In many companies there is constant tension between the sales and marketing departments. The people in sales complain that marketing never gives them good quality (read that as “qualified”) leads. Marketing people complain that the salespeople never do anything with the leads that they give them. The battle has been going on for a long time. Savvy companies, however, are looking for better ways to align their sales and marketing capacities—bringing them together through something some are calling “Smarketing.”
The way things have traditionally worked is that marketing generates a lead, passes it off to sales—and nobody in marketing know what happens after that. But there’s a new approach for companies that are taking an inbound approach to marketing. In these companies, the generation of a lead triggers a workflow process that provides actionable intelligence. Visitors to a company’s website are followed from the moment they land on the website all the way through their conversion (using a lead capture form), to the point that they become a customer.
Sales and marketing are both seeing what happens to leads. And this helps marketing to develop and produce more effective content (because they can see what’s working). It also helps marketing identify which lead sources are productive—and which aren’t generating the kind of results they want.
Automatically closing the loop between sales and marketing enables both departments to do their job better. And if it’s an automated process, it doesn’t put “one more thing” on the plate of an already busy salesperson. Bringing the efforts of sales and marketing together is just smart. Hey! Maybe they’ll start calling it “Smartketing!”
Want to know more? Take a look at the following post about “Smarketing” from our friends at HubSpot.
Blog Post Written by Spencer Powell
Spencer is the Inbound Marketing Director at TMR Direct. Spencer specializes in helping clients create and execute effective inbound marketing campaigns.