If our goal were to create a dictionary on inbound marketing, the concept of smarketing would be at the top of the list. Firstly, because it is an attractive proposal of this new philosophy, which consists of integrating the sales and marketing team into the lead generation strategy.
Leads are those people who, after going through the “convert” stage within the inbound marketing methodology, change their status from visitors to sales opportunities. In this conversion process, Internet users provide their data in exchange for a content offer (ebook, templates, whitepapers, infographics, webinars, etc.) automatically becoming leads.
This is why the central core of smarketing, as we have already mentioned, is the generation of leads since if we continue with the chain of this methodology, the next step will be to transform those sales opportunities into customers.
Marketing + sales: smarketing
If we delve deeper into the functions involved in this process, both the marketing team and the sales team have a high role in this stage.
The first because it develops techniques to capture those leads (content marketing, SEO, blogging) and the second, because it is responsible for stimulating a final purchase in these people (email marketing, CMR, personalized attention), finally converting them into potential clients for the companies. companies.
In this sense, the marketing team is responsible for transferring these sales opportunities and their contact information to the sales team, who is responsible for closing the purchasing process by personally communicating with these users and addressing their needs individually.
If we understand how the inbound marketing methodology works, both tasks (marketing and sales) are sufficiently explicit to condense into a larger strategy the importance of teamwork within these two areas to achieve common goals and improve. company income.
Next, we invite you to learn about the benefits of aligning your marketing team with your sales team for the proper functioning of your company at all times:
1. Greater understanding of your buyer personas
Buyer personas are defined as profiles structured with real and semi-fictional data that companies create to understand in depth how the mentality of their potential buyers works, with the aim of building appropriate content strategies for them.
These profiles allow you to know what the motivations and needs of your clients are (and the people who can meet those same characteristics) to know exactly what to sell (products and/or services), how to sell it (messages to use) and through what platforms (social networks, blogs, etc.).
If your marketing team is perfectly aligned with your sales team, together they will be able to collect valuable information that progressively feeds the characteristics of these profiles.
For example: marketing obtains information from them by monitoring social networks and observing comments on published content, while sales delves into that information in the conversations it has with customers, through emails and phone calls.
Both teams will be able to help you improve the understanding of your buyer personas, since if together they set the common goal of knowing the needs of the people who connect with your brand, the content and marketing strategies you generate, they will become more and more correct and therefore successful.
2. Growth in annual income
According to a study by Aberdeen Group, companies that have strong alignment between marketing and sales achieve 20% annual revenue growth.
If we compare this data with companies that are unaware of the importance of smarketing, this variable decreases by 4%. When both departments follow the same rhythm and have the same objectives in terms of the number of sales to be made in a given time, it is much easier to complete and obtain transactions exponentially.
The sales team will know exactly who they are communicating with, how to sell to them and what their needs are, thanks to the information that the marketing team has been collecting. Therefore, sales will simply be in charge of completing a job that has been built little by little by the marketing team.
On the other hand, it is well known that people generate a purchase when they trust both the product, content and/or service they are consuming, as well as the equipment that is selling them.
The close relationship that a telemarketer within this team can generate with potential clients, as a result of that prior knowledge provided by another group of specialists, becomes the key to increasing the number of sales, ROI and of course, annual income.
3. A more pleasant work environment
Smarketing must also be understood as an effort to strategically align the objectives of the marketing department with those of sales, which historically have been characterized by being conflicting with each other, precisely because they have different objectives.
Regarding this, Hubspot (a pioneering company in inbound marketing) reveals that 87% of the terms that marketing and sales use to describe each other are negative. For example:
Inbound marketing and especially smarketing seek to break this terrible habit and show companies an effective way to create a more pleasant work environment.
As we have already observed, marketing and sales must have the same language and share information between them. This constant communication and exchange of knowledge will avoid that antagonism that has characterized both departments for decades, promoting inclusion and education between them.
The marketing team will always have something valuable to learn from the sales team and vice versa. The central idea is to visualize them as two halves of the same team and not as completely opposite areas, because at the end of the day, together they represent the spinal cord of the company’s growth.
Therefore, being constantly in contact (dispensing with derogatory adjectives) should be a prolonged practice.
Having your sales and marketing team aligned will be key to the growth of your company’s revenue and at the same time, it will help you internally develop stronger relationships between the members of your organization.
