Never Ending Thoughts…

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I wish it were as easy as taking the best books in sales and
marketing, and just simply blend them together to come up
with something that would really get me the results.
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What Smarketing Really Is?

Smarketing simply means a way to align your sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. This term is relatively new in the Industry. So new that I thought I came up with it while writing this blog! Then I started looking up on the Internet and found that the guys at Hubspot say that it was actually coined by Dan Tyre in around 2007. However I couldn't find much material from Dan on this topic. Perhaps he shared the thoughts with Hubspot folks at some meetup. So I followed up with Dan himself and got this information from him: "Mike Volpe and I coined the term in 2007 to explain how sales & marketing departments are really archiac holdovers from an earlier age and how HubSpot would be different." Thank You Dan!

In a nutshell, this is what I think it is: Alignment of sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. So let's carry on with that.

When Do You Know You Need Smarketing?

Well the answer really is that you need it almost every time. But still, let's take a few examples.

Let's take some real life examples. So you came up with a great email marketing campaign. You got the best template out there and you got the best content and images for your email campaign. But you forgot to put the "sign up" button within the email. Instead you asked users to go to some page and click there to sign up. Guess what, you just ran a perfect marketing campaign but then left the sales folks at the mercy of only those few who would go an extra mile reading all the steps to sign up in your email.

Let's take another real life example. Your marketing team came did a great job attracting lot of people at your booth at the conference that happened last week. But they did a terrible job filtering the leads they captured and now a list of 20,000 contacts is left over at the mercy of sales folks who end up taking a month following up with all those leads. As a result you end up loosing many potential buyers.

What's the learning in both cases? Sales and Marketing teams can't work in solace. They have to work in perfect coherence to be able to generate amazing results.

OK. I Get The Point. How Do I Start?

1. Break the walls between your marketing and sales team. Have them work together. Have marketing plans reviewed by sales and have sales targets reviewed by marketing. It sounds a lot of work and perhaps something that might slow down your progress; but the reality is that these necessary evils are actually going to help you come up with that perfect blend of sales and marketing that works for you. You won't know it until you try!

2. Use technology that simplifies communication and helps easy blending of both the teams in every aspect related to lead generation, lead nurture to customer relationships.

3. Create a culture of respect for each other. Often marketing is considered as coming up with Banner Ads and Catchy Lines while sales is frowned upon as the dirty job of cold calling. Break that culture and make it open enough for both teams to realize the value one provides to the other.

Is smarketing for you? What do you think?