No matter your industry, chances are pretty high that you use terms and jargon that only make sense to those who work with you. However, they exist for a reason — whether it’s to make processes easier, or it’s a term of art that describes to a tee a concept, you’re aware that if you want to get better at what you do, you should take some time to thoroughly understand it.
Such is the case with the term smarketing. A portmanteau of the words sales and marketing, the term encompasses the symbiotic relationship that makes magic happen. But how are they similar? How do they differ? And what can you do to align your teams?
Although marketing and sales go hand in hand, each process is geared towards different goals.
On one hand, marketing’s target is brand awareness; making sure that your target audience has knowledge of your product or services — and how such goods are designed to alleviate/resolve their pain points.
On the other hand, sales’ main focus is to turn those aware leads into paying customers. So really, both departments are separate, but inextricably interdependent.
Smarketing is a business approach that integrates the sales and marketing teams together in order to create a seamless, more efficient workflow.
With this approach, the two departments work together to develop a single, unified strategy dedicated to pursuing the same ultimate goal: to generate profits for a business.
Therefore, both teams have to be perfectly aligned and work cohesively. But in order to do this, you must first design a strategy — a smarketing strategy.
While once in a blue moon, you may be able to close a couple of sales without a smarketing strategy, designing one is crucial to reach your business goals long-term. When both departments implement actionable steps together as a team, it results in the following:
It's like yin and yang, peanut butter and jelly, Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens.
Without developing a good smarketing strategy, you’re setting up the stage for the proverbial: “It’s not my fault. It’s the other team’s fault” story. Sales will complain about the poor leads they’re getting, while marketing will point the finger at sales for not closing enough sales. It’s sophomoric behavior, but, like it or not, it will continue to exist for as long as humans are alive.
Yet, study after study has shown that aligning both teams increases business revenue.
In addition, failing to develop a smarketing strategy provides fertile ground for inefficiencies to arise. While working in silos, they both waste time investing in efforts without clear goals. They also work inefficiently by being redundant. To add insult to injury, they negatively impact the customer experience, as a marketing rep may write about one thing, while a sales rep contradicts it. This is the last thing you want to do, since a bad experience is enough to cause customers to jump ship and do business with one of your competitors instead.
Your sales and marketing teams both want the same thing — for your company to grow and be successful. But if they have fundamentally different approaches on how to achieve that, then your company will likely end up sinking faster than the Titanic.
There are plenty of warning signs to look out for if you suspect that your smarketing business system might be falling apart. Start panicking if you notice these signs:
If your sales and marketing teams aren’t aligned with the same goal in mind, then it’s highly likely that they’re not targeting the same audience.
If you’re consistently receiving poor-quality leads that aren’t in the best interest of your company, then there’s a good chance of a miscommunication regarding the ideal audience that you should be targeting — and how to do so.
A lack of sales qualified leads (SQLs) is an indicator of a massive gap in communication between your marketing and sales teams.
Sales qualified leads are contacts that are analyzed by your marketing team to determine whether they meet a specific set of requirements to be an ideal client for your company.
Once your marketing team vets the leads, they pass them on to the sales team to move them through to the next phase of the sales funnel.
Having a lack of SQLs means that your marketing team doesn’t have the correct set of criteria to check whether a lead would make an ideal customer. Thus, they’re wasting their own time and the sales team’s time.
If there’s a lack of quality content designed to guide prospects through your sales funnel, then your marketing and sales teams clearly aren’t communicating on the best way to attract and convert leads.
Does your company put out consistent material, or is your content marketing strategy lacking?
This lapse is a major indicator that there’s a fault within your greater business strategy, and your teams are not communicating effectively.
Your content marketing strategy plays a big role in increasing brand exposure and attracting organic traffic to your website. If you’re lacking in content, then you’ll likely see a lack of organic traffic and leads.
If your sales team is missing out on prospect opportunities or having trouble closing deals, this could be due to a disconnect in the approaches of delivering your product to the customer.
Your marketing team might be presenting your products or services in a certain light, while your sales team could be offering them from a completely different angle.
This kind of inconsistency creates confusion for your audience and the appearance of instability, which drives away prospects.
If you’re consistently missing your marketing or sales goals, there’s a reason. This is possibly the biggest indicator that your smarketing strategy is failing. If you have a high-quality product or service to offer and know there's a demand for your stuff, then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to meet reasonable goals.
Having your two teams work toward different goals is counterproductive and will hold them both back from achieving either goal set.
If you’re consistently missing your growth goals, your company will remain stagnant and may even experience a particular bout of bad business.
Ok. So now you know beyond the shadow of a doubt that sales and marketing need to work together. But how can you do so effectively?
While both teams want to increase revenue, that’s a very general concept. Your teams should get together and narrowly define what that means — for the year, for the quarter, and for each sprint. Maybe you’ve decided to increase sales by 30% by the end of the year. Or maybe you’re launching a new product or service. Each time you have a new objective, both teams need to get together regularly to flesh out how they’re going to accomplish it.
Yes, another meeting. But this is not the kind that could be an email. Sales and marketing teams should specify at which regular intervals they’ll get together to discuss strategies. Build a buyer persona. Determine what that person needs right now. How are the solutions you’re offering addressing those needs? Then come up with content ideas for marketing to implement and for sales to follow up with.
In order for the marketing team to design any type of content (blogs, newsletters, marketing emails, social media posts, etc…), they need to be fully aware of how everything works — what are the benefits, who is it designed for, how can they be put together, implemented, or integrated with whatever the customer already has. How, exactly, can it help the target audience reach their goals? By the same token, the sales team will be better equipped to close a sale if they can foresee common questions and have answers at the ready.
If either team encounters the same challenges on a regular basis (for example, leads who aren’t sales qualified), instead of sighing with resignation and moving along, take some time to have conversations as to why. Where’s the disconnect? Sometimes, these conversations can be uncomfortable, but they are necessary for growth. They’re also a great opportunity to discard strategies that have proven unsuccessful through trial and error.
Working with collaboration tools is one of the best ways to make things a lot easier for everyone involved — marketing, sales, and customers. They allow you to see everything relating to a campaign in one centralized location. Everyone has access to the same data, such as task progress, previous client communications, and ongoing campaigns. Smarketing platforms also enable remote work, so that everyone on both teams has access to pertinent information regardless of their location.
Fortunately, there are several technologies your sales and marketing teams can use to work together more efficiently. Some of the most popular ones include:
Once your teams identify their common goals, it’s time to do some market research. This is the process of collecting data about your buyer persona. And there are plenty of software platforms that can help you do this through online surveys, customer collecting feedback, NPS scores, social media conversations, and advertising insights. Once all the data is collected, sales and marketing can get together to designed their joint strategies.
Customer relationship management software is an all-in-one solution. It’s a technology where every single interaction with leads and customers is logged. It stores all contacts’ information (whether from blog or newsletter subscribers, people who signed up for your email list in exchange for a discount, and pretty much anyone else who has at some point or another reached out to your business. It also keeps track of past purchases, status of their orders, and customer service queries or concerns.
Having such a big picture overview of relationships with potential and existing customers can help you optimize each interaction — whether by personalizing service, creating additional campaigns to address a market need, and use analytics to make data driven decisions for future campaigns. And since both teams have access to the same information, they can both serve customers without asking them to repeat their stories and without making irrelevant offers.
While there are many services that require close attention from a marketing or sales rep, there are also certain tasks that are both time consuming and repetitive (such as contacts segmentation, lead nurturing, and follow up emails. Marketing automation software can help with these items on your teams’ To Do list so that they can focus their efforts on those issues that do require one-on-one attention.
Creating a good customer knowledge base provides leads and customers a library of resources they can peruse to determine whether they need your goods and services (and how to use them). This makes things a lot easier for your marketing and sales teams because these tools can track pages that are viewed often, which ones have a high bounce rate, and whether they are meeting the expectations of your buyer persona. You can then use this information to either continue doing what you’re doing or identify weaknesses both teams can improve on.
The only way to know whether something is working is to track its progress. Sure, you can always look at your coffers to see how much money you’re making this quarter versus last quarter. However, sometimes marketing efforts take time to yield results. And analytics provide you with data reflecting key performance indicators (KPIs), such as website traffic, people who open your marketing emails, traffic to lead ratios, and landing page conversion rates, to name a few.
Designing a good smarketing strategy requires the willingness to implement constructive feedback and to collaborate. And once your company starts reaching goals (and sometimes even exceeding them), you will all realize that both departments are really just one team, after all.