Smarketing for better business results

What is Smarketing anyway?

Smarketing stands for successful collaboration between sales and marketing teams. Smarketing aims to break down silos and enable corporate functions to pursue the same goals. Synergies result in SalesMarketing or Smarketing for short.

Better collaboration between marketing and sales

The foundation for successful smarketing is the pursuit of the same goals. In too many companies, marketing and sales pursue their own and sometimes even competing goals. A common objective that promises success for the entire company creates the prerequisite for smarketing.

To achieve these goals, marketing and sales must work hand in hand to generate more profit for the company. Often it’s a matter of speaking the same language and defining the stages of lead generation or the sales funnel.

Smarketing goals

Who hasn’t seen this? Marketing reports include email open rates, display ads impressions, social media likes, and the number of blog posts published. After the CMO, the Chief Revenue Officer presents how many new sales pitches the sales team had and even shows well-known logos representing those companies.

While these metrics are important to measure, they only relate leading up to successful collaboration between sales and marketing and to business success.

In smarketing, common goals should be defined that align with corporate goals. Of course, there must also be campaign-related KPIs that the marketing department reports and sales data that allow for further planning. The point is that marketing and sales set common goals to support their own objectives and those of the company.

Therefore, the best goals are ones where all three objectives overlap:

Good smarketing goals are

Shorter sales cycle
High percentage of leads convert to SQL/SAL
Marketing influenced and generated revenue
Lower churn rate
Higher Customer Life Time Value (CLTV)
Annual revenue growth

Successful Smarketing Strategies

Inbound Smarketing

Inbound marketing aims to generate potential customers by having them come across the company’s content on their own. We’ve already discussed in detail why inbound marketing goal setting so important is.

The bottom line is that the common goals of marketing, sales, and business are to generate more revenue through inbound efforts. Important factors where sales and marketing need to align are lead numbers and quality.

The overall goals are then broken down by measurable metrics such as leading and legging SEO metrics in the respective departments (in this case Marketing) to achieve the overall goal.

Outbound Smarketing

Outbound marketing is the counterpart to inbound. Here, marketing messages such as advertisements are actively delivered to the target audience.

A good overlap of sales and marketing alignment is the so-called SDR marketing, where sales development representatives handle both incoming leads (inbound) and potential customers through, for example, cold calling (outbound).

Lead Scoring

The goal of a lead scoring model is to measure lead quality and to pass only high-quality leads to Sales/Sales Development. To ensure this, both Marketing and Sales should jointly develop a lead score matrix, review it regularly, and adjust it if necessary.

Account Based Smarketing

Account Based Marketing or ABM for short is the crème-de-la-crème of smarketing. ABM only works when marketing and sales agree on the criteria, measures, and messages.

For example, a LinkedIn ABM campaign can even be counterproductive if the wrong companies or target audiences are addressed. On the other hand, properly communicated and executed, such a campaign can save the entire year’s bottom line.

Smarketing SLAs

Smarketing only works if sales and marketing pull together. Regular communication is therefore indispensable. In addition, the respective departments must also take responsibility and be accountable for pre-defined agreements. For example, Marketing Qualified Leads must be processed within a certain time according to the lead score alignments.

This is where SLA Service Level Agreements come into play. SLAs are agreed upon in the joint objective. Usually, SLAs are time-based agreements such as processing or feedback within a pre-defined time. Service level agreements also serve to optimize the customer journey as much as possible.

Furthermore, it is helpful to hold smarketing meetings to maintain open communication. These can be weekly meetings where important information, reports, and SLA compliance are discussed. In addition, planned activities such as digital marketing campaigns can also be discussed.

Shared technologies

To facilitate collaboration, both departments should use the same sales and marketing software. On the one hand, this ensures that all information is available to both parties in real-time, but also efficiency.

Smarketing technologies should be at least a common CRM and sales enablement software. If marketing automation software is used, it must be ensured that important information is synchronized into the CRM.