Marketing and Sales alignment

During the last few years, I have witnessed that one of the most common failures in business is the complete separation of the marketing department from the sales department or vice versa.

While the sales team is forecasting, preparing quarterly Bottoms Up, or finding out how to increase the ticket of existing clients ( all of these approaches centers at the bottom of the funnel),  the marketing team is setting up campaigns, building a content calendar, reviewing and validating communication channels with a completely different scope of Awareness or Acquisition Top Funnels strategies. The results? : at the end of the day almost always the marketing team is guilty because they are not aligned with the business model and only communicate TOFU ( Top Of Funnel ), communications with non-performance actions that bring prospects or new clients.

This scenario can be avoided if the Head of Sales and the Head of Marketing prepare their teams with a strategic alignment, the objective? work together, secure that both departments know the business model and how they can achieve the business’s main objective, both departments manage a lot of important data so they have to use it. 

So “SMarketing” is the alignment of both departments. With this approach, they can:

• Pursue the main goal of the company. 
• Create metrics that both can use to reach the goal. 
• Both teams will know what are the insights of the action they take together, analyze, replicate or improve actions. 
• Both teams will find what is the principal channel that brings the most sales.

How to implement SMarketing

In my perception and experience, the way to implement SMarketing in a corporation is by following at least these steps:

• The sales team must show how the pipeline is composed, what kind of industries, and who is the buyer persona also known as the decision maker. This will give the marketing team the signals of where and how to communicate. 
• The marketing team presents how the conversion funnel works and indicates which clients they think are present in which stages of the funnel.
• Weekly meetings for reviewing the last week and planning the next week 
• Build common metrics that permit both departments to move forward together. 

It is proved that when SMarketing is applied in business, the main indicators like revenue increase, cost per acquisition decrease, and quality of prospecting increase.