Five ways to check the health of your sales and marketing

We can thanks Mad Men for the notorious rivalry between the sales and marketing teams in most businesses. Sure, in front of the directors and CEOs there is always a faked cohesion, with much back slapping and friendly banter that happens. But as soon as the big bosses disappear it usually descends into kindergarten-esque name calling from both sides. In fact, in a recent presentation, Hubspot pointed out that “87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative” 87% of the terms sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative”

However, with the creation of the inbound marketing process, the once distinct line between the IT sales and marketing teams has become increasingly blurred. This is especially true in B2B agencies that rely less on a sales team and more on quality content creation, case studies and other strategies from the marketing team in order to acquire clients.

What is ‘smarketing’?

This merging of sales and marketing teams has been given the term ‘smarketing’. Which, without going into too much detail, really refers to the integration of a company’s sales and marketing strategies into one awesome, well-oiled, revenue-making machine.

In this blog post I will be showing you five ways to check whether your sales and marketing team are smarketing-ready.

So, how can you check if your IT sales and marketing strategy is broken?

1. Does your marketing team think that your sales team are a**holes?

In his book, To Sell is Human, Daniel Pink asked people to finish the sentence “Sales people are….”,  and the most common answers were “pushy”, “sleazy”, “dishonest” and “manipulative”. Real nice, right? Well, unfortunately these stereotypes might lodge themselves within your company too.

The bottom line is that if your marketing team believes these stereotypes and think the sales team are a bunch of a**holes,hen your strategy needs some serious work.

2. Does your sales team think that your marketing team are fairies?

Over the years, there have been many names and stereotypes bandied about for those that work in marketing I’ve heard everything from “artsy fartsy” and “away with the fairies”, to “frivolous and flaky”, with my personal favourite being “they know nothing about numbers”.

These days, due to huge technological advancements in both IT sales and marketing, the marketing team are no longer just creatives.Most will be just as tech-savvy and mathematically competent as any sales team member.

If your sales team members are under the impression that your colleagues are fairies, with their heads in the clouds, then your strategy is definitely not doing what it should be.

3. Do your sales and marketing teams meet weekly?

This is an easy one. If your teams are not meeting regularly to go over their strategies and successes then you don’t have a ‘smarketing’ team. You have a separate sales and marketing team, who are not working together.

If you answered no to this – your strategy needs fixing.

4. Do you have an SLA agreement between the sales and marketing team?

Firstly, if you have no idea what an SLA is then your marketing strategy is probably not working. A service-level agreement is a two-way dialogue and strategy between the marketing and sales teams. This agreement outlines how the two teams should assist and support each other.

A ‘smarketing’ SLA should commit the marketing team to generating a certain amount of leads in a given period of time, and establish how fast the sales teams need to act on leads in order to acquire clients.

If you don’t have a comprehensive SLA between the teams, then your strategy may not be as accountable as it could be.

5. Do you have a blog and social media presence?

Unless you have been living under a rock since the 90’s, you should know that without a blog or social media presence, your company is going to go to a place where no living person will ever lay eyes on it: Google’s fourth search page. A touch dramatic perhaps, but I think you get the point.

Simply put: you need content creation and a social media presence for your company to succeed. If you don’t have these, then your strategy is not just broken – it may as well not exist.

The growing use of an inbound strategy in IT sales and marketing has presented companies with the unique opportunity to get their most essential teams to work together on increasing revenue. The Hubspot CRM Demo Hubspot CRM Demo is a great place to start if you are looking into an inbound marketing strategy for your company that “eliminates manual work and helps your sales team sell”, by integrating the most important facets in the inbound marketing process.

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 Image Credit: http://www.marketing-for-business.com/