Passing leads from marketing to sales

I’ve been part of Outreach’s marketing team for more than two years, and have seen how our sales engagement platform (SEP) has emerged as an indispensable part of a sales team’s tech stack. But some organizations aren’t sure how marketing automation tools integrate with Outreach, or how each team’s different tools work together to jointly propel the sales pipeline.

In fact, when marketing teams ask their sales team how Outreach is going to integrate with their marketing automation platform, the response is decidedly Lucille Bluth: “I don’t understand the question and I won’t respond to it.”

With Outreach, gone are the days of wondering if your marketing leads are being followed up on, or sending email notifications to the sales team to share key prospect info and having to toggle from your inbox to your CRM and back again.

Historically, marketing serves up sales teams with marketing qualified leads (MQLs), but after handing them off, marketing is often unable to track actions taken, leading to misalignment between the two teams. But with Outreach, gone are the days of wondering if your marketing leads are being followed up on, or sending email notifications to the sales team to share key prospect info and having to toggle from your inbox to your CRM and back again.

Marketing Automation + Outreach = Total Transparency

The fact is, Outreach and marketing automation tools are part of the same team, working toward the same goal: converting interested parties from leads to customers.

At Outreach, we use Outreach to modernize the handoff between our marketing and sales teams. I use our marketing automation tool to capture customers’ information--name, email, company, phone, etc.--that they provide on our website to access our gated resources (think webinars, ebooks, etc.), and then the lead’s info is passed into our CRM, which puts the prospect into a sequence via Outreach triggers.

Outreach’s Best Practice

Our best practice has been to set up a trigger so that each inbound marketing lead is put into a Sequence starting with an auto email, so that the lead is contacted on average within two minutes with a relevant message from a rep. By sending an auto email, we make sure that we are reaching out while the interest is high and we’re working each lead to its fullest potential, regardless of the day or time.

Pro tip: Try setting up a marketing high priority ruleset that keeps the delivery schedule open to all days/times. Unlike outbound prospecting when you don't want to send emails at 2am or on a Saturday, with inbound leads you want to reach out as soon as possible, so if someone fills out a demo form at 2am on a Saturday an auto email will be sent and once the rep is back in the office, s/he will see the second step already set up for them to complete.

However, teams can set up the Sequence however they prefer, where the first step is an auto email that is sent on the rep’s behalf, or a manual email that is sent by the rep. Below is an example of a manual email to an inbound marketing lead who downloaded an asset from Outreach.

Pro tip: Try setting up a marketing high priority ruleset that keeps the delivery schedule open to all days/times. Unlike outbound prospecting when you don't want to send emails at 2am or on a Saturday, with inbound leads you want to reach out as soon as possible, so if someone fills out a demo form at 2am on a Saturday an auto email will be sent and once the rep is back in the office, s/he will see the second step already set up for them to complete.

Catalyzing Cohesion and Pipeline Collaboration

By using Outreach, marketing and sales have total transparency into each prospect’s journey, from the creation of the inbound lead, to adding the prospect to a Sequence, and each engagement afterward.

With this dynamic duo, the sales process is supported by different platforms that are optimized for a different set of results. Together, these two technologies work hand in hand to bring sales and marketing alignment: marketing automation enables marketers to reach out with standardized, branded email templates at scale, and then the SEP enables reps to prospect at scale by personalizing sales and then measuring the results.