How many times have you heard from the sales team that they need more leads, more leads, MORE LEADS. And you hear from the marketing team that they don’t know what happens to all the leads they gave to sales. Are they quality leads? Are they following up with these leads? Did anyone follow up with the lead? What happened to the lead?!?!
HubSpot reports that 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative. We have to change that, otherwise we will not succeed. As many Shark Tank contestants say, “There has to be a better way!”
Sales and marketing are often disjointed in most B2B companies because they work as separate departments who have different goals and separate reporting. It can be difficult to connect the two together, but now with inbound marketing we don’t really have a choice. The lines have become very blurry between sales and marketing because both departments write content, share it with their prospects, send emails to nurture them, and track them either in a database or CRM. Sales has their ear to the ground, the data they have about the customer is amazing and marketing needs to hear it. Old school sales tactics don't work as well anymore, like dialing for dollars. Sales teams need their marketing team to send them opportunities, but they need to be quality over quantity. It’s time to bring these touch points together and ultimately start working together so you can learn from each other, grow together, and take over the world together (....okay, that might be a little extreme).Our team at StringCan believes in the power of Smarketing and works closely with our client's sales and marketing teams to create this alignment. We've worked with many different marketing automation platforms, and have found that HubSpot makes it simple to bring everything together. Lucky for us, we are based in Arizona and HubSpot's #6 employee, Dan Tyre, resides in our state and is the person that coined the term "Smarketing." We created this infographic that explains how your company should start on the same page by creating a smart business strategy, then align the sales and marketing teams with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that ensures your team has the same goals for their inbound marketing efforts, the touch points sales will have to create Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), the touch points marketing will have to create Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), how they will be organized in a joint database, and finally how you will measure the effectiveness of the campaigns through closed-loop reporting.
Here’s what we are proposing regarding sales and marketing. Use the inbound methodology to create alignment between the departments and a marketing automation system to funnel your leads through a strategic Smarketing process.
How does your company align your sales and marketing team? Share your experiences below!
Work Habits & Productivity
Jay, the CEO of StringCan, oversees strategy and vision, building culture that makes going into work something he looks forward to, recruiting additional awesome team members to help exceed clients goals, leading the team and allocating where StringCan invests time and money.
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