From Data to Deals: How CRMs Align Go-to-Market Teams

Speaker A: Welcome to the latest episode of Go to Market Coffee Talks, where your hosts, Marc Jacobs and Rob Kriiner are digging into the full GTM pipeline. From sparking demand to closing the deal and everything in between. Mark and Rob serve up real talk smart strategies and the Go To Market pitfalls you'll want to dodge. Wondering why a CRM matters in your GTM strategy? In this episode of Go to Market Coffee Talks, we Mark and Rob dive into the role of CRMs in go to Market strategy and why every small team needs one. They'll break down why a CRM matters for sales and marketing alignment, how platforms like HubSpot help lean GTM teams generate and nurture leads, and how sales leaders can close deals faster by viewing the entire pipeline and sales activity.

Speaker B: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Go to Market Coffee Talks, episode four, part two of our discussion on sales enablement tools for small teams. If you haven't listened to the first part of this episode, which was episode three, which came out last week, I would highly suggest that you do that. And thank you to all of you out there who listen to episode three. If you haven't, definitely go back and take a listen to that. Mark and I talk a lot about how you can implement technology stacks without making yourself crazy. Um, so that is a, is a good episode to go back and start with. But for this episode, Mark and I are specifically going to start talking about CRMs and why CRMs matter. Mark, how are you?

Speaker C: I am doing great. Uh, the Hurricane Aaron is barreling up the east coast as we speak. I was out this morning having breakfast, uh, with, with a friend and watching the, uh, the water pound over the sea wall. So I thought it was a good time to come, uh, back inside and talk CRM with you.

Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. It's, uh, it's been wild at the beaches, for sure. Uh, so, Mark, tell us about why CRM matters. Why does the CRM matter?

Speaker C: All right, I'm going to start you off with a riddle. What do you call a sales team with three reps, a growing list of prospects, and sticky notes everywhere? The answer?

Speaker B: The answer.

Speaker C: A sales team without a CRM.

Speaker B: There you go.

Speaker C: So there's my answer, Rob. CRM is the single most important sales, marketing, and service tool you're going to buy. You know, I've seen sales teams delay adopting a CRM because it's, uh, perceptually expensive, or it's a foreign concept, or they want to start somewhere else in the technology stack and they think they can handle everything and then excel let's call that a big mistake. Without a CRM, you are the scattered spreadsheet company. And all the fun things that come with being a scattered spreadsheet company will follow you. You'll have lost follow ups, you'll have no view of customer history, hot leads are going to slip through the cracks. You're going to have no pipeline visibility for the founder or the manager. So simply put, why does a CRM matter? For a small team you need a CRM. So get a CRM before you buy anything else. Buy it, learn it and use it.

Speaker B: Yes. And uh, in the last episode I think we referred to the CRM as being the linchpin to your stack. So the importance of this is not to be understated at all. And there are, I don't know how many CRM platforms there are out there, Mark, but what are the tools that are out there for CRMs? And do you have uh, any sort of recommendations for where teams might want to start when looking at a CRM?

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean there are a bunch of CRM platforms, right? I mean there may be a new one. Between a recording of this podcast and the errand of this podcast, uh, AI adoption will impact the market. Um, I think you were telling me earlier this week about you noticed the uh, stock, uh, performance of CRM, some CRM companies being impacted over the last six months or eight months because of uh, the potential impact of AI. Did I get that right?

Speaker B: You did, yes.

Speaker C: Yeah, some of the big ones. So there's going to be some, there's probably going to be some change coming. But for the sake of this discussion, let's break it down into two categories. The enterprise focused and the small business focused CRM. So you know, on the big guy side, the enterprise side, Salesforce is by far the global market leader. And there's some other products out there that some of you might have come across. Microsoft Dynamics, 365, Oracle, Netsuite. They're significant players, they're scale, they are highly customizable, but they take skills to manage and they cost an arm and a leg. So if you're just starting out, if you're a small business just starting out with the CRM, stay away from these tools. That's my advice. So for the startup market, for the SMB scale up market, our focus are a different set of CRM companies and there's some unique up and comers like Zoho. But uh, I'm going to focus on HubSpot, which is the SMB market leader. HubSpot is a tool you and I, Rob, have used quite a bit in the last five or six years and we've had success with it. So maybe that clouds our view. But when I recommend to startups in the course of my business where to start in the tech stack stack, I start with HubSpot.

Speaker B: Yeah, HubSpot is um, everything that you said and more. And I think it's also important to just kind uh, of understand some of those enterprise. Right. And those names that you mentioned on the enterprise side are huge names. But the thing and I, you know, this is a great sort of situation. All sorts of businesses, you know, who aren't actually selling use them. So I was speaking to somebody who's the head of admissions at a college and they were trying to implement Salesforce and small team. Just the amount of customization that needs to go into such a huge platform like that for a small team is, it's, it's almost the amount of time you're going to spend doing that. You could get something like HubSpot up and running way sooner. So definitely something to keep in mind there as well when you look at a CRM like HubSpot. Right. And I see this as being uh, a huge benefit to just the whole go to market team in general because you'll have, I mean the great, the best thing about the thing that I love about HubSpot is that it gives really great visibility into what the whole go to market motion is doing. Whether it's marketing, sales, everything is in the same system, right. And you can see where your lead generation is flowing into lead nurturing which is then flowing into the pipeline. So it's a really great system to see all of the data and see all the visibility and see where things are going. But when it comes specifically to the sales team, mark, why is HubSpot such a great option for a sales team?

Speaker C: Delivers those core commercial functionalities you need, you know, so contact management, pipeline and forecasting, task management, email tracking the core functionalities that you are looking to, to enable within your, your process. You'll get that out of HubSpot and it's easy to get up and running. As you pointed out, there's not a lot of technical know how needed to get started. You know, over the last five, six, seven years it has gained so much traction among small companies that that translates into a uh, familiarity with people from their past jobs. So you know, past job usage makes implementation and training much easier for your company. Right now people are familiar with HubSpot and you know, lastly, but Certainly not least it's inexpensive. I mean there's a free option for the very small companies, you know, I think one or two users and that you'll get a fair amount of core functionality out of that free option. Uh, I'd recommend the starter platform. Uh, it has additional functionality. Um, it scales and it's so inexpensive. I think they're running, I was just checking on the website, I think they've reduced the price to $9 per month as we record right now per user for the annual plan. So if you have a three person team, that's 325 bucks per year, um, if my math is correct. So that very small investment has a lot of kick to it.

Speaker B: Yeah. And on the free tier, just to go back to that, so it's two users and you get a thousand contacts, which is a lot of contacts for starting out your CRM system. Right. I mean just for, for the sake of comparison, the mailchimp free tier gives you 500 contacts, right. So you're getting 500 more in HubSpot. Um, now you may go through those 1,000 or you may not. It all depends on, you know, your trajectory as far as your lead generation goes. But that free tier includes email tracking, meeting scheduling, there's all these things that are included in there and it gives you a great opportunity to get your feet wet. Right. Start the process right. As you and I talked in the last episode, what's the problem that you're trying to solve with technology? Right. And that free tier for HubSpot will quickly allow you to understand if this is going to solve your problem. And then moving to the next tier up, as you were mentioning, is very inexpensive. It's almost a, ah, no brainer as far as cost goes. And then you can start to prove the ROI right from there. You know the other thing to think about, just to quickly talk about what happens on the marketing side. Right. So at the top of the Funnel, what does HubSpot allow you to do? Well first of all, there's a lot of automation that goes into it. Right. There's email workflows, there's lead score. Right. Lead scoring, as you start to get more developed in your go to market strategy becomes a no brainer, uh, implementation because how you're scoring your leads that come in immediately translates to how the sales team is going to work on them. You want to make sure that your sales team is focused on those leads that are going to close the fastest. That lead scoring system that you build helps them decipher which leads should close the fastest. And that's all built into HubSpot. So you don't need any secondary systems to do that. You can add in websites, right. And you can build the whole score around who's opening your emails, who's visiting your website, who's downloading from a landing page. Landing page functionality is all included in HubSpot. So at the top of the funnel, when you're building your lead generation and your go to market strategy, HubSpot is that all in one system that seamlessly then flows the information to sales. And it's really critical that that happens because as Mark and I have talked about, a lot of the friction that happens in the pipeline is in the middle. Right. People get into the middle of the pipeline and they stay there. HubSpot and the scoring system allows you to pinpoint the score that relates to the middle of the pipeline. You can start targeting them specifically with account based marketing campaigns, whatever it is. But HubSpot um, gives you this whole visibility into all of that and it's super crucial, especially for scaling teams who can't waste time. HubSpot is a really great way to get that alignment between marketing and sales. Mark, in your experience with you know, using this CRM, anything, um, you want to kind of add to that visibility and how it's helpful from a sales team perspective.

Speaker C: Sure. I mean I look at it two ways from a sales perspective. It helps the individual contributors, the sales reps, so they use HubSpot to organize their leads to run the outreach and move deals faster. And then it helps management, founder, manager to forecast revenue, monitor team productivity and ensure client follow through. Right. So two different tiers there running from a sales perspective from the, you know, from the sales reps, it's going to be your lead and contact management system, your central database with all your interactions that are going to be logged automatically. So your emails, your calls, your notes, your pipeline tracking, see what stage your deals are in your email, outreach tools, your templates, your sequences, your meeting links, uh, follow ups and it's all the activity traffic tracking, you know, the call logs and the uh, email opens and things. So it is from an individual contributor standpoint, that type of organization tool. From uh, a uh, management perspective, if you are a founder and owner, you're looking for something a little bit different. It's going to give you the forecast and reporting, you know, the headlights that you, you need and it's going to give it to you in a systematic process. Um, it's going to be performance tracking at a team and A rep level. So you're going to be able to systematically be able to see things like your deal velocity and your win rates.

Speaker B: The MQL to SQL story is something that HubSpot does really well. We all, everyone wants to look at your ratios, right? What's your lead to MQL ratio? What's your MQL to SQL ratio? What's your SQL to close win loss ratio, right? Those ratios are super important because it shows you the velocity of how things are going. When you're a small team, those, those ratios may not seem like they're that important because you have 30 million other things going on. But as you start to scale and as you start to look at how many MQLs are flowing to SQL, how many leads are flowing to MQL, you start to see areas for improvement. And that's a huge thing for small teams to be constantly improving, right? That's you want to learn and you want to move, right? So using HubSpot to coordinate your campaigns so you can understand how many leads you brought in through a specific campaign and then follow that story all the way through from MQL to SQL all in one system, right? To your point about the data dashboards and for management's visibility into that, right? When you start to look at the waterfall of how that's flowing by campaign, you as a sales leader, the CMO can now start to really put your heads around, wow, this really worked. Look at this campaign. It, it flew. And our close ratio was 25% right? Which if your ratio is 10% right, that's a huge jump as an example. Um, but that's the visibility that you get from a management perspective with the Data that's in HubSpot. And it's incredible what you can start to unlock when you are looking at that data holistically and starting to really figure out where things come m from. And it starts with the CRM, right? The CRM measures all of this for you and that's why HubSpot's a great tool because it's all in there. So when you're looking at getting started with this mark, right? We've already talked about identifying the problem, right? What's the problem that you want the CRM to solve so that you can prove roi. What else needs to get done to get up and running with this if you're starting from absolute scratch?

Speaker C: You know, uh, one of the cool things about implementing HubSpot is sometimes you can see benefits right away. Even in the first week. I've seen some Wide eyed business leaders amazed at getting that first glimpse of a new business pipeline or a renewal pipeline. You know that element of organization which did not exist before but in general it's going to take 60 to 120 days, you know, 60, 90 days for that full onboarding experience to kick in. If you work with someone who's been there before, I guess that's a little commercial for us, you'll be able to get more done quicker. Um, but you know, you start by building out a clean record management process and you set up the processes for pipelines and prospecting, outreach and customer service tickets. Um, move into your prospecting sequences a deeper understanding of your onboarding and your customer care systems and things of that nature. Over that process of 60, 90 days you'll have a usable tool that's going to do some important things. It's going to give you a uh, clean record management we all your contacts organized with desired target information. You're going to have new business and renewal pipelines forecasting which are standardized across the team. You'll have probably uh, a couple active props, prospecting sequences with track results. So those are campaigns for new businesses and you hopefully have a workable onboarding and customer care process with the shared in mocks and ticketing pipeline for handling customer issues. So to your point Robbie, start with your biggest problem and follow that through. But generally speaking you start to see impact right away. But to see full impact, the onboarding experience in my experience is going to take about three months. You might have a little bit different view and be interested to hear what you think about it. And if you're looking for a place to start, start with record management.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker C: You know, having your context organized and you're going to be able to build those fields into those records that are going to help you define what your ideal customer profile is and allow you to track interaction and everything that goes with that. That's a great place to start.

Speaker B: Yeah, the, the data, I agree, I think three months is about right for getting it, you know, up and running and implemented. But the data is so right. Garbage in, garbage out. And there'll be two types of data that you'll be putting into the CRM, right? You will have lead data and you'll have customer data. Your customer data will probably be a bit more cleansed. You'll have more access to your customers and the information about them. So your customer data may not be terrible, but definitely cleaning it before you put it into the system is huge. And you know, the other thing to Think about, and this is something that I think some sales teams overlook, Mark. And you can tell me if I'm wrong. One of the best things about the CRM is territory assignments, right? Because you can now start to assign leads automatically based on where the lead is located. And I think a lot of the times for small teams, they may be doing things like round robin or they may just, you know, be next, man up sort of thing, right? And Lee comes in. I got it. But the CRM allows you to put some structure now into how you're actually selling, right? So if you have a rep in California, even if you have three reps, let's say one's in California, one's in Texas, one's in New York, have them work the leads in their time zone. Right? Simple as that. But that, that'll be a huge process improvement for you as a business.

Speaker C: And unfortunately part of any companies, you have turnover and without a CRM, when someone leaves and with, they're going to take that institutional knowledge with them. So in a CRM, um, you know, if you're looking for a history of what went on in that geographic territory, to use your example, who's been contacted, what kind of conversations existed, when did they want you to contact them for new deals, when were bids up, all that information. CRM allows you to control that information as your own company instead of just putting in the hands of individuals who may walk away with that.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And it scales, right? So as your team gets to be more sophisticated and this goes to lead data. So customer data, make sure it's as good as you can get it before you put it in. Lead data, I think is going to be a little bit more time consuming just because of the way that, you know, you may be getting data in right now. Depending on how your lead generation is set up, you may have different website forms, landing page forms, you know, and all the data that you're getting from these forms may not be cohesive. You may be tracking certain fields in one form and not in the other. But it is important to make sure that your lead data is as sanitized as you can get it with a, A, uh, good amount of information in it. So that when it gets into the CRM and you start to put it into these things that we're talking about, like sequences, you can start to really define your ideal customer profile further by using the data that's included in the lead information. And that goes to what I was talking about, where the system will scale. So if you start to see that you have one rep who's really good in one particular industry. Cause now you're tracking where you know which industry that your customers are coming from or which industry your customers are serving. Now you can start to assign not just by geographic location, but by industry or by any other metric that you're tracking in the CRM. That's where the strategizing comes into play and as Mark mentioned, kind of a commercial for us. But this is the help that Mark and I can provide. If you're just starting out with the CRM, right, you don't need to think of all these things at once. We are able to lay the groundwork for you so that as you start to get the system up and running and as these things start to become identified, the system's already set up for you to quickly start making these shifts and changes, learning about what's going on as you know, your leads go through the entire funnel. And then you start to really understand what's happening in the business and what's happening with your ICP and how your go to market strategy needs to change. Right. And again, I know we're saying this a lot, but all of that hinges on, um, the CRM. It's crucial that you have the good data put in, that you're tracking it well and that everything all the way up to the KPI dashboards that you're setting up all flows through and tells the right story, because that's how you really start to squeeze the value out of a CRM. So, Mark, anything else to add on the CRM story? I mean, again, this is another one of those conversations where we can probably talk for six hours about CRMs, but in relation to small team getting started, HubSpot, anything else you want to add?

Speaker C: CRM is king. It's your single source of truth. If you're looking to start and you're looking to have one tool that you can master and implement, it's your CRM. So choose wisely, spend time putting it into play and reap the benefits. And I look forward to, uh, as we move on through the stack, I look at some different parts of the sales enablement technology stack. Right, Rob? Lead generation and content management.

Speaker B: Yeah. So next episode, which will be part three of this series, we're going to look at tools. This is a perfect segue, but as I was talking about, making sure that your lead data has, is sanitized and that you have the information that you want, we're going to look at some tools next week that will help you do that will help you find really good lead data and will help you start to fill your pipeline of leads with really good contact information. So we'll be talking about Apollo I.O. next week and, uh, another system that you can integrate where you will start to manage your proposals and see how proposals are getting sent out, where they're getting sent out, fun things you can do to your proposals where people are reading them. And, uh, that system is Proposify. So next week we'll be talking about Apollo I.O. and M. Proposify. Please tune in. Oh, Mark, PI plans this weekend. I almost forgot.

Speaker C: I had not thought about that. I need to prepare better, but there will be pie this week.

Speaker B: Weekend there will be PI. All right, so next week we'll find out what your PI plans were for this weekend. But hopefully we will see you here next week for part three of the series where we talk about Apollo I.O. and Proposify.