‘Smarketing’ describes the way the sales and marketing teams integrate to achieve better results.
Rather than working in silos with different approaches, sales and marketing come together to share their knowledge and insight, tracking their successes from the marketing stage through to sales wins.
As early as 2010, a study by the Aberdeen Group showed companies that used smarketing achieved a 20% increase in revenue growth.
Despite the resounding evidence, and a surge in the number of fused departments, not all senior-level managers are aware of the benefits. Here, we break down the top five reasons smarketing is a great idea, giving you everything you need to convince your boss to unite and conquer!
It has big revenue benefits for any business
What are the potential benefits of integrating marketing and sales in your company? Let’s start with the evidence. Here are a few headlines:
- In 2015 Marketsource found that poor alignment between the two teams costs companies 10% or more in annual revenue.
- In the same survey, Marketsource discovered 84% of B2B sales and marketing teams are misaligned.
- Hubspot found combining the two teams boosts marketing revenue by an average of 208%.
- Hubspot also found that when sales and marketing are aligned, companies experience 36% higher customer retention and 38% higher sales win rates.
These strong statistics were made for a PowerPoint presentation. They’re also effective when defending or building your business case.
It unites everyone in shared success
In the past, your sales and marketing teams may have had very different cultures, and even been quite competitive with each other. Sales teams complained about the poor quality of qualified leads, while marketing teams accused sales of not following up leads properly. Creating a single team changes all that.
When the two departments join forces, each takes responsibility for distinct parts of the customer journey but is much more aware of the other’s contribution. The only way to succeed is to work together to achieve shared goals.
By clarifying important issues, like what a constitutes a qualified lead, and understanding the role each unit plays in the end game, sales and marketing teams speak the same language and pull together to achieve success.
Teams can harness data to deliver
With an integrated, data-driven approach, blame culture is erased and life becomes about perfecting the process.
The dedicated software provides at-a-glance data on lead progress – eliminating common problems such as duplicate contact information or questions about how often a lead is followed up.
It can also demonstrate the power of marketing content, so sales teams witness the effect of their teammates’ work. Marketing can gain a better understanding of which types of articles best serve their sales team friends, and produce more in turn. This closed loop approach means everyone gets to celebrate the team’s successes, which is great for morale and teamwork.
Your business becomes smarter
Simply sharing knowledge strengthens a team, but sharing buyer personas in particular significantly impacts sales and marketing success.
When you have an opportunity to combine the marketing team’s customer intelligence – the stuff of psychology, behaviours and habits – with the sales team’s knack for reading clients, understanding pains and their frontline privilege of meeting the client face-to-face, you can arm your organisation with an in-depth understanding of your audience.
Harnessing this knowledge refines marketing activities, focuses the ‘sell’ and shortens the sales cycle, resulting in higher revenue, faster.
It enables your company to be more strategic
When your company takes an integrated approach it becomes easier to develop and improve your overall communication strategy.
Perhaps for the first time, your sales team can access marketing content and use it to boost conversions from qualified leads. Conversely, your marketing team can receive direct feedback on any issues or questions that qualified leads mention during the sales process. These can be addressed in future marketing content.
Both teams can now analyse customer outcomes for the first time. Software that tracks leads by their source along the entire sales funnel shows which generated the most qualified leads and converted to sales.
You can also analyse each marketing campaign, product and buyer persona to test its effectiveness. This gives your boss the opportunity to identify those strategies which are adding value to the company and deploy staff in new, effective team structures, gathered around products, buyer personas or campaigns as the data suggests.
Now that your boss can see the range of benefits smarketing can bring to your company, it’ll be a no-brainer to make the change.
