If you’re in a leadership role in any part of a B2B organizational chart, no one has to tell you that the marketing department is costly, and the sales department is expensive. Marketing campaigns can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars a month to a couple hundred thousand dollars a month — and there’s never just one single campaign. When it comes to the sales side, salaries, commissions, travel, entertainment, and other miscellaneous expenses— roll in like a tidal wave.
As a result, and not surprisingly, B2B leadership wants to get the best possible return on its investment in sales and marketing. However, unfortunately for many B2Bs, when there’s a lack of alignment between sales and marketing teams, it can cause an ROI implosion relating to revenue, customer retention and close rates all suffering as a result.
A lack of organizational alignment is easy to spot when you talk to people in the marketing and sales trenches. Sales reps will tell you that the leads from the marketing campaigns are terrible. Marketers will tell you the sales reps don’t actively participate in their marketing campaigns or communicate them poorly. Sales reps are using one standard to measure their success and earn their paycheck while marketers are using another standard that is entirely different.
It should be no surprise when customers get confused, grow indifferent and take their business elsewhere.
To solve this problem of misalignment and to take smoothly functioning sales and marketing teams to an even higher level of success, savvy B2B organizations can implement a smarketing strategy.
What is smarketing? The resource below, Smarketing: Aligning Your B2B Sales & Marketing Teams, provides a crash course and overview of what smarketing is. It also explains why it’s fundamentally important and includes the basic steps needed for introducing a successful smarketing strategy.
At its core, Smarketingsimplymeans bringing your sales and marketing functions into alignment – to play on the same team. It may be simple to explain, but it can be far from easy to achieve. Smarketing requires sales and marketing teams to work together. They need to share information, collaborate on sales and marketing initiatives, work toward common goals, participate in collective incentive programs, communicate effectively, and learn to give and take constructive criticism from the other side. For some organizations, the activities just described involve fairly easy-to-digest changes; for others,marketing may require a profound adjustment in work habits and the entire company culture.
No matter how easy or challenging smarketing may be for your companyto implement, the payoff is huge: Instead of your sales and marketing departments cancelling each other out, you’ll have them working together — to eliminate the competition. To learn more about smarketing, check out the accompanying resource.
Author bio: Grant Clarke is Senior Vice President of Global Sales Operations and Pre-Sales Consulting at ServiceSource. His experience and knowledge uniquely position Clarke to scale his capabilities to ensure ServiceSource is focused on improving the customer journey for the company’s clients.
This infographic was created by ServiceSource