The path to seamless sales-marketing alignment is a marathon, not a sprint. As you work to refine company culture and collaborative best practices, consider using these tips to get your smarketing strategy up and running:
- Schedule recurring smarketing meetings
Routine meetings and events make it easy for teams to stay close to their smarketing counterparts. Set up regular meetings to review current campaigns, hear the latest insights from the sales team, and check in on progress toward shared goals. Outside of these syncs, look for additional opportunities to connect by shadowing sales calls or hosting show-and-tells to highlight the latest converting marketing material.
- Create a cross-team email alias or slack channel
Convenience is the key to effective internal communication. Make it easy for your sales and marketing teams to update one another on the latest happenings or share critical knowledge by setting up a shared email alias, like sales-marketing@hubspot.com, or creating a dedicated smarketing slack channel that integrates with your HubSpot instance.
- Encourage calendar transparency
Transparent calendars help build collaborative relationships, promote trust, and define shared responsibilities. Decide which department-level calendars to share, or ask respective sales and marketing leaders to grant each other full calendar visibility so they can see what’s on the horizon across both teams.
- Collaborate on sales content
Consistency is integral to smarketing — and customer satisfaction. Rather than producing content in silos, ask marketers to lean into sales feedback on the types of content that resonate best with their prospects and customers. Salespeople have a direct line to your customers, which means they have a pretty good idea of customer preferences.
- Create a one-stop shop for all things content
Great content shouldn’t go unnoticed. Centralize and share all of your marketing team’s content assets in an accessible repository, and give teams the management tools to track content performance. This all-in-one repository will give sales teams easy access to valuable materials and marketers access to engagement metrics to identify common knowledge gaps.
- Update buyer personas every quarter
As your company scales, your ideal customers may evolve in turn. Partner up once per quarter — or more if your company is undergoing drastic changes — to review your existing buyer personas and ideal customer profiles (ICPs). Discuss what’s working, which characteristics are on the mark, and what could use some improvement, then work together to make updates as needed.
- Share revenue goals across departments
Shared goals promote shared accountability and transparency across marketing and sales teams. Promote transparency around revenue goals and other critical milestones between departments. Sharing these goals makes it much easier to accelerate successful efforts and pinpoint the strategies that require more investing.
- Let marketers shadow sales calls
Internal syncs are essential for collaboration, but even the most insightful internal meetings don’t hold a candle to gathering feedback directly from your customers. Invite marketers to sales calls or share call recordings via conversation intelligence tools to give them firsthand insight into prospects’ biggest questions, concerns, and challenges.
- Make it easy for teams to adopt new solutions
Get everyone at your organization as excited about their new smarketing tools as you are. Invest in training to bring teams up to speed on the latest tools and systems. You can tap your solutions providers for live training sessions and lean on free resources like HubSpot Academy to help everyone learn the ins and outs of your new software.
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Connecting the Dots Between Sales and Marketing
Developing an attainable smarketing strategy requires patience and determination, along with reliable tools designed to support your teams over time.
If you’re reading all this and realizing your team could benefit from a sophisticated, scalable multi-hub marketing and sales solution, our experts are happy to connect with you.
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