Smarketing

Smarketing (a blend of sales and marketing) is the practice of making sales and marketing work as one team on the same revenue objective.

It rests on three fixed points:

• the same data for both functions;
• the same definition of a qualified lead (a contact that meets the requirements to be handled by sales);
• a written agreement on what marketing hands over to sales and on what sales return, that is the outcome of every contact worked.

The term is attributed to Dan Tyre and Mike Volpe, who are said to have coined it around 2007. No primary document confirms it, so this entry reports it as an attribution. The problem the term names is older than the term: the separation between marketing and sales, which in structured companies becomes contacts lost at the handover.

Smarketing is the daily form of marketing and sales alignment: it keeps the principle and turns it into a habit of the team:

• joint meetings between the two functions;
• shared objectives;
• an SLA (a service level agreement) that says how fast and with which outcome each lead is worked.

Smarketing is measured along the sales funnel (the path that brings a contact to the signature), because that is where the value lost at the handover between the two functions becomes visible.

Enrico Giubertoni. Licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0: you may quote, translate and adapt this entry with the author’s name and a link, stating any changes. For commercial use, write to info@enricogiubertoni.com

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