After years of sales and marketing being separated into two departments, we are finally seeing the Internet bringing the two skills together as one. While the integration is wonderful, it is hard to understand why it hasn’t happened sooner. Of course, you must be thinking to yourself that a sales and marketing strategy is not a new thing. After all, it is simply taking both your sales and marketing processes and aligning them to match your customers buying behavior. However, the problem in the past was these two strategies were performed by two teams and, more often than not, in two departments.
"Smarketing," on the other hand, merges both departments into one to create a strategy that works in perfect harmony.
If you sell B2B, then you need to create deep and meaningful relationships to aid your work in both processes. Marketing will be supplying content that will help the sales team to close more business. The sales team needs to provide feedback to marketing by providing information on customers’ buying processes and industry changes.
Working together will dramatically increase the chance of you finding lots of happy and long-term clients and customers for you business. You will even find that many of these will soon become evangelists for your business.
You don’t want to throw everything into the mix all in one go; start off by having your sales and marketing teams meet once per week to collaborate on the same project. Keep it brief though, 30-60 minutes tops.
Inbound Marketing is perfect for aligning your sales and marketing departments. Using software such as Hubspot to assist your marketing, you can sync Salesforce or other CRM systems to segment contacts and personalize emails.
Sales and Marketing need to create a consistent line of communication to ensure the contribution between each party is both captured and valued.
Integration between both teams can only be effective if the software both use is also connected. Whilst each person within the teams has his or her opinion, there is one thing that will stay consistently equal throughout both departments—data. Data does not lie and it will keep both teams honest with one another.
As smarketing catches on, we are bound to see an increase in the integration between sales and marketing departments. How are you incorporating it into your business? Let us know in the comment section below.
Photo Credit: B2B Marketing
Joe Pack is founder of inbound marketing agency Jigsoar. Joe has provided online marketing solutions to major brands such as The North Face and a range of different professional services firms based in both the United Kingdom and Europe. Taking a non-technical approach to inbound, he believes it is time to fight back against the bad name stamped upon some tactics in the Digital Marketing industry. Connect with him on Twitter @TheJoePack
