Still too often, the sales team and the marketing team each evolve on their own , while they are both key players in the purchasing journey . The relationship between these two teams, once “rivals”, but nevertheless complementary, remains a source of friction .
However, there are solutions to reduce them , or even eliminate them, such as Smartketing , a management technique to effectively align these two services and benefit from them in the medium to long term, for you and your customers. Our explanations in this article dedicated to Smartketing .
Definition of Smartketing
Smarketing consists of aligning the sales team and the marketing team of the same company around common objectives , in particular in order to:
to better engage audiences
to improve lead management
to perfect sales techniques and processes
to share skills , documents, content and other playbooks
to prepare joint campaigns, in particular with account based marketing (marketing of key accounts)
to streamline revenue operations
to reduce friction in the purchasing process and ultimately increase turnover .
The interest of applying Smarketing
One of the goals of a company is to increase revenues (and make a profit) , sales as a growth engine is in this sense an essential element to achieve this goal.
This phase has long been the preserve of salespeople . This is true, or almost, because even if they are the ones who conclude the sale, it remains that it is the marketing actions carried out that must generate prospects and therefore feed the sales pipeline .
As mentioned above, the relationships between these america cell phone number list teams are often complicated . Smarketing has the effect of breaking the ice and reestablishing the current between the marketing and sales teams in order to define a “collaboration contract” (we speak of SLA in the jargon for Service Level Agreement) between these two services.
interest-of-marketing
For what ?
Marketers must commit to passing qualified leads to salespeople , this transition is important to improve sales performance and generate revenue.
For their part, salespeople must commit to taking charge of them quickly , recording the information in a CRM (customer relationship management tool) and ensuring rigorous monitoring so that marketers can exploit the data .
Ideally, you would think of sales and marketing as two halves of the same team . Basically, your marketers become salespeople and your salespeople become more interested in the acquisition process like marketers. And if you also include customer service, you have a real revenue team.
What results?
According to software vendor Hubspot, companies with aligned sales and marketing teams see a 20% increase in annual revenue .
The figures are revealing, especially since companies unaware of this management style see an average 4% drop in their turnover .
How to apply Smarketing?
Aligning two teams that aren't used to working together probably won't be easy and won't happen with a wave of a magic wand or because you decree it.
So how do you go about setting up an efficient organization ?
A. Define SMART or OKR objectives
First of all, the sales team and the marketing team must share common goals . Bring these teams together around a table and clearly present your SMART goals to them :
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Temporary
In this way, all employees will be able to establish an action plan to carry out their actions in order to achieve the expected result.