The Power of Smarketing

Hello Everybody,

Today I'm going to introduce you to the concept of Smarketing with tips and tools from Hubspot that will help you with your search engine optimizing. This is the second class of the close section in inbound methodology.

According to Hubspot, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment get 20% annual revenue growth. To do this we remind both sales and marketing that we're all on the same team. There are different way to create this type of mentality, and one of them is to align both departments around the same goals. Allow visibility into each other's goals and progress. Provide compensation based on each others goals. It is also good to have alignment around personas. Communicate persona details across the company, educate each other about new persona details, and specialize teams around particular personas.

In order to complete these types of alignments Hubspot provided 5 steps to integrate Smarketing.

1. Speak to Same Language- Keep in mind that sales is a numbers driven division, so it helps when you integrate numbers into the marketing divisions. Base you marketing goals by taking your sales goals and working backwards. Also you map the buyer's journey to the lifecycle stages. Only 45% of business have stabled a companywide definition of a sales-ready lead. A sales-ready lead is a person that's a great fit lead with high level of interest. You also need to define the handoff process and your buyer persona as a group.


2. Set up Closed-Loop Reporting- There are questions you should ask yourself when setting up closed-loop reporting, such as 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 slews with the basic contact information without intelligence about what content those leads consumed?  And Are you unsure of the impact your marketing efforts have on revenue? The concept of closed-loop reporting is to complete the feedback loops between marketing and sales. It benefits marketing by getting them up to date contact info and status updates, learn which marketing programs are working and which aren't and increase marketing ROI. It benefits sales by de-duplicate leads, help prioritize leads, help make warmer calls, and increases close rates and sales ROI. Types of closed-loop reporting include: closed loop lead intelligence, closed loop CRM integration, and closed loop lead alerts. 


3. Implement a Service Level Agreement- Service Level Agreement or SLA for short, defines what each team commits to accomplishing in order to support the other. It crystalizes the alignment around the goals. To calculate marketing to sales know how many lead of a certain quality does a sales rep need to make quote. To calculate sales to marketing know how many call/email attempts to engage should a sales rep make to every lead and most waste leads.


4. Maintain Open Communication-Ways to maintain open communication include implementing weekly smarting meetings and if your business is larger have monthly management meetings. Have campaign communication by marketing your campaigns to your sales team and share the information they need in order to be successful. Have product communication by sharing updates about products and services- arm the sales team with the details and why customers/prospects will care.


5. Rely on Data-A good way to relay data is through the use of dashboards. Create and share a common dashboard with the reports aligned with the teams' goals. Check the dashboard daily and encourage individuals to fix problems. Dashboards are frequent, public and transparent. You can have different dashboards for different things such as a marketing dashboard for measuring and communicating the progress towards primary goals. They can be used to track leads by source, track leads by campaign, track volume of MQLs money marketing reports, sales by day, and sales activity reports. 

Remember when things don't go according to plan, rely on data not emotions- separate reality from perception.

-Caitlin Campbell