It might sound like a brand new concept but the notion of smarketing has actually been around for almost 20 years now.
Here’s the easiest way to understand what it is. Imagine sales and marketing are both superheroes – no, stay with me! – and they meet and fall in love and have a wee baby.
That baby grows up into a superhero too and, lo and behold, the name they’re given is smarketing.
Now, with superpowers derived directly from mom and dad, smarketing is able to harness the strength of sales and the mastery of marketing.
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And their mission? To use these powers to promote products or services to potential buyers across the globe.
Of course, as with most superheroes – think Thor’s hammer and Doctor Strange’s cloak – there are certain ways smarketing can boost those abilities.
Communication
When sales teams and marketing departments get together regularly and analyse the combined data learned from outbound and inbound marketing, there is a much greater chance of overall success.
Working together in this way – and using the same easy-to-understand language at meetings – can quickly lead to improved customer insights.
In fact, one study by the Aberdeen Group showed the perfect working alignment of sales and marketing employees can generate an increase of up to 20% in revenue growth.
Strategy
While both sales and marketing are adept at identifying prospects, inbound marketing can introduce the power of blogs, website traffic, SEOs, social media platforms and e-newsletters into the mix.
This can form part of an overall strategy – with defined objectives and KPIs – that combine different tactics to build brand awareness and improve client engagement.
Follow-up
It’s one thing having good prospects, it’s another following up to see how successful they turned out to be.
Smarketing is strongest when a company uses so-called closed loop reporting – this is the method of tracking success from the marketing stage right through to direct sales efforts.
By using this data, both teams will see if targets are being hit – and, if not, how this can be remedied.
The sales teams at some of the world’s biggest corporations are pioneering smarketing to help drive their business.
If you’d like to discover more about the power of smarketing in the world of selling, take a look at the latest Sales vacancies on s1jobs.