Last week at Inbound, I settled in for one of my favourite sessions of the conference, HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's keynote presentation. Unlike past years, when they have talked about the roll out of new HubSpot features, this focused on the way marketers, salespeople and consumers are getting smarter and how we need to adapt to be successful.

The evolution of sales and marketing

Sales and marketing pros are savvier than they used to be, and technology needs have gotten much more in-depth and complicated. We need the right tools to stack together to make our day-to-day simpler. Enter the rise of the growth stack, a system of tools that work together, the same way sales and marketing teams are working together to build successful businesses.

Customers are not the lone responsibility of the sales team, the marketing team plays an integral role in getting that customer down the funnel from contact, to lead, to closed customer. And because there are so many touch points within a company, you all have to work together in the same stack to coordinate your efforts.

Be honest, if you are ignoring the need to integrate your teams and implement a cohesive effort, are you feeling the pain? Tasks take longer. Projects cost more. Customers don't close.

More and more organizations are seeing the importance of sales and marketing working together. That alignment between the two teams results in opportunities to work together as a larger growth team with a common foundation.

Building your growth stack

A successful growth stack will integrate tools that will enable your team to track your entire sales and marketing funnel from the first website visit to the closed deal and beyond. Having your CRM, sales tools and marketing platform all communicating with each other is important. It's how growth happens.

By setting lead qualification criteria, an automated email with a link to your lead's contact record can be handed off seamlessly to the right sales person. Because your marketing team can bring in more qualified leads without manually scoring them or personally contacting sales with every contact name, they can focus on generating and nurturing leads, and sales will have the information the need to make sure those leads aren't slipping through the cracks.

Your newly integrated team will work faster together by sharing contacts, customer data, metrics, reports and pipelines all in one place, which you will ultimately see reflected in your bottom line. Are you ready to Hughes and Grow? Let's get started!