Are your sales team complaining that your marketing team isn't doing a good job, only focusing on making your company website visually appealing? Or, conversely, is your marketing team pointing the finger at your sales team, calling them lazy or, worse, incompetent? These are situations that can arise and need to be addressed as quickly as possible for the good of the company.
Indeed, the relationship between sales and marketing teams plays a crucial role in a company's growth. In this article, we'll explain smarketing, the strategy for aligning your sales and marketing teams and generating more revenue.
What exactly is smarketing?
The term smarketing comes from the contraction of two other words: "sales" and "marketing." Smarketing offers a solution to the adversarial challenges faced by salespeople and marketers. Its main objective is to align them so that they become complementary.
Since there is no shared marketing and sales department, smarketing aims to bring these two departments together through an integrated approach. The efforts undertaken by both teams contribute significantly to achieving a more successful company.
With smarketing, the marketing department engages target audiences with personalized messages and contacts them when they become prospects. Meanwhile, the sales department approaches target audiences and follows up with prospects who represent potential customers.
Why adopt the smarketing strategy?
The main problem within a company's organization is the rivalry between the two departments (marketing and sales). However, a company cannot be profitable without a good working relationship between these two teams.
While the responsibility for closing sales and thus increasing company revenue lies with the sales team, marketers also play a crucial role. It is the actions developed by marketers that generate qualified leads and subsequently feed the sales pipeline.
The smarketing strategy is especially crucial at the transactional level between the two departments. Once the marketers have completed their part of the work by providing qualified leads , it's the sales team's turn to take over by contacting the acquired leads as quickly as possible and gathering all the necessary information. This information will then be used during follow-ups.
In summary, the advantages of deploying smarketing are:
- Engaging audiences
- Improve sales strategy (technique and process)
- Optimize lead handling
- Minimize stress in the purchasing process
- Increase the company's revenue
READ ALSO: Smarketing: 5 mistakes that desynchronize your marketing and sales teams
How to deploy your smarketing strategy?
Use the same language
The two teams should no longer work separately. To be more efficient, the definition of a lead must be the same for everyone.
Indeed, this definition often differs between the two teams. For marketers, a lead is an individual who has shown interest in the company's services, and they also call them a "Marketing Qualified Lead" or MQL. As for salespeople, their definition of a lead, also called a Sales Qualified Lead or SQL, is based on the profile of an individual who is closest to making a purchase.
The leads generated by marketers often don't meet the conditions imposed by salespeople. This can lead to tension.
To address this, you need to bring your two teams together so they can define and identify the key concepts of a lead, whether it's an MQL or an SQL. This will allow for more effective lead nurturing throughout the sales funnel.
The criteria for defining a lead vary from one company to another. But in general, to define your lead you can look at the following information:
- Your contact's profile: age, job title,…
- Target company profile: number of employees,…
- Individual behaviors: number of clicks, frequency of visits, filling out a form,…
Next, identify your buyer persona and establish your lead scoring system based on the criteria provided by both your teams. This way, sales representatives will only receive qualified leads that represent genuine business potential.
Set SMART goals
To move forward together, your sales and marketing teams must be working towards the same goals. They need to define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) objectives, such as the number of new opportunities, company revenue, appointment booking rate, etc.
Establish a contract between the two services
Your sales and marketing teams must be linked by a clearly defined framework agreement, also known as a Service Level Agreement (SLA) . This agreement will detail the commitments, actions to be taken, and results to be achieved by each team.
ALS includes, among other things:
- the objectives set;
- the criteria of the buyer personas;
- the roles and responsibilities of each person;
- the protocol related to prospect management, etc.
The framework agreement serves to establish the relationship between the two services by subjecting them to pre-established rules and clearly defined expectations. However, it must be regularly reassessed, given that situations may evolve as the two services progress together and may thus set new objectives.
Hold a weekly meeting
Simply assigning tasks and objectives isn't enough. For greater efficiency, the two teams should meet weekly to discuss feedback on the actions taken. This will allow your two departments to communicate regularly, maintain good coordination, and share any potential problems they may have .
To align your marketing and sales teams, adopting a smarketing strategy is essential. As long as you adopt best practices , smarketing will allow you to properly coordinate the roles of your two teams, improve their performance, and subsequently increase your profits.
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