Customer Journey

What Is Smarketing and How Can It Help Generate Leads?

smarketing

We know that sales and marketing are two different functions in a business. Whether your business has separate departments full of sales and marketing teams or if individuals carry out those functions, it’s not uncommon to keep sales and marketing separate.

But what if that’s not the best option? What if it makes more sense to foster closer communication between sales and marketing to get better results overall?

Smarketing represents a business strategy aimed at aligning sales and marketing functions, which can help improve your business outcomes and return on investment (ROI) for both of these functions.

Why is Smarketing Important?

It’s a way to encourage teams to work together toward common objectives designed to improve conversions.

When you integrate smarketing into your overall strategy, you prompt your teams to interact to create shared goals and work with each other toward reaching those objectives.

For example, with the help of smarketing, you might create a marketing strategy that generates high-quality leads and send them to the sales team. Because those teams regularly work together and create shared processes, the sales team is more responsive and can more easily close deals and increase sales.

Smarketing also encourages sales to relay valuable information to the marketing team. They can provide metrics that let the marketing team know where their efforts are most effective and allow the team to tweak their strategy to create content and ads that attract more qualified leads.

Benefits of Smarketing

By improving the way that sales and marketing teams collaborate, smarketing offers a number of benefits.

  • Higher-quality leads: Smarketing encourages higher-quality leads because sales can provide feedback on the type of customer likely to buy, allowing the marketing team to adjust their lead-generation strategies.
  • Easier conversions: When marketing and sales teams are aligned, sharing information, metrics, and goals, conversions become easier. Marketing can provide information about where customers are in the sales cycle and provide pain points and solutions salespeople can use to close the deal.
  • Better customer retention: With a smarketing approach, keeping customers and targeting them for return purchases is easier. Working together promotes improved communication as you follow up and compare notes. Indeed, customer retention is 36% higher with a smarketing approach.
  • Higher ROI: With smarketing, your customer acquisition cost decreases, improving your ROI. Additionally, the targeted nature of working together promotes the potential for increased revenue per customer.

Challenges of Smarketing

There are some smarketing challenges, although many crop up during the implementation phase. Trying to get your sales force on the same page as your marketing team can be difficult if they aren’t used to working together.

Additionally, it can be difficult to find common language and terminology. Often, we get caught up in our own jargon. Trying to integrate teams that have different ways of communicating offers a challenge. On top of that, teams might have their own tools, so finding tools that both teams can use might take time and effort.

It can take a few months to align objectives, workflow and reporting, so it’s important to be dedicated to the process as you implement smarketing.

How to Align Sales and Marketing Teams for Maximum Impact

As you prepare to implement a smarketing strategy, here are some of the steps that can help you create the best positive impact:

  • Have conversations about terminology and tools used: Get everyone on the same page with terminology and how it’s used in the process. Also, share information about the tools the teams use and how to use them. Cross-train on sales and marketing tools.
  • Share data: Make sure sales and marketing teams share data so they can make better decisions. Both teams should be using data that helps them better target customers and potential customers.
  • Meet frequently: Encourage sales and marketing teams to meet regularly to review shared objectives and strategies. They should develop their key performance indicators (KPIs) and goals together, and track progress at regular meetings.
  • Encourage professional relationships across teams: Your sales and marketing teams should have multiple working relationships. Have them in meetings together and encourage them to touch base even outside of meetings so they have good rapport and develop trust in each other.

Tools that Facilitate Smarketing Initiatives

There are plenty of tools available that can help facilitate effective smarketing strategies. Some ideas include:

  • Document sharing: Decide on a shared drive for important documents so that you can all access the most updated information. Consider OneDrive from Microsoft or Google Docs to manage these documents.
  • Communication: Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams make reaching sales and marketing colleagues easy. Encourage your teams to set up a communication system they can use to stay in touch, share successes and reach each other quickly if they need immediate information.
  • Project board: If you’re looking at keeping projects organized so everyone can see what’s happening and take accountability, look into various boards. Trello, Asana, Monday, and Notion all offer ways to manage projects and results.
  • Marketing and sales products: Get help managing your campaigns using tools designed to help you gather data and create more effective campaigns and track sales metrics. Tools like those offered by Taboola and Salesforce can help you make the most of smarketing efforts.

Measuring the Success of Your Smarketing Efforts

You need to measure your smarketing efforts. The right metrics can help you better understand how well your marketing strategies work, as well as your conversion rate and what drives it. Begin by establishing a baseline. Look at where you are now, and then mark when you start implementing smarketing efforts. Measure the changes over time using relevant metrics.

As you get used to tracking the data and using it to tweak your approach to both sales and marketing, you’ll likely see more progress toward your goals.

Key Takeaways

Keeping your sales and marketing functions separate might be holding you back. While these are different tasks, they are complementary, so fostering communication between sales and marketing teams makes sense. Implement a smarketing approach and you’re more likely to see better results and a higher ROI.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Why integrate sales and marketing teams?

Sales and marketing are complementary functions in many businesses. Marketing campaigns often drive leads that salespeople can use to convert customers. By integrating the teams to work together through smarketing, both teams can improve their results.

Is smarketing the same as ABM?

Smarketing is very similar to account-based marketing, or ABM. The idea with ABM is to focus on high-value accounts and direct efforts there with collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Smarketing is broader, however. Smarketing involves ongoing collaboration between sales and marketing teams without targeting specific accounts or customers.

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