Are your sales reps complaining that your marketing team isn't doing a good job of just making your company's website fun to see? Or, if not, is your marketing team pointing the finger at your sales reps as lazy or worse, incompetent? These are situations that can arise and need to be corrected as soon 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 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 both teams go a long way towards achieving a more successful company.
With smarketing, the marketing department energizes targets with personalized messages and contacts them when they become prospects. While for its part, the sales department approaches the targets and relaunches prospects who are potential customers.
Why adopt the smarketing strategy?
The main problem at the level of the organization 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 thus increasing the turnover of the company, belongs to the salespeople, the makers also play a big role. It is the actions developed by marketers that are responsible for generating qualified leads and subsequently feeding the sales pipeline.
The marketing strategy is especially essential at the level of the transaction of the two services. When marketers have finished their part of the job by transmitting qualified leads, it is the turn of salespeople to take care of it by canvassing the acquired leads as quickly as possible and collecting all the necessary information. These will be exploited during the follow-ups.
In summary, the benefits of deploying smarketing are:
- Engaging audiences
- Improve sales strategy (technical and process)
- Optimize lead management
- Minimize tensions in the buying 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 is an individual who has shown an interest in the services offered by the company and that they also call “Marketing Qualified Lead” or MQL. As far as sales people 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 a purchase.
Often, marketer-generated leads don't fit the conditions imposed by salespeople. As a result, tension can arise.
In order to remedy this, you need to bring your two teams together so that they can define and find together the notions of lead, whether it is an MQL or a SQL. The support of leads will then be more optimal in the sales funnel.
The criteria for defining a lead change from one company to another. But in general, to define your lead you can move towards the following information:
- Your contact's profile: age, function,…
- Target company profile: number of employees,…
- Behaviors of the individual: number of clicks, frequency of visit, filling out a form,…
Then identify your buyer persona and establish your lead scoring based on the criteria provided by your two teams. In this way, salespeople will only receive the hot leads that constitute the real business potentials.
Setting SMART goals
To be able to move forward together, your sales team and your marketing team must have the same goals. 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 from a specific framework agreement, also known as an SLA (Service Level Agreement). This contract will aim to detail the commitments, the actions to be taken and the results to be achieved for each team.
An SLA contains, among other things:
- the objectives set;
- buyer personas criteria;
- roles and responsibilities;
- the protocol related to the management of the prospect, etc.
The framework contract serves to build the relationship between the two services by subjecting them to pre-established rules and specific expectations. However, it must be reassessed regularly, as situations may change 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 weekly to discuss feedback on actions taken. As a result, your two services will be able to dialogue 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 the best practices, smarketing will allow you to properly coordinate the roles of your two teams, make them perform and subsequently increase your profits.
