Smarketing

Smarketing is a strategy in which sales and marketing departments cooperate and communicate to achieve their company’s goals. It helps generate leads and increase revenues.

In this article, we’ll find out why smarketing is important and review the steps necessary to implement this strategy.

Why is smarketing important?

Since all companies strive to increase sales, they need to improve their customer acquisition and retention. To do it, marketing teams communicate with the sales departments since salespeople can indicate the stages of a company’s sales funnel where most leads stop performing any actions. Afterward, marketers can remove these gaps and decide whether it’s better to generate leads by teaching how to use a company’s service with demos, sending informative emails, writing guest posts, or providing educational content.

The cooperation between sales and marketing helps brands prosper and establish their positions as industry leaders. With this strategy, on the one hand, salespeople receive information necessary to make warm calls and have insights about their leads’ behavior and other important facts. On the other hand, marketers better understand their prospects and the places they come from.

This information enables your marketing team to figure out what leads are more likely to convert into customers and provide them with the best service and conditions to do this. Hence, your marketing team can relocate their effort and resources efficiently to increase ROI.

Now that you know the benefits and importance of smarketing, let’s move to some steps that can help implement this strategy.

We’ve prepared six steps that will enable you to leverage the strategy for your business. These steps are imperative if you want to get new leads and increase your sales volume.

1. Define common goals. It’s essential to establish common objectives for your campaigns and other shared tasks to coordinate your sales and marketing departments’ work. When the teams are working towards achieving specific goals, they can easily unite for the common good. Since each team has its own strengths important for your company, marketers and sales managers should cooperate and utilize their skills and knowledge to achieve excellent results.
2. Ensure communication between teams. Your company will be able to reach certain goals only when your teams can effectively communicate, understand, and listen to each other. That’s why they should meet and discuss their campaigns, objectives, and other tasks altogether.
3. Share your experiences. Members of sales and marketing teams should pay attention to each other and show empathy. Both sales managers and marketers can feel stressed or under pressure during their workday. Therefore, they need to support each other and share their successes and failures in achieving your company’s goals. The best way to find a solution to an urgent problem is by using the power of cooperation.
4. Arrange regular meetings. Since communication is a critical factor, your sales and marketing teams should meet at least once a week. Use this time to share experiences, successes, and challenges, analyze your recent campaigns, and discuss new ideas. Choose representatives from each team to attend the meetings and report about your current situation.
5. Create an information-sharing agreement. Ensure that the teams you work with have access to the necessary data since it is crucial for understanding metrics, leads, the performance of marketing campaigns, etc. However, having access to data isn’t enough. You should develop a clear and effective strategy to use the information you have correctly and make the right business decisions. Besides, consider using a CRM to automate the process and allow team members to manage the sales funnel and monitor your company’s metrics. SendPulse’s CRM allows you to manage your sales process and communicate with customers effectively.
6. Utilize collaboration tools. To ensure effective collaboration between sales and marketing teams, make use of special tools for communication, sharing documents, assigning tasks, and tracking their progress. It’s especially useful if some of your team members work remotely. Firstly, create a shared team email account to store all information in one place and make sure your teams have access to it. Secondly, leverage video conferencing platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom to communicate with your teams online. Thirdly, make use of Google Docs. It enables real-time collaboration and is time-saving. Moreover, consider implementing project management tools like actiTIME, Trello, Wrike, or ClickUp to ensure seamless communication and delegate tasks effectively.

To conclude, implementing smarketing techniques can have lots of benefits for your business. It increases revenue and improves customer experience and relationships between and among your teams. Hence, pay attention to the steps above to implement this smart technique.

Last Updated: 22.03.2023