Through our experience we see that most companies are set up with the traditional dynamic of a marketing department in one office and a sales team in another and when asked 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative*
It has always been common practice to separate sales and marketing into two different departments, despite their practices going hand in hand. Can you imagine a department where both sales and marketing coexist? An environment were they have mutual respect for one another with shared goals and a single vision? Well we can and that department is called the “SMarketing” office.
The aim of SMarketing is to align the goals and deliverables of your sales and marketing teams, the aim is to promote your product or service to potential clients via marketing whilst simultaneously incorporating the working of the sales department to convert and close. The term SMarketing highlights the importance of sales and marketing departments working together to create a more effective division of the business that supports the customer journey.
It has been all too common for marketing and sales to focus on their separate efforts with little collaboration. In some companies there’s very little acknowledgement that the two departments are working towards a common goal. Often you see the two departments failing to pool resources as though they have completely separate aims.
SMarketing forces the departments to operate as one, increasing productivity through more effective communication and long term planning. Research into the effects of SMarketing shows that companies who integrate their sales and marketing departments grew 20% faster than the companies who don’t.
It’s common sense that the integration of these two sectors of the business will increase productivity. More and more leads for business originate from marketing, naturally aligning the two sectors. When this organic alignment is ignored and the two are operated as different sections of the business, this hinders the ability to maximise growth.
A good SMarketing team develops an overall strategy that brings together the effective tactics from both departments – Attract / Convert / Close / Delight to generate growth.
How do you achieve this?
It’s important to unite the teams to make them feel like one big SMarketing team. They need regular meetings to discuss strategy, to give feedback on what is successful and what isn’t and most importantly; keep lines of communication open at all times.
* – https://hbr.org/2011/11/how-the-rift-between-sales-and
Hubspot have created a PDF on smarketing:
