, we were are joined by Caleb Buscher – Senior Channel Account Manager (EMEA Region) at HubSpot, to discuss how to make the most out of HubSpot as a revenue growth business tool. 

We explained how we’ve had first-hand experience of the difference HubSpot can make to a business: “We have had some truly inspiring conversations with clients who had zero experience of using a joined-up marketing automation CRM tool and now have a newfound love for HubSpot and what it can do for their business. Our work is about helping our customers energise the way they approach marketing, giving their business a single point of truth and empowering them to deliver better customer experiences that fuel loyalty and growth.” 

Need some help getting started?  

HubSpot is an incredibly powerful platform, but it’s not the only one out there. There are other great solutions available, and we’re happy to work with any of them and apply the same principles to deliver precisely what you need. If you want to discover how HubSpot could be a game-changer for your business, we’d be happy to guide you. Equally, if you’d like to talk about any aspect of your marketing strategy, get in touch today on 0345 241 3083.  

Sales And Marketing Alignment: Working As Equals Drives Better Revenue Generation

sales and marketing alignment strategy is more than just mandating two teams work together; it’s a finely-tuned mechanism that drives better sales for your company. To implement a successful alignment strategy, you need to change to tackle behavioural change, culture change and leverage technology and processes that drive mutual respect, understanding and genuine collaboration between sales and marketing professionals.

Louis Fernandes, VP of Sales at Uberall and SaaS marketing and sales thought leader, talks about the need to work in partnership: “In B2B sales organisations, behaviours need to change; it’s not about marketing serving sales or sales ruling the roost. Sales and marketing need the same drivers; that’s how you build an authentic environment for success where all functions work towards a common goal and deliver revenue generation. It’s that simple! It’s all about working in partnership, I’ve worked in both marketing and sales, and I’d strongly advocate for congruence of goals that we work towards together, where we’re measured in the same way. It has to be a meeting of equals. And profitability will certainly follow.”

If sales and marketing aren’t working together towards a common goal, it’s impossible to maximise your inbound and outbound strategies; and improve your overall understanding of your market and customers. The key to this process is sharing information and promoting transparent ways of working. For example, marketing and sales must understand where the budget goes and what that activity drives. Without this visibility, they’ll likely misinterpret their spending, leading to wasted money and effort and negative perceptions. The end game is teamwork and trust, investing time and resources in a focused and efficient way. Sales teams feel far more supported in their efforts, and marketers feel invested in sales follow-up processes and accountable for optimisation throughout the entire journey.

Creating an environment that integrates well:

Putting the right processes in place means that you can move quickly and efficiently as a team. Choosing the right tools and having an effective marketing and sales tech stack allows you to create an environment that permeates and integrates well, so everyone feels comfortable and supported.

Historically, marketers used their own methods of tracking conversions and determining profitability, while sales teams focused on relationships and closing. Sales teams could email contact lists and make recommendations to the marketing team based on sales success or where’d they achieved cut-through. And while this strategy was solid for quick results, it naturally excluded many profitable or high-converting prospects in the pipeline. It was harder to measure, and many implementations required high levels of collaboration and coordination between teams.

Businesses with a more holistic view of their marketplace are more likely to succeed. With the insights afforded by a high-performing CRM and tech stack, it’s far easier to shift focus to solving customers’ problems rather than trialing a range of products and services for traction and success. It’s for this reason Account-Based Marketing strategies see such a solid return on investment. It’s often the first concerted effort to align marketing with sales and pull together to achieve the same vision.

Our Marketing services team are demand generation specialists, and experts in optimising the sales-marketing relationship. HubSpot Gold Partners are hyper-focused on using the platform’s leading technology to deliver more for customers. Associate Director, Verity Studley-Wootton, said, “The most significant benefit of bringing marketing and sales touchpoints into one powerful system is the ability to create a single version of the truth in a business. By doing this, we uncover a far clearer picture of customer behaviours and the opportunity to understand better and ultimately successfully market to them and convert them into happy, loyal customers.”

Create a list of objectives that you can agree upon, and action them:

Having well-defined objectives is a prerequisite to successful alignment. However, it’s not enough to have goals in mind; you need a plan to deliver. Talk to your sales team to find out what questions they get asked by your customers. From there, you can analyse sales processes alongside campaign performance and integrate any improvements that would come quickly and easily to your sales team. Once you start a conversation with your ideal customers, you can build consistency and brand into the customer journey by empowering your sales team with the assets and content they need to convince prospects, solve their pain points and close deals. And this is where you can map what’s required, at what point, and assign ownership.

Implement a feedback loop for better alignment throughout your organisation:

The key to getting buy-in for your sales and marketing alignment strategy is to give your entire organisation visibility of the implementation process, so customer service, IT and operational units can mobilise to support.

Implement a feedback loop. Tell people in the business what you’re going to do, why it matters and share the results. This way, they’ll know what they can expect, and you’ll see if you need to make any changes. When you share why this is important and how it will make the entire business more profitable, perceptions change. When you share how it will improve your customer’s experience and drive growth, accessing the technical and administrative support, you need to improve processes around automation, customer service, and CRM suddenly becomes a much easier sell.

Evaluate the results, then adjust your strategy to respond to your customer:

Once you’ve put together a strategy, it can be easy to get complacent and assume that it’s working just because you see traffic and sales. However, it’s essential to ensure you’re still getting the results you want by regularly checking your analytics and sales numbers.

The absolute joy of alignment happens when you win! Marketing and sales teams can celebrate success together. Equally, when something falls flat, the learning opportunities are so much more valuable in a naturally joined-up environment, so you fail fast and, hopefully, rarely.

Air Marketing Group has been working hard since 2016 to address this need and help deliver results-driven marketing that better aligns with sales goals. With an increasing number of clients unsure of how to run aligned marketing campaigns and turning to us for expert advice, we saw an obvious gap in the market. Today, we rely on the combined expertise from both services withing the group to deliver the best possible results for clients.

If you’d like to talk more about driving better sales and marketing alignment in your business, we can help. Get in touch today.

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Rob Baxter – Director of Rugby at Exeter Chiefs

Introducing our 28th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards.

Our 28th guest is Rob Baxter, Director of Rugby at Exeter Chiefs. Owen and Rob discuss ideas around leadership – Building sustained success over a long period of time:

– How do you manage to rebuild confidence and motivation going into a new season after a disappointing end.

– Strategies for managing and maintain your teams motivation

– Setting themes and a nurturing environment and the planning that goes into it

– The process of learning from a loss

– How to create a culture of openness

– What Rob looks for in somebody to come and join the team

– The parts of the role Rob finds most challenging 

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Louis Fernandes – VP of Sales -EMEA at Uberall

Introducing our 27th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards. Our 27th guest is Louis Fernandes.

Owen and Louie discuss aligning your sales and marketing teams to drive revenue?

Including: 

– Who Louis and Uberall are

– Why sales and marketing need to collaborate to drive revenue

– Why companies align sales and marketing

– Who should be in charge of aligning the departments?

– CRO is not a customer centric role

– What the tell-tell signs are that your sales and marketing departments are not aligned 

– The steps to aligning sales and marketing

– How to overcome the fear of change

– How to create the desire to collaborate

– Good examples of collaboration

– Bad examples of collaboration

ON AIR: With Owen Featuring Lauren McGuire

– Introducing our 26th episode of ON AIR: With Owen – our latest interview video series with honest conversation about scaling revenue, hosted by our Founder & CEO, Owen Richards. Our 26th guest is Lauren McGuire.

– Owen and Lauren discuss how to structure the perfect cold call Including:

– Who Lauren McGuire is

– Why is data so hard to get right and such a problem for go to market teams

– How to overcome the myth of perfect data

– How to identify if bad data is negatively effecting your outreach

– How to measure data accuracy

– Should SDRS be building their own data? Or should your organisation provide it?

– The value of direct dials and why they are so important

– Where to draw the line when investing in data

– Why increasing headcount will not help without the right investment in data

– How to define bad data

– Who should own data accuracy and cleansing?

– Why data should be at the top of your agenda