The sales and marketing departments within a company must work very closely together. Both ultimately have the same function for the company: winning new orders. In many companies, the collaboration between marketing and sales is not optimal. Sales calls potential customers too early, causing them to drop out. Or marketing does not provide all the relevant information to sales, leaving salespeople with unexpected questions during the sales conversations.
Smarketing: integrated sales and marketing
In many companies, marketing and sales are two strictly separate departments. They are located in separate rooms and each has its own director. Both departments report based on their own indicators. The result is poor transfer of marketing to sales. The transfer takes place too late or too early, or the transfer of information is incomplete.
Smarketing is an approach where sales and marketing work together in an integrated manner. In this approach, marketing and sales agree on the terminology they use and the data and KPIs on which reporting is based. Staff from both teams work closely together. In some organizations, for example, the marketing and sales departments are housed in the same space. In marketing, members of the sales team are involved in developing a campaign, while marketing professionals listen in on evaluations of sales processes.
Goals of marketing and sales
No matter how well your marketing and sales teams work together, they still have different interests. Although they ultimately have the same goal, selling products or services, both teams use different indicators to measure their success.
The task of the marketing team is to ensure that leads are generated, that there is a good ROI from marketing, and that the cost per contact, lead, or customer is as low as possible. Sales prefers to convert leads as quickly as possible into customers. This sometimes conflicts with each other. In many organizations, marketing is measured by the number of leads, while sales is measured by the conversion ratio.
Six things that are important for sales
These conflicting interests between sales and marketing lead to questions. How do you ensure that marketing and sales help each other as optimally as possible? For example, what does sales need from marketing to function as well as possible?
1. Tuning
Good coordination between sales and marketing is crucial for the ultimate success of sales. The coordination concerns the basis of the marketing campaigns. Which solutions are being promoted most? Which personas are these campaigns aimed at? What type of customers are marketing intended to reach and what does this mean for the sales team?
2. Transfer
It is important that marketing qualified leads that have been converted into sales qualified leads are transferred from marketing to sales. Sales must therefore know when a lead is ‘ready’ to be called. If sales calls too early, the chance is high that the lead will hang up. Your organization needs hard criteria for when a lead can be considered as being sales qualified.
3. Understanding the customer
Sales needs information about a potential customer. When marketing passes on a lead, sales wants to know as much as possible about it. Did the customer attend an event and do we know who they spoke to there? In which information has the lead shown the most interest? This information is necessary for sales to make the sales process as efficient as possible.
4. Clarifying reports
Marketing and sales are often two separate teams, even in organizations that work with marketing. To ensure that marketing does not pass leads that are not yet ready to buy, it is important to report on goals that involve both sales and marketing. If marketing delivers good sales qualified leads that are easy to convert, they too deserve the credit, especially when this means that more costs are incurred by marketing.
5. Understanding the marketing plans
It will only happen to you as a sales manager. Just when three people in your sales team are on vacation, marketing comes with a whole bunch of new leads. Their latest campaign with an e-book was a huge success. The sales people who are still there are working their butts off, but they don’t have enough time to keep up with all the leads. A large portion of the leads, some of them promising, drop off and have a bad impression of your company.
As a sales department, you would also like to have insight into the marketing calendar. That way you know when you need to quickly switch gears to convert promising leads. Conversely, you also know when you can spend more time on leads that don’t convert as quickly.
6. Understanding the competition
Of course, as a company you should focus as much as possible on positioning your own brand. But there is always competition, and the competition sometimes adapts its strategy as well. As the sales department, you expect your marketing department to keep an eye on the competition. This way, you can quickly respond to changes in the supply.
In summary
The information that marketing provides to sales determines, to a large extent, the success of sales. Does sales receive the right information about potential customers, for example about the exact customer request? Does marketing properly assess whether a customer is ready to be contacted? Is there a good alignment regarding the content of campaigns and their timing?
Ultimately, there is a correlation between marketing and sales, or smarketing. If sales and marketing use the same terminology and the same data, they can work together to achieve their goals. It is also of great importance to measure the results of marketing and sales throughout the entire sales funnel. For this, it is of great importance that both departments communicate openly with each other and work together.