Are your salespeople complaining that your marketing team isn't doing a good job of just making your company's website visually appealing? Or, on the contrary, is your marketing team pointing the finger at your salespeople as lazy or worse, incompetent? These are situations that can arise and need to be corrected as quickly as possible for the good of the company.

Indeed, the relationship between the sales and marketing teams plays an essential role in the development of a company. In this article, we will detail smarketing, the effective strategy to align your salespeople and your marketers and generate more revenue.

What exactly is marketing?

The term smarketing comes from the contraction of two other terms: “sales” and marketing. Smarketing is a solution to the adversity of salespeople and marketers. The main objective is to align them so that they become complementary.

As there is no common marketing and sales department, smarketing aims to make these two departments work by adopting an integrated approach. The efforts undertaken by the two teams contribute greatly to obtaining a more efficient company.

With smarketing, the marketing department energizes targets using personalized messages and contacts them when they become prospects. While for its part, the sales department approaches targets and contacts prospects who constitute potential customers.

Why adopt the smarketing strategy?

The main problem at the organizational level of a company is the existing rivalry between the two departments (marketing and sales). However, a company cannot make a profit without the two teams maintaining a good relationship.

Even if the responsibility for closing sales and therefore increasing the company's turnover belongs to salespeople, marketers also play a big role. These are the actions developed by marketers which are responsible for generating qualified leads and subsequently feeding the commercial pipeline.

The marketing strategy is especially essential at the transaction level of the two services. When the marketers have finished their part of the job by transmitting qualified leads, it is the turn of the salespeople to take care of it by canvassing the acquired leads as quickly as possible and collecting all the necessary information. These will be used during follow-ups.

In summary, the advantages of deploying smarketing are:

• Mobilize audiences
• Improve the sales strategy (technique and process)
• Optimize lead nurturing
• Minimize tensions in the purchasing journey
• Increase the company's turnover

How to deploy your marketing strategy?

Use the same language

The two teams no longer have to work separately. To be more effective, the definition of a lead must be the same for everyone.

Indeed, this definition often differs for the two teams. For marketers, the lead constitutes an individual who has shown an interest in the services offered by the company and whom they also call “Marketing Qualified Lead” or MQL. As far as salespeople are concerned, their definition of lead, also called Sales Qualified Lead or SQL, is based on the profile of an individual who comes closest to an act of purchasing.

Often, the leads generated by marketers are not suitable for the conditions imposed by salespeople. As a result, tension can arise.

In order to remedy this, you must bring your two teams together so that they can define and find lead concepts together, whether it is an MQL or an SQL. Lead support will then be more optimal in the sales funnel.

The criteria for defining a lead vary from one company to another. But in general, to define your lead you can focus on the following information:

• Profile of your contact: age, position, etc.
• Profile of the target company: number of employees,…
• Individual behavior: number of clicks, frequency of visit, filling out a form, etc.

Then identify your buyer persona and establish your lead scoring based on the criteria provided by your two teams. This way, salespeople will only receive hot leads that constitute real business potential.

Set SMART goals

To be able to move forward together, your sales team and your marketing team must aim for the same objectives. They must define SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Temporary), such as the number of new opportunities, the company's turnover, the rate of appointments made, etc.

Establish a contract between the two services

Your sales team and your marketing team must be linked based on a very specific framework contract, also called an SLA ( Service Level Agreement) . This contract will aim to detail the commitments, the actions to be undertaken and the results to be achieved for each team.

An SLA contains, among other things:

• the objectives set;
• buyer persona criteria;
• the roles and responsibilities of each person;
• the protocol linked to prospect management, etc.

The framework contract serves to build the relationship between the two services by subjecting them to pre-established rules and very specific expectations. On the other hand, it must be reassessed regularly, given that situations can evolve as the two services move forward together and can thus set new objectives.

Have a weekly meeting

It is not enough to simply distribute tasks and objectives. For greater efficiency, the two teams should meet every week to discuss feedback regarding the actions taken. As a result, your two departments will be able to communicate regularly, be well coordinated and share any problems on each side .

To align your marketing and sales teams, adopting a smarketing strategy is essential. As long as you adopt good practices, smarketing will allow you to properly coordinate the roles of your two teams, make them efficient and subsequently increase your profits.