Smarketing is the new buzzword

Sales and marketing have been a widely used strategy by a business owner in order for them to achieve their profit target. However, with the current business environment where customer relies mostly on product reviews and recommendation instead of salespeople before buying a product creating a need for sales and marketing team to work together.

Hence the term "smarketing" was coined by HubPoint, which means integrated sales and marketing strategy. Smarketing means that both marketing and sales processes is aligned where both departments have clear roles and one goal to achieve, according to Financial Advisor.

According to Entrepreneur, both teams shares the same goal which is to increase company's revenue. By using a clear smarketing technique, both teams will be able to work together better to achieve the goal in this ever changing B2B market.

It is important for the future small business owner to develop a good smarketing technique stressed Peter Strohknob in Marketing Magazine. Since collaboration between both team will ensure customer's satisfaction and loyalty.

He also added that "If your organisation is not either overhauling or fine-tuning this important right now, you can be sure that your competitors are."

Jason Wesbecher, CMO at Mattersight, outlined several steps that future business could take when creating their smarketing strategy on Entrepreneur. He said that both sales and marketing teams need to know the target customer. By knowing this, the team could understand how to approach this customer and how the product offered is great for them.

Once the target audience is known, the team should focus on creating a good lead and the amount of lead needed for the product. This can be achieved via service-level agreement where both marketing and salespeople will understand the collaboration and support required to make a sale.

In Financial Advisor, Gail Graham divides the level of collaboration between marketing and sales into three funnel stage which is top, middle and sales opportunities. For top stage, the marketing team will create product awareness to the customer through advertisement, public relation, and branding while salespeople will personally greet the customer and talks about the product.

For the middle stage, the marketing team will engage with customers via email and collecting data for qualified leads. The data will be passed on to the sales team to make the calls and connect with the potential customer.

For the sales opportunities stage, marketing will provide salespeople with the needed material and sales support while sales team will use the gathered information to close on a deal and getting profit for the company.