Table of contents
- Prerequisites to align Marketing and Sales with LGM:
- How to automate sales and marketing alignment:
- Step 1 – Push into LGM for outreach
- Step 2 – Add the lead when they sign up:
- Step 3 – Follow-up
- Step 4 – Last message for those who didn’t convert:
- Step 5 – For the more advanced: How to do lead qualification properly😉
- Final Thoughts:
When it comes to sales and marketing alignment, the struggle usually boils down to a fundamental issue: Defining what makes a good lead. Not all sign-ups are of equal importance or equivalency, and expecting a salesperson to make a call without certainty about a lead’s “warmth level” is unrealistic.
It’s crucial to grasp the distinct roles these teams play within an organization.
Example 🔍
La Growth Machine, for example, defines marketing’s objective as generating opportunities—making the distinction between marketing-qualified and non-qualified leads.
The question then becomes: When does the sales team come into play?
In our case, the magic happens when these leads are qualified based on our preset criteria. This ensures sales can focus on leads with genuine interest and potential, streamlining the entire process.
The art lies in defining what marketing truly entails within an organization. Is it just communication, or does it extend to internal product marketing with added data elements?
The goal is to arrive at a crisp definition of a “marketing qualified lead” that motivates the sales team to invest time and effort.
Let’s break it down! 🤜
Prerequisites to align Marketing and Sales with LGM:
Choosing the Right Tool Stack:
Before diving into the nitty-gritty of all this, keep in mind that LGM is an outreach automation tool, so you’ll need other supportive tools to align your teams successfully.
Here, your existing stack plays a crucial role in collecting relevant data for qualification.
We at LGM tend to recommend HubSpot thanks to the wealth of data-related functionalities at your disposal.
If you’re using something like Pipedrive for instance, you might find yourself in a pickle. It’s essentially a pure sales tool— a glorified Kanban board. It lacks substantial data and interaction features and it’s not designed for this intricate dance between marketing and sales.
Example 🔍
Say your newsletter is managed by HubSpot, and you have trackers on your site. Tracking leads becomes a breeze. You can follow a person’s journey from the moment they’re exposed to your brand, see if they checked out the pricing page for instance, and even observe events with segments—all crucial for scoring.
Engaging Qualified Leads:
Identifying and engaging potential leads is the next step. I urge you not to rely solely on Email for this part, this is where most inbound strategies are doomed to fail.
It’s not just about sending out a barrage of emails. We’re talking about engaging with your leads in a way that stands out.
Remember, when someone signs up for a product or fills out a form, they’re expressing interest. It’s up to you to take that interest and turn it into a genuine conversation.
And here’s the kicker: While most companies might shoot off an automatic email, hoping for the best, that’s not the LGM way. We know that these emails are often ignored—just another drop in the digital ocean.
Instead, why not take the conversation to LinkedIn? It’s a platform designed for professional engagement, and with LGM’s approach, you can automate personalized outreach that feels authentic. It’s a game-changer.
Expert Tip 🧠
Try using voice messages with your LGM sequence. It’s super easy; just click on any message in your LinkedIn sequence, and it magically turns into a voice message block.
We’ve seen that it literally doubles your reply rate.
And now, with our newest feature, voice Messages are now fully customizable!
1 lead = 1 personalized message 😉
How to automate sales and marketing alignment:
When you use LGM for your LinkedIn outreach, you’re creating what feels like a one-on-one interaction. It’s not perceived as an automated message but as a genuine attempt to connect. This is how you cut through the clutter.
When we highlight this strategy, the results speak for themselves. We saw a 32% increase in engagement rates when we switched to LinkedIn for our conversations.
Wanna learn how? Read on!
Step 1 – Push into LGM for outreach
Your data is ready, you worked your qualification criteria out with the sales team, but you don’t want to have to import every new lead manually.
Although LGM’s newest feature allows you to import your leads directly from your CRM, it’s a static import. This means that once you create a new deal on HubSpot after the import, it won’t update on LGM’s side.
The solution? Zapier! All you need to do is connect your HubSpot account, and thanks to LGM’s Zapier integration, your dynamic integration can be achieved with this Zap:
Once a Deal is created on HubSpot, the lead will be added to the LGM audience that’s linked to your campaign. The next steps will depend on your use case, let’s dive into some examples.
Step 2 – Add the lead when they sign up:
Since you’ve connected the signups from your CRM to be pushed automatically into the campaign, any signup will now enter this sequence.
As usual, always send a note with your LinkedIn connection request! It may not increase your reply rate, but as you’ll see if you follow the link, the stats prove that overall, you’ll get more qualified deals made:
Hey {{firstname}}, thanks for signing up for {{identity.companyName}} . It’s my job to help you get started with our product. Feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or my email if you have any questions!
This, in essence, becomes the baseline to determine if a lead is qualified. Initially, when you’re starting up, you might get in touch with everyone who signs up.
However, as you and your client base grow, you need to start adding qualification barriers.
Example 🔍
For instance, let’s take LGM as an example.
As the company grew bigger, we replaced the “Signup” barrier with Lead Signed up + Visited the pricing page.
As we grew even bigger, the barriers got bigger as well. We started looking for leads that started a campaign on our tool or connected their CRM—actions that carry a higher value.
These are examples from LGM’s perspective, make sure you adapt your barriers to your own offering!
Step 3 – Follow-up
This is one of the key elements of the sequence:
I’ve opted for the voice message option because it’s just so much better. It’s more personable, people will definitely listen to it because no one uses this function on LinkedIn so their curiosity gets the best of them, and best of all, no one will even doubt that it’s an automated sequence!
A simple and open-ended message:
Hey {{firstname}}, how’s your trial going? Anything I can help you with?
And now with the newest AI LinkedIn Voice message, you can rest assured your lead will definitely feel special! Each message will be perfectly customized to the person who listens to it.
No need to do anything fancy, let’s keep it :
- Human: so short and simple
- Open to discussion: so they feel inclined to reply with anything currently blocking them.
And it works great: that simple message is yielding a whooping 36% reply rate.
Step 4 – Last message for those who didn’t convert:
For the 36% that have replied, you’ll be able to help them turn into customers proactively and the campaign will stop for them. I suggest you continue the conversation manually here, an automated message might be suspicious and rub them the wrong way.
You might ask me, how will LGM know if they paid or not? What if they didn’t reply but still converted to an actual customer?
Well, that’s easy, enter Zapier again!
Let’s say you use Stripe to manage your payments, well you can create a Zap that automatically stops the campaign for leads who already paid on Stripe as seen below:
All those who remain are those who didn’t convert and never replied. Hence, the last message as shown above:
Hey {{firstname}}, noticed your trial ended but didn’t turn into a customer 😔 What did we do wrong?
You might have noticed a sneaky email at the end there. That’s in case we got nowhere with the lead. Maybe they’re simply not active on LinkedIn, maybe they’re on vacation, who knows?
In this case, here’s an example of what to say in the email:
Subject: End of trial
Hi {{firstname}},
I reached out via LinkedIn to help you get started with {{identity.companyName}}, but maybe it’s easier via email.
I noticed that you decided against converting to a client in the end.
Would you mind telling me why? It’d be extremely helpful in fine-tuning our product and acquisition strategy. 🙂
{{identity.firstname}}
Step 5 – For the more advanced: How to do lead qualification properly😉
Another great use case for automating your inbound lead acquisition is to increase the lead qualification form completion rate.
You’re probably sending a Typeform via email after your lead signs up to qualify them; Their demographic information, what made them choose the product, etc. This is their chance to show a strong willingness to buy.
LGM used to run a simple email sequence for when they didn’t fill up said Typeform and got a decent 54% form completion rate.
By adding a small interaction via LinkedIn, we boosted it to 72%!
A simple, neat campaign such as this beauty does the trick:
Start it with a profile visit. Look at this as a soft warming up of the lead. Once they get that notification, they’ll check you out. This will prime them for your email:
Subject: {{firstname}}, your invite to La Growth Machine!
Hey {{firstname}},
Thanks again for signing up with LaGrowth Machine.
We’ve looked into {{companyName}} and decided to move you up in the waiting list!
La Growth Machine is the best sales automation too for generating leads via LinkedIn, Email and Twitter.
You’ll get 3.5x more responses than before, all connected to your CRM. Most of all, you’ll save a ton of time. About 40% of what an SDR does on a daily basis can be saved by automating with LGM!
To kick off your onboarding, we just need to verify some technical elements to make sure you can use LGM and how you want to implement it.
Could you please fill out this short questionnaire?
Best,
{{identity.firstname}}
Next, you add them as a LinkedIn connection (LGM takes care of enriching this information). I don’t need to remind you to add a note!
Hey {{firstname}}, sent you a Typeform to get to know you better and move you up on the waiting list. Don’t forget to fill it out :)
This will help us customize your onboarding!
One last touch just in case, a LinkedIn message. Though you’ll rarely need to send it 😉
Here’s the link in case you missed it: {{link}}
Of course, you’ll want to stop the automation from continuing once the Typeform is submitted, which you can easily do using Zapier:
Our buddies over at EvaBoot have a similar campaign running where they also integrated LinkedIn. They record a whopping 50.6% reply rate!
Final Thoughts:
In essence, when considering your approach, you need to keep it simple at first; qualify opportunities as they come in. As you grow, you start gradually adding more barriers based on user intent and your product interactions.
The goal remains the same: turning potential interactions into genuine connections.
The advanced version is about crafting tailored messages based on specific actions, like trial signups with no payments.
What makes LGM special in this process is its ability to add a personal touch that goes beyond standard email outreach.
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