If you’re in a leadership role, nobody has to tell you that the marketing department is costly, and the sales department is expensive. Marketing campaigns are expensive — and there’s never just one campaign. On the sales side, salaries, commissions, travel, entertainment, miscellaneous expenses and samples all add up.

As a result, leadership wants to get the best possible return on its marketing and sales investment. However, for many businesses, a lack of alignment between sales and marketing can amount to an ROI implosion, with revenue, customer retention and close rates all suffering as a result.

A lack of alignment and communication is easy to find if you talk to people in your marketing and sales departments. Sales reps will tell you that the leads from marketing are terrible. Marketers will tell you the sales reps don’t participate in their marketing campaigns or communicate them poorly. Sales reps are using one standard to measure their success and earn their paycheck; marketers are using a completely different standard.

It’s no surprise customers get confused, grow indifferent and take their business elsewhere.

To heal this problem of misalignment, or to take smoothly functioning sales and marketing teams to an even higher level of success, savvy organizations must implement a smarketing strategy.

Smarketing: Aligning Your Sales & Marketing Teams

 

What is smarketing? The infographic below, Smarketing: Aligning Your B2B Sales & Marketing Teams, provides an excellent introduction to and overview of what smarketing is. It also explains why it’s fundamentally important and includes the basic steps necessary for introducing a successful smarketing strategy.

Smarketing simply means bringing your sales and marketing functions into alignment.

It may be simple to explain, but it is far from easy to achieve. Smarketing requires sales and marketing teams to work together. These teams need to:

• share information
• collaborate on sales and marketing activities
• work toward mutual goals
• participate in collective incentive programs
• communicate regularly and effectively, and
• learn to give and take constructive criticism from the other side.

For some organizations, the activities just described involve fairly easy-to-digest changes; for others, smarketing may require a profound shift in work habits and the entire company culture.

Smarketing simply means bringing your sales and marketing functions into alignment. Click To Tweet

Bottom Line

Whether it is easy or challenging smarketing may be important for your organization to implement, the payoff is huge: Instead of your sales and marketing departments cancelling each other out, you’ll have them working together — to eliminate the competition. To learn more about smarketing, check out the accompanying resource.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya

This is a guest post from Grant Clarke, Senior Vice President of Global Sales Operations and Pre-Sales Consulting at ServiceSource. His experience and knowledge uniquely position Clarke to scale his capabilities to ensure ServiceSource is focused on improving the customer journey for the company’s clients.