Historically, sales and marketing teams have operated independently with little interaction. Marketing’s role has been to attract and nurture prospects then pass them on to the sales team. The separation often results in a disconnect between sales and marketing that reduces efficiency and limits an organization's growth. The solution to this is smarketing, a term for the alignment of sales and marketing.
Related Blog: How Inbound Marketing Can Support Your Sales Team
Traditional marketing is no longer up to the task of identifying gaps in the market, creating a brand identity or providing sales teams with what they need to convert. In a world where customers are empowered by the Internet, marketing and advertising by themselves have become meaningless chatter that can easily be ignored. To solve this problem, sales and marketing will have to be integrated and work together almost all the way to the end of the full sales cycle.
Essential Ingredients in Good Smarketing:
Same Language
The first step in smarketing is for both sales and marketing to use the same vocabulary. For example, they should agree on what constitutes a sales ready lead. This helps to eliminate disagreements about whether sales is working leads provided by marketing and whether the leads that marketing provides are sales ready.
Good Communication
Sales and marketing must communicate, which includes meeting regularly. Smarketing meetings involve reviewing recent leads along with the status of existing leads brought in by marketing. Creating a service level agreement can eliminate any ambiguity with regard to goals, responsibilities and accountability. The aim is for everyone to have the same overall goal and to be on the same page.
Meeting frequency will largely depend on the company’s size but in most cases be weekly or monthly.
Build Relationships Internally
One way to build a better team is to provide members with insight into each other's jobs. Someone from marketing can watch a sales rep meet with prospects or call leads. This insight may make them more empathetic, but can also help them to come up with new ways to market. Similarly, a sales rep may be able to provide a marketing team with blog ideas that are more relevant to the target audience.
Having your sales and marketing teams focused on the same goals is essential for revenue growth. It can also help to build the relationship between sales and marketing, two groups that have traditionally been managed as separate silos.
