Alignment and Automation for Growth of Coaching Businesses (with Lynne McNamee)

Learn about the alignment between marketing and sales and using automation tools for growth in this podcast episode of Great to Elite with Lynne McNamee, founder of a marketing strategy and consulting agency Lone Armadillo. 

What is your approach to aligning marketing and sales for coaching businesses?

Over the years, marketing and sales have grown further and further apart. The origin of that has been largely because the licenses for the CRMs that the sales team were using were so expensive. So it was cost-prohibitive to add all these marketing people onto that license. And so, marketing wasn’t getting the information they needed to make relevant decisions. 

We started using the data that we had to improve what we could. Because we are really about that customer, that client, and providing a good experience for them. 

How to bridge the gap between marketing and sales for coaching businesses?

Having one source of truth or CRM and making sure that marketing and sales are using the customer record. Because when you can use that information, you can start the engagement, knowing what the pain points, the challenges, and someone’s goals were. 

What are some actionable steps that coaching businesses can take to streamline the process between multiple departments?

I am a big HubSpot fan. They’ve just made this process very easy. They understand that there is a lot of repetition work and eliminate a lot of extra steps that some of the other platforms do require.

Which steps can coaching businesses take:

• Automate things in the background
• Have a core piece of information about the clients
• Engage with the clients around that piece of information

What does the ideal setup for coaching businesses look like for HubSpot or a different platform that has sales, CRM, and marketing in one?

The key is making sure that the customer is where you are starting. We want to make sure it is a brilliant experience for them. And so it is the operations on the company’s side, but also what are the expectations for the customer.

The gap comes between departments because the marketing team might be doing its thing, but they are not totally clued in with sales. So when you have tools like HubSpot, that also have the service hub, and having marketing, sales, and service looking at customers data, you can avoid that gap.

However, the key is to have something like Operations Hub, which allows the APIs to be brought in so that you can build reports. Here, the key thing is what you are reporting on. Making sure everyone is capturing data the same way is crucial. And the more we can automate, the more we are going to capture what we know.

What is the ideal automation setup for tracking the customer journey for coaching businesses that have a team?

Use landing pages. Don’t send people to your home page. The top of the funnel has a low-level commitment. Ask for their email and then have something that they can click on to go to the next level from that email. And then, offer opportunities to gauge how quickly they’re looking to get started. Are they kicking the tires? Are they ready to go? So, offer a button so that they can just sign up for your newsletter.

Keep in mind to try to get more accurate information. If you have a newsletter that is automated, keep it going probably quarterly. Have more intentional outreach, to kind of push nudge that might be where you have some sort of special discount or smaller type package to help get people over the inertia. Do one more round if they don’t take action because things get lost in the email.

What can coaching businesses do next after they have gathered all this data?

Depending on the sales resources you have on the backend, you’ll know how committed your potential customers are. When you are building content, you want to build it knowing what it is going to tell you. And that is where having marketing and sales actually talking and knowing what the history is of what’s closed and what’s not. The content should be built to give you that information about where is someone at each stage.