SMarketing is the process of aligning marketing and sales to work toward a common goal, drive revenue growth, and better serve prospects by enhancing the buyer's journey from first touch to customer decision. SMarketing alignment creates a seamless customer experience that echoes the values of an inbound organization.

Sales tends to focus on the 3% of buyers ready to buy now.¹ Marketing tends to focus on top-of-the-funnel metrics like impressions, visits, and total leads. SMarketing, however, focuses on building a team that addresses the concerns of buyers from the first touch through the life of the relationship.

Aligning sales and marketing teams is not simplistic. Most marketing executives get excited about the opportunity to work with their sales counterparts because it gives them more visibility, more influence, and a direct connection to revenue. It is usually the sales team that needs support and encouragement to move in this direction.

SMarketing is the best way to respond to the changes in buyer behavior defined in the first chapters of this book. Because buyers are spending more time researching online before they engage with a salesperson, lead nurturing becomes a more important component of the entire sales process. Organizations that implement SMarketing have a 20% increase in revenue. Those that don't see an average 4% decline in revenue.²

SMarketing makes it easy for sales because they connect to more qualified opportunities with a deep understanding of who they are talking with and ultimately close more deals. SMarketing creates better lead intelligence about the prospect and whether they fit into the ideal company profile.

SMarketing teams require a unified view of the customer to deliver value throughout the buyer journey.

Organizations practicing SMarketing provide sales with detailed individual contact lead intelligence. Examples include how many times the contact has been to the website, what content they looked at, emails they have opened, and links they have clicked through. It also includes lead notification emails or texts for these buyer behaviors as well as when someone is active on the website. SMarketing provides better lead intelligence through the entire buyer journey because this unified team views all points of the process from the first touch through the life of the relationship. The buyer journey is not separated into a marketing part and a sales part. It is viewed as one unified whole.

SMarketing provides a lead scoring mechanism that makes it easy for salespeople to spend more time with high-value prospects, rather than having to make their own decision about contact priority. SMarketing helps salespeople update current proposal templates, suggest the best content to deliver at the right stage, and automate low-value tasks.

SMarketing makes it easy for marketing teams as well because they can be sure the prospects are treated appropriately through the entire buying process. SMarketing teams have better access to data about engagement and follow up with high-quality leads. SMarketing requires the development of common goals, which ensures that high-quality leads are tracked down with multiple attempts, so good leads aren't wasted.

SMarketing teams generate better content by working together to create top-of-the-funnel content offers. Salespeople answer prospect and customer questions all day long. These answers are the best, most attractive content for inbound marketing initiatives. By publishing answers to common sales questions, the SMarketing team generates more interest around the topics that prospects care about. SMarketing makes it easy for marketing because they get a better understanding of what content works at each stage of the sales funnel.

SMarketing is essential if you want to be an inbound organization. You can't transform into an inbound organization without the alignment of these departments. If you educate and nurture prospects through the beginning phase of the buyer journey, but the sales team engages with traditional sales tactics, any trust that has been built through the process will be impacted.

Brian Signorelli, HubSpot director of the Global Sales Partner Program, says this about SMarketing:

After decades of discord, why would any leader care more about aligning their sales and marketing teams than in the past? One fundamental reason is that buyers have changed their behavior in such a way that requires tighter alignment between sales and marketing than ever before. Buyers, your potential customers, are delaying engaging with sales reps while consuming more and more content. So, if marketing isn't producing the right content at the right time, or the sales team doesn't know which content to share at the right time (with the right people), your company is not only going to be completely irrelevant to buyers, but it will experience eroding sales over time.³

The sales team still has a profound impact on every deal. But if a prospect is doing 60 to 80% of their research online, then a modern salesperson needs to approach this prospect with the right attitude and a consistent process that reflects the philosophy of helping people first. Using traditional sales tactics on an inbound lead annoys people. Have you ever downloaded an e-book, and someone calls you two minutes later, without any research or context, and tries to push you to a demo?

Traditional organizations give an annual quota to the sales team. Inbound organizations create a shared revenue goal between marketing and sales, tie marketing to a revenue forecast, and make marketing it an investment rather than an expense.

Implementing SMarketing

There are three key steps to creating a SMarketing department:

1. Develop a common vocabulary.
2. Set common goals.
3. Create a service level agreement (SLA).

Developing a common vocabulary between marketing and sales starts with everyone agreeing on the ideal buyer persona and buyer journey. SMarketing requires agreement on definitions for leads, deal stages, and team actions. Other areas of common vocabulary include defining lead quality, handoffs between marketing and sales, lifecycle stages, and responsibilities for taking action steps.

If you ask your marketing and sales people to define a lead, will you get a consistent response? Is there agreement on a common definition?

SMarketing teams define lead stages and specify when a contact enters a particular stage. For example, when a buyer is ready to move from the Awareness to the Consideration stage, there is a point where they desire to become more engaged and talk to a salesperson. How do you define this transition point? Do marketing and sales even agree on what this point is? SMarketing teams recognize this point and agree on the hand-off process (see Figure 22.1).

Common lead stages include an MQL (marketing qualified lead), a contact at a company who has filled out a form on a landing page or started a trial, and an SQL (sales qualified lead), a contact who has requested a salesperson to call them.