Aligning Marketing and Sales: the Smarketing Meeting

[tonmoypramanik]

The Smarketing Meeting, an essential regular meeting
To align Marketing and Sales, you need to work on 3 things:

Determine common goals ;
Define together the typical profile of your ideal prospect ;
Implement a content strategy adapted to the purchasing journey ;
These 3 elements must be detailed in black and white in an official document, the SLA – Service Level Agreement – ​​to promote collaboration between the 2 services.

These actions are essential but are not sufficient . To maintain good collaboration norway email list between Marketing and Sales, it is important to organize a regular meeting between them to discuss areas for improvement and the performance of both departments.

Smarketing Meeting yes, acute meetingitis no
Studies on the subject continue to show that we spend far too much time in meetings. So why organize one more?

The idea of ​​the Smarketing Meeting is not to organize yet another endless meeting: the objective is to promote collaboration between Marketing and Sales and to maintain their good relationship.

It is important to keep this in mind to organize an effective Smartketing Meeting.

4 steps for an effective Smarketing Meeting


1. Invite the right people
The nature of the participants will have a direct impact on the quality of your Smarketing Meeting. You must skillfully invite participants to ensure that:

Keeping Marketing and Sales on an equal footing.
Promote exchanges.
Stay in a small committee.
It is important to keep the CEO or members of the management committee away from your Smarketing Meeting . The reason is simple: if they are present, salespeople and marketers will be less likely to participate.

Another important point: try not to invite the same people over the course of meetings . The goal of the Smarketing Meeting is to raise your head from the handlebars and bring out new ideas.



2. Find the right frequency
For our clients, we generally plan to organize a Smarketing Meeting every week, but the frequency may vary depending on the specificities of your company.

It is still important to plan a Smarketing Meeting at least once a month . Beyond that, your Marketing and Sales alignment will suffer.

You can also organize a larger Smarketing Meeting every quarter to discuss the performance of the two departments in more depth.



3. Identify areas for improvement to be addressed
To avoid falling into meetingitis, you must define an agenda for your Smarketing Meeting and do everything possible to get something concrete out of it.

At our clients, we conduct a performance review of the two departments over the past week and identify areas for improvement .
Our goal is to discuss with Marketing and Sales to understand the obstacles they encounter and implement concrete actions as soon as the meeting ends.

When you write an SLA to align Marketing and Sales, it is very likely that the commitments you have defined will not be optimal: the Smarketing Meeting will therefore allow you to make regular modifications.



4. Make the Smarketing Meeting a testing ground
The Smarketing Meeting must be a time for experimentation: each participant must share with the others their vision, their understanding of the problems and the actions they think they should implement to solve them.

Not only will this allow you to optimize your Marketing and Sales strategy, but it will also strengthen the relationship between Marketing and Sales .