You probably know what "Smarketing" is by the professional definition, "sales and marketing working together." My take on it is a bit different. I think "Smarketing" is more simple than that, it's just "smart marketing."
Think about it - how many times have you dealt with a company as a consumer and said, “Wow, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.” The organization and communication just wasn’t there. Did this increase or decrease your trust in this company and their abilities to either follow through on their services or provide an outstanding product? I’m willing to bet the snickers that is sitting on my desk you have a hard time trusting this company to get the job done.
Now that you are on board with me and realize you need to start “Smarketing” let’s get started with the short version of steps that you need to take.
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Define Your Buyer Profile
Nothing is worse than marketing and not understanding sale’s ideal buyer. You might think they should automatically know this as they do work for you company. Not necessarily. Sales and Marketing should sit down and outline their ideal customer and then take that ideal customer and break it out into buyer personas. This will ensure your marketing team is on the right track when developing their strategies.
Define Your Goals As One
Most sales teams have a quota to meet and most marketing teams have KPIs to meet. Develop a unified goal together to ensure you work as one. When you develop a single goal for both divisions then hitting your personal goals should be easy.
Define Your Qualifiers
What marketing might think is a SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), might very well be completely different than what sales would think qualifies these leads as sales ready. It is imperative for both divisions to be on the same page. Have an in depth conversation to determine their qualifiers.
Create a SLA
Have your sales and marketing team get together and develop a SLA (Service Level Agreement). Your SLA should have the following items in your agreement:
- The average conversion rate from lead to opportunity
- The average conversion rate from opportunity to closed deal
- The average value of a sale
Laying out these specifics will help both divisions or positions understand each others goals. Without these clear defined goals and responsibilities, frustration can develop on both sales and marketing sides. The frustrations occur when the marketing side of the house pours their heart and soul into a campaign that develops SQLs to send to sales, to only find out they don’t jump on these leads immediately. At times the lead sits there in their CRM and goes cold. In turn, sales works leads that just aren’t qualified or in line with what they need which leads to them being ignored.
Here is an example of an SLA that you should be able to identify with.
“Every month, marketing will deliver 100 qualified leads to sales and sales will contact every lead within 24 hours of receiving it.” I’ll be honest, here at Captevrix we prefer that turn around time to be a little faster, but we understand that not all sales teams can do this.
Meet Regularly
As you are new to this, start meeting every two weeks as you will probably stumble your way through this process. Remember this is not a pointing fingers meeting nor is it a one sided hooray. This is about two divisions coming together to accomplish a common goal. Like we say at Captevrix, if you don’t succeed, we don’t succeed. The same should apply here.
Bosses Not Allowed
If your company is large enough to have an executive team, respectfully tell them they are not needed in this meeting. The boss can tend to take control of the meeting and demand results, or hinder the flow of the conversation, instead of allowing the two divisions to discuss and strategize how they will accomplish their set goals.
Content Discovery
Marketing is great at developing great content, right? But have you ever heard of the great saying, work smarter not harder. Many times marketing misses their biggest asset of inspiration and content...the sales team. The sales team is loaded with amazing ready to order content and they don’t even know it. Have your sales team BCC marketing on their email communications with their leads and clients. If you are using a killer CRM like Hubspot, ensure they are hitting that log square and it is recorded in the Hubspot CRM. I’m biased of this CRM, because it is what we use and so do our clients. Also, there are “pitches” that sales may use that marketing could use to create stellar content. Just let them talk and see what you discover.
Of course there is so much more to “SMARKETING” and ways you can align your sales and marketing teams, however the average human beings attention span just isn’t that long. The tips I have given you here should get your started. So what are you waiting for, go tell your team you all have some SMARKETING to do!
Curious what your cost per lead would be with direct mail? Check out our interactive calculator to find out!
