Hubspot - Integrating Smarketing

For those who are not familiar with the term, "smarketing" is used to describe the combination of sales and marketing. What many people fail to realize is that although marketing and sales are labeled together many of the times, 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative. The goal is to bring these two opposing teams in to one in order to gain revenue. Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment get 20% annual growth revenue. Now the real question here is, how can companies integrate smarketing?

There are 5 steps associated with the integration of this term: 

Speak the Same Language

 In other words, have a transparent marketing goal. As I mentioned before, revenue is the key goal for both sides therefore having a prospective number in mind should be the goal. Having the transparent marketing goal so closely related with the sales goal will help assure that the marketing efforts help support sales. Below is an example of how one can work backwards from sales in order to set a marketing goal. 

Set Up Closed-Loop Reporting

There are a few questions one must ask when determining when he or she needs closed-loop reporting. These questions consist of:

• Do you send leads to Sales and never hear if they were good?
• Do you end up creating and trying to manage duplicate leads?
• Do you send leads to Sales with the basic content information without intelligence about what content those leads consumed?
• Are you unsure of the impact your marketing efforts have on revenue?

Implement a Service Level Agreement

A Sales-Marketing SLA defines what each team commits to accomplishing in order to support the other. The SLA formalizes the goals of each team to make sure the company is set up to reach its revenue goal.

Maintain Open Communication

Having weekly smarketing meetings is crucial in this aspect. This will assist in your entire Sales and Marketing teams get on the same page about: team success, product info, persona education, and SLA waterfalls. However, it is also important to remember that meetings are not the only means of communication.

Rely On Data

A key part of the smarketing relationship is relying on the data. A great tool one can use are marketing and sales dashboards. These initially include all the common reports that are lined along the set revenue goals. By creating a shared dashboard and making it accessible to the teams, it will become easier to track progress from both sides.