Alignment between the sales and marketing sectors is essential for your business to grow and increase profits. That’s where the concept of smarketing comes in.

In this post, we’ll cover what smarketing is, how it works and what are the benefits that your company can have adopting this concept that is increasingly present in the day to day of successful businesses.

What is smarketing?

Smarketing is the sum of two words: “sales” and “marketing” and represents the importance of these two areas – which often seem to work against each other – in working together for a single goal: to increase sales and, consequently, the profit of your company.

The word also suggests “smart”, meaning that the integration of these two sectors is a smart strategy and that all the companies must adopt it.

In summary, the objectives of smarketing are eliminating barriers between sectors, optimizing sales processes and joining forces for better results.

What are the benefits?

Beyond just increasing profit, the employment of smarketing in your company will generate a greater integration between the marketing and sales sectors, which ends up in optimizing processes, reducing costs, facilitating the achievement of goals and putting an end to the eternal feud between sectors.

The increase in customer conversion rates also tends to grow with its adoption as the marketing industry is able, through the experience of the sales force, to build a more effective campaign with much greater potential results.

According to an Aberdeen Group survey, with smarketing, corporate annual revenue growth grew by 20%, while increasing the productivity and work efficiency of these two industries.

How to implement smarketing?

The first step is to determine common goals for the two sectors – sales and marketing – based on the same indicator: revenue through closed deals.

After determining the goals and objectives, a process of immersion must be carried out: the marketing team needs to understand the sales processes in depth and the sales group needs to understand the marketing processes. It is only through this mutual understanding that your strategy will succeed.

Another key to the success of smarketing is the constant alignment between the two teams. This alignment should be carried out in person, through tactical and strategic meetings. So forget about focusing on sending emails and making phone calls.

To support the effectiveness of its strategy, it is fundamental to adopt a CRM system (Customer Relationship Management) integrated with a marketing automation system like Microsoft Dynamics 365.

The adoption of this integrated system makes the sales and marketing sectors work with a single information base, allowing them to meet, understand and relate to their customers in real time, optimizing communication processes and consequently sales.

What is the main difficulty?

As with any change in the corporate environment, resistance to the new process may occur. For smarketing to work properly, it is necessary to change the mindset of the teams, making it clear that they need to work together and that one depends on the other to achieve the results.

To reduce this resistance, it is advisable to establish a document describing the goals, roles, and responsibilities of each team in the process.