If you’re in the business world, chances are you’ve come across the term “smarketing” at some point. It’s been gaining popularity in recent years and for good reasons. We’ll demystify the concept of smarketing (AKA sales-marketing alignment), explore how it can help you synergize your sales and marketing efforts for maximum success, and put you on a pattern for sustainable growth.
What Is Smarketing?
Smarketing is a dedicated business strategy that aligns and integrates sales and marketing teams to achieve the same goals.
It’s more than just getting your sales and marketing staff on the same page to land contracts. Smarketing is where your teams use concerted efforts to retain, grow, and land new sales.
Why Is Smarketing Important for Your Company?
Eighty-six percent of marketers spend efforts on accounts that the sales team is also targeting, according to Forester in 2019. How much time, effort, and energy would you save if your sales and marketing teams were aligned? How much more success would your teams have?
Everyone on your team has different talents. There’s the sociable one, the analytical one, and the closer. But if all of these people’s talents were aligned for a singular goal, your company would likely see a sustained growth pattern.
How Does Smarketing Work?
Smarketing thrives on open communication, shared goals, and mutual respect, transforming two traditionally separate teams into a single, powerful entity.
See this brief, step-by-step process for implementing an effective smarketing strategy.
1. Establish Common Smarketing Objectives
Before you pull out of your driveway, you need to know where you’re going. The same is true when you merge your sales and marketing efforts. One technique is to change the verbiage your teams use. It’s not a “sales funnel” but just a “funnel.” Everyone on the team should know what the funnel looks like. We like to call it the “universal funnel” because it works the same no matter the paradigm, as it has since 1898.
Pro tip: Your funnel isn’t a one-way process (nor does it conform to the effects of gravity). Once a lead becomes a client, the funnel starts over for the upselling opportunities.
2. Communicate, Communicate, and Overcommunicate
It’s vital to communicate and overcommunicate among all stakeholders on a particular client or prospect. Let’s say you have a specialist, account manager, and consultant all handling one high-profile client or prospect. Each person brings a different perspective to the table, but all of you have the same goal of upselling to the current client or landing the prospect. All of you need to communicate effectively, even if you have remote teams, to ensure success. Communicating does two things: It prevents missteps and eliminates duplicated efforts.
Which leads to our third point.
3. Smarketing Tools Start With a CRM
Your company has a CRM, whether you make $500,000 or $500 million a year. Use your CRM wisely and effectively, whether it’s Salesforce, HubSpot, Sharpspring, Keap, or whichever tool you use. A CRM centralizes communication, holds the team accountable, and makes sure no prospects go down without a fight.
“I like to refer to smarketing as the notion of tracking a prospect from click to close.” — A. Lee Judge, Co-Founder and CMO of Content Monsta and Forbes Councils Member
When used effectively, a CRM tells you what prospects are likely to become contracts, when you should reach out to warm leads, what tasks need to be accomplished and when, and notes about each prospect. It’s the one place your smarketers should all live for a good portion of their 40 hours a week.
The Revenue Marketing Alliance says successful smarketing teams have the following traits:
- 77.8% have integrated tools that share data
- 72.2% have regular joint meetings
- 72.2% take sales materials and use them for marketing
- 63.9% have shared goals and KPIs.
4. Understand Each Other on the Smarketing Team
Sales consultants face different challenges than other members of the team. When working on commission, their bottom line is on the line. They might be willing to push for an upsell or accelerate timelines to make the client happier sooner. However, an account manager or specialist might pull back and say the team needs to underpromise and overdeliver in a specific timeframe to temper the client’s expectations. Yes, upselling is essential. However, it must happen when it’s warranted.
On the other hand, non-salespeople need to understand that upselling is a normal part of doing business. A good barista will try to upsell that extra dab of whipped cream for an extra 50 cents. Add-ons add up. Just ask any restauranteur.
5. Smarketing Has to Think Long-Term
It’s easy to make a cup of coffee. And we’re probably all not even thinking about what goes into that beautiful nectar of the gods that we sip every morning. But do we ponder what truly goes into that? The electricity for your coffeemaker. The manufacturing of the coffeemaker itself. The coffee took three to four years to grow (fun fact). The logistics it took to deliver the coffee to the store shelf. You get the idea. That cup of coffee we hold in our hands needed a long-term strategy (including the right sales and marketing) to land in our warm bellies every morning.
Smarketing is the same way. Businesses can’t just wave their hands and say expecto smarketeas to have smarketing magically work. (And even spellcasting takes work. Just ask Harry Potter.) There will be hiccups. There will be a process. But once everyone believes in the process, works through it, and succeeds at it, smarketing can then be a force for your business. (“Trust in the process” to have another metaphor thrown in here. We adore a good metaphor.)
What Are the Benefits of Smarketing?
Embracing the Smarketing strategy can gain some serious traction.
MarketingProfs says that organizations with tightly aligned smarketing teams have 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates.
HubSpot customers with Marketing and Sales Hub who use workflows close an average of 508% more deals than those who do not.
Aberdeen Group surveyed 453 companies in 2010 in the most ground-breaking study on smarketing firms. High-performing organizations saw 20% average growth in revenue, and 47% of the forecasted pipeline was generated by marketing when the sales and marketing efforts were aligned.
You Need Sales, We’ve Got Marketing
When you want to optimize your funnel, it’s important to align your sales and marketing efforts. You have a sales team. We can be the marketing team.
Contact us or call (417) 799-2233 for more information. Let’s talk.
