We know that sales and marketing are two different functions in a business. Whether your business has separate departments full of sales and marketing teams or if individuals carry out those functions, it’s not uncommon to keep sales and marketing separate.
But what if that’s not the best option? What if it makes more sense to foster closer communication between sales and marketing to get better results overall?
What Is Smarketing?
Smarketing represents a business strategy aimed at aligning sales and marketing functions, which can help improve your business outcomes and return on investment (ROI) for both of these functions.
Why is Smarketing Important?
It’s a way to encourage teams to work together toward common objectives designed to improve conversions.
When you integrate smarketing into your overall strategy, you prompt your teams to interact to create shared goals and work with each other toward reaching those objectives.
For example, with the help of smarketing, you might create a marketing strategy that generates high-quality leads and send them to the sales team. Because those teams regularly work together and create shared processes, the sales team is more responsive and can more easily close deals and increase sales.
Smarketing also encourages sales to relay valuable information to the marketing team. They can provide metrics that let the marketing team know where their efforts are most effective and allow the team to tweak their strategy to create content and ads that attract more qualified leads.
Benefits of Smarketing
By improving the way that sales and marketing teams collaborate, smarketing offers a number of benefits.
Higher-quality leads
Smarketing encourages higher-quality leads because sales can provide feedback on the type of customer likely to buy, allowing the marketing team to adjust their lead-generation strategies.
Easier conversions
When marketing and sales teams are aligned, sharing information, metrics, and goals, conversions become easier. Marketing can provide information about where customers are in the sales cycle and provide pain points and solutions salespeople can use to close the deal.
Better customer retention
With a smarketing approach, keeping customers and targeting them for return purchases is easier. Working together promotes improved communication as you follow up and compare notes. Indeed, customer retention is 36% higher with a smarketing approach.
Higher ROI
With smarketing, your customer acquisition cost decreases, improving your ROI. Additionally, the targeted nature of working together promotes the potential for increased revenue per customer.
Sales and Marketing Alignment Challenges
Getting your sales force and marketing team on the same page can be difficult, especially if they are not used to working together. Differences in priorities and perspectives can create friction during the implementation phase.
Communication and Terminology Barriers
Sales and marketing teams often use different jargon, making it challenging to establish a common language. Miscommunication can lead to misunderstandings, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities.
Tool and Technology Integration
Each team may have its own set of tools and platforms, making it difficult to find and adopt solutions that work for both. Aligning technology requires time, effort, and sometimes additional investment.
Alignment of Objectives and Workflow
It can take months to synchronize objectives, workflow, and reporting structures. Commitment to the process is essential to successfully implement smarketing and ensure long-term collaboration.
How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams for Maximum Impact
As you prepare to implement a smarketing strategy, here are some of the steps that can help you create the best positive impact:
Have conversations about terminology and tools used
Get everyone on the same page with terminology and how it’s used in the process. Also, share information about the tools the teams use and how to use them. Cross-train on sales and marketing tools.
Share data
Make sure sales and marketing teams share data so they can make better decisions. Both teams should be using data that helps them better target customers and potential customers.
Meet frequently
Encourage sales and marketing teams to meet regularly to review shared objectives and strategies. They should develop their key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals together, and track progress at regular meetings.
Encourage professional relationships across teams
Your sales and marketing teams should have multiple working relationships. Have them in meetings together and encourage them to touch base even outside of meetings so they have good rapport and develop trust in each other.
Tools that Facilitate Smarketing Initiatives
There are plenty of tools available that can help facilitate effective smarketing strategies. Some ideas include:
Document sharing
Decide on a shared drive for important documents so that you can all access the most updated information. Consider OneDrive from Microsoft or Google Docs to manage these documents.
Communication
Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams make reaching sales and marketing colleagues easy. Encourage your teams to set up a communication system they can use to stay in touch, share successes and reach each other quickly if they need immediate information.
Project board
If you’re looking at keeping projects organized so everyone can see what’s happening and take accountability, look into various boards. Trello, Asana, Monday, and Notion all offer ways to manage projects and results.
Marketing and sales products
Get help managing your campaigns using tools designed to help you gather data and create more effective campaigns and track sales metrics. Tools like those offered by Taboola and Salesforce can help you make the most of smarketing efforts.
Measuring the Success of Your Smarketing Efforts
Measuring smarketing efforts requires tracking key metrics that assess collaboration, lead quality, conversion rates, and overall revenue impact. By tracking these metrics, businesses can evaluate the effectiveness of smarketing efforts and make data-driven improvements. Here are some essential metrics:
Lead Quality and Engagement Metrics
These metrics assess how well marketing is generating leads and how engaged those leads are. They help determine if leads are properly qualified before being passed to sales and how likely they are to convert into customers. Examples are MQLs, SQLs and lead-to-customer conversion rate.
Sales and Marketing Alignment Metrics
These track how effectively sales and marketing teams collaborate, ensuring that leads are properly handed off and followed up on. They also measure whether both teams are adhering to agreed-upon processes. Examples are lead response time, lead handoff rate, and service level agreement compliance.
Revenue and ROI Metrics
These metrics evaluate the financial impact of smarketing efforts by measuring customer acquisition costs, revenue generated, and the efficiency of the sales cycle. They help determine if marketing investments are leading to profitable sales. Examples are CAC. revenue from marketing efforts, sales cycle length.
Content and Engagement Performance
This category measures how well marketing content and campaigns engage prospects. It tracks the effectiveness of emails, social media, and other digital assets in attracting and converting leads. Examples are email opens and CTRs, revenue from content, social media and website engagement.
Feedback and Collaboration Metrics
These metrics assess how well sales and marketing teams work together, including meeting frequency, internal satisfaction, and performance reviews of won and lost deals. They help ensure continuous improvement in smarketing alignment. Examples are Sales/Marketing meeting frequency, NPS for internal teams, win/loss analysis.
Key Takeaways
Keeping your sales and marketing functions separate might be holding you back. While these are different tasks, they are complementary, so fostering communication between sales and marketing teams makes sense. Implement a smarketing approach and you’re more likely to see better results and a higher ROI.
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Why integrate sales and marketing teams?
Sales and marketing are complementary functions in many businesses. Marketing campaigns often drive leads that salespeople can use to convert customers. By integrating the teams to work together through smarketing, both teams can improve their results.
Is smarketing the same as ABM?
Smarketing is very similar to account-based marketing, or ABM. The idea with ABM is to focus on high-value accounts and direct efforts there with collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Smarketing is broader, however. Smarketing involves ongoing collaboration between sales and marketing teams without targeting specific accounts or customers.
