November kiwi HUG re-cap: What is SMarketing?

A big thank you to everyone who came to our last Kiwi HUG of 2018! These events are the ultimate opportunity to meet, grow and share with like-minded Inbound Marketers in Auckland.

This event’s theme was around a little concept that HubSpot cleverly named, ‘SMarketing’. We got an engaging rundown from our guest speaker and go-to HubSpot guru, Varun Bhandarkar.

Missed the event? No worries, we’ve got a full recap plus more for you right here.

What is SMarketing?

First things first, what is SMarketing? It’s simply the alignment and communication between your sales and marketing teams. The big goal is to bring both teams together so they have a common integrated approach.

Why you should practice SMarketing

People are changing the way they buy - they’re educating themselves and they’re coming to salespeople with that information. But as customers shop around your site, all their data is captured by marketers. This information shouldn’t go to waste.

Giving that data to sales reps empowers them with information to make interactions more personalised and consultative. Ultimately, this brings more value to the lead, and more opportunity to close the deal.

When these two teams are working harmoniously, companies achieve 20% annual growth rate, compared to a decline of 4% in annual revenue of companies with poor alignment, so says Varun and HubSpot data.

These are numbers that businesses can’t ignore!

So, for any salesperson who’s ever complained about the marketing department not sending them qualified leads, and for any marketer who’s ever questioned the sales department's abilities… SMarketing.

Easy ways to get started

At this point, SMarketing is starting to make sense, but you’re probably also wondering how to make it work practically in your business. It could potentially mean a whole new reshuffle of your processes.

Well don’t worry - we won’t leave you high and dry. We’ve got a couple of easy tactics to help you get started.

Step 1: Get on the same page

Agree on common terminology and use data throughout the entire sales and marketing processes so everyone is able to identify good prospects and to assess how those prospects are followed up.

As a start, redefine your lifecycle stages to make your funnel more specific. From top working to the bottom break your funnel down as follows:Prospect/Visitor

• Lead

• MQL

• SQL

• Opportunity

• Customer

This will help you organise your contacts to give you a clear picture of where they all stand in your marketing and sales processes and create better overall interactions with them.

Step 2: Set up goals for each team

In order for SMarketing to work, you need to ensure there’s mutual accountability for each team.

These goals should ultimately work together in a never-ending loop, from marketing to sales, and sales to marketing.

• Marketing to sales: Number and quality of leads required to hit company revenue goals

• Sales to marketing: Speed and depth of lead follow-up that makes economic sense

Importantly, you need to set up service level agreements (SLA), as this contract between the service provider and the end user will define the level of service expected from the service provider.|

Step 3: Bring everyone together once a month

Once you’re talking the talk and walking the walk, bring everyone together to see how their results are going. These should be monthly meetings to ensure your goals are on track, holding both teams accountable.

In these meetings, your teams want to evaluate and re-evaluate your goals in order to identify opportunities for improvements.