SMARKETING – How to align sales and marketing to improve ROI and revenue

Marketing and sales are the two arms of a business responsible for growth, profit, ROI, and most importantly, sales. Ironically, these two departments hardly ever work in close alignment. They are either in a competitive conflict or are far too siloed.

If these departments in your company are not working together, you’re in murky waters.

Here’s the truth.

When sales and marketing are disconnected or in conflict, customer experience suffers, which translates to a loss of business.

According to research by Super Office, when sales and marketing are not in alignment, businesses are losing trillions!

So how exactly do you get these departments to work together? What is the best example of SMARKETING coordination and what are the key benefits of a SMARKETING strategy?

Let’s explore these questions in detail.

What is the Cost of Non-existent or Poor Sales and Marketing Coordination?

Poor revenues! But that’s just one of the many things you could be losing.

Here’s what happens when your power arms work in isolation:

Marketing efforts that do not translate into sales

So if your marketing team is creating content assets, building funnels & spending millions in optimizing your solution/product/business but your sales department is not active about their lead response management in their day-to-day operations, all that effort is wasted.

For instance, marketing decides to create customer guides that they could use in email funnels, and luckily, customers are reaching out with queries. Sales handle all customer queries, but because they were not part of this funnel and guide process, they were not able to respond effectively to queries. Customers sense poor service and leave. The days and money spent building and promoting that asset is wasted.

Poor customer experience leading to poor satisfaction ratings

Customer satisfaction starts with the prospective buying process, not at the end of a purchase process. When sales and marketing don’t agree on a customer persona or journey, then the experience will be distorted.

For instance, if sales and marketing work together, they’ll be able to better understand customer pain points. Marketing can use live chats, call logs, and product demos to craft better messaging which eventually will help bring qualified leads for sales to convert. Customers will feel more confident in buying the service, which means a win-win for everyone!

Business growth is fragmented with no unified goal/direction

Fragmented business growth is frustrating and non-sustainable. With no unified goal/direction, your business growth cannot be measured.

For instance, one of your products or packages is making more revenue than the other because that’s where sales are focusing. Marketing on the other hand is focusing on promoting the lesser revenue gen product in the hopes that it grows, but when sales aren’t aligned with the same direction, it all goes to waste.

All these issues are impacting your revenue goals, but because you’re measuring metrics in isolation, you’re unable to get the true picture of your losses or gains.

How Do I Get Sales + Marketing to Coordinate?

The easy way – get authoritative. Start meetings, get (complicated) plans made, create processes & enforce implementation. This method will enforce action, but it will not be effective in getting coordination from your teams. The conflicts will still remain. The disconnect is still not addressed.

Now for some of the harder stuff…

1. Begin identifying causes of disconnect or conflict

To truly implement change, you must begin by identifying causes of disconnect or conflict between your power teams.

It’s not uncommon to see the two teams often at each other’s throats. For instance, we’ve seen companies where sales blame marketing for poor lead quality, while marketing blames sales for losing leads.

Conflicts like these need to be addressed before implementing any process.

A good solution to this specific conflict can be to create a lead qualification criterion (as given by sales) while measuring sales performance to incoming leads (such as measuring their response times).

Once you identify these basic problems and start implementing solutions to resolving them, you’re already putting a SMARKETING structure in place.

2. Measure key email metrics that can strengthen sales and marketing alignment

Regardless of what popular marketing articles say, email marketing remains one of the most critical inbound marketing strategies that tie both sales and marketing under one common goal – to get a paying customer.

Yet, most companies measure only open rates or click-through rates. Very few go deeper and look to measure email performance internally.

For instance, how long does it take your sales team to respond to a first-time lead? What’s your average response time? How many of your sales team members are achieving their goals?

On the marketing side, how many of your marketing team members are responding to a request for a proposal within the first hour of an email?

Measuring email reply time metrics is a good way to kickstart the collaboration between sales and marketing, while also allowing you a glimpse into the performance of your star players.

3. Create a customer experience journey & unite teams under this journey

One of the most problematic challenges companies face today is creating the right customer experience journey.

Sales and marketing each have a different perspective of the customer experience, yet, they hardly ever sit together to create a coherent journey or map.

Without this customer experience map, you’re at a loss. You wouldn’t know what your customer touch-points are, why they choose you (or not choose you) over competitors, what problems they are facing, and whether you’re helping them overcome those issues.

For the SMARKETING model to work, you need a customer experience map that is the blueprint for your teams. Without this, you’ll have a hard time convincing teams to work together.

Wrapping Up

As with all organizational changes, such implementations cannot be achieved overnight. You’ll have to put in the consistent effort that spans 6 months to a year, bring about changes in processes that do not support the SMARKETING model and get the buy-ins of your team leads.

The benefit to SMARKETING – Increasing revenue DOUBLE-FOLD. You don’t need us to tell you how successful your business can become if your power arms finally work together towards the same goals.