The other day, I was driving to a business meeting to discuss the power of data-driven marketing. Driving along that Iowa highway, I passed family farm after family farm — complete with fields of corn and silos for storing the harvest. Silos are a crucial part of farm life, but in business, they’ll kill you.
If your sales and marketing departments are managed as separate silos, the system ultimately fails. I’ve experienced this at companies large and small. For companies to achieve growth and become leaders in their industries, it is critical that these two groups become properly integrated.
So, how do you bridge the gap between marketing and sales?
What’s the top problem that businesses have? Frequently, people will guess low sales or ineffective marketing, but it could be something else entirely.
During an early stage in my career, I worked for a fast-paced tech startup. One thing I noticed was the sales team and the marketing team often had a difficult time communicating and working together. What I realized, however, is that marketing’s effectiveness is null if the sales team isn’t doing their job. On the other hand, your sales team could be doing great, but marketing could be dropping the ball.
So what does this mean?
Your business’s success depends on communication between sales and marketing.
SMARKETING?
Yes, this is actually a thing… Our marketing automation partner, HubSpot, calls this symbiosis between the two worlds “Smarketing” and I love the term. If you need help with marketing and work with me, one of my objectives is going to be getting to know and evaluate your sales process.
Smarketing is sales and marketing fighting for the same end goal: getting clients, growing business and building a strong brand through the whole process.
If your sales team is dysfunctional or your sales process is broken, it doesn’t matter how great your marketing is. If your sales team rocks, but your marketing team is disjointed, then your brand will be weak. There are plenty of companies with strong salespeople and a weak and basically unknown brand.
So how do you bring together these business departments? You need to find a marketing approach that understands sales and a sales approach that understands marketing. I am finding that this is a fairly new business philosophy.
SIX TIPS FOR SMARKETING
As with most business solutions: communication is key to proper Smarketing. Here is a quick list borrowed from HubSpot with tips to Smarter Smarketing:
- Have sales and marketing meet frequently
- Build multiple relationships between sales and marketing
- Mix marketing and sales desks together
- Provide many types of feedback between marketing and sales
- Agree on terminology
- Use data to communicate
Smarketing may be an entirely new way of thinking for your organization. To be successful in today’s digital landscape, your company must have a strategic marketing program that works in concert with conventional advertising and marketing programs.
So if you are great at sales, but need some help to generate leads for your sales team Smarketing might be something you should look into. If your sales team is great at traditional sales, but struggling to work their new marketing leads you may want to adopt this approach. If your marketing team is great, but your sales team can’t close a deal to save their life or the sales cycle is much longer than it needs to be, you might want to look into smarketing.
As in any relationship, communication is key. Define your goal and get clear about what it will take to get there — together.
