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Are the sales and marketing teams working on the same team? Are they moving their chips under common goals? If you want to generate income, efficiently, then aligning these «natural opponents» should be one of your priorities.

marketing vs. sales, the battle of 1,000 days

Although at first glance it seems that these departments are not related, in reality, they are the perfect pair for your business to make more sales. On the one hand, marketers are dedicated to creating strategies to attract visitors, convert them into leads and nurture them, while salespeople are constantly working to make them customers.

It is there that the term smarketing makes its grand entrance, referring to the alignment of these two teams, through frequent and direct communication.

The objective is to reach an agreement on the measurable goals that each person must attack, in order to identify opportunities for improvement. (You are interested in: The 6 mistakes that will change the course of your Inbound Marketing strategy).

At the end of the day, both will benefit: the sales team will close sales with less effort and the marketing team will get reliable information to implement better marketing actions. So, why apply this process, typical of Inbound Marketing?

We tell you 10 hard facts about the power of smarketing:

• According to HubSpot, the annual growth of organizations that manage to keep sales and marketing teams well aligned is 20%.
• 44% of companies that applied this practice had a positive ROI, even higher, compared to the previous one (HubSpot).
• 50% of sales time is spent on unproductive prospects (Reachforce & Marketo).
• 56% of B2B organizations verify business opportunities before passing them on to the sales department (Marketing Sherpa).
• 67% of companies that synchronized marketing and sales were more effective at closing deals (Marketo).
• 74% of organizations using marketing automation and CRM as part of an integrated technology stack report that their teams are properly aligned (DemandGen).
• 79% of leads never convert to sales. The lack of lead nurturing is the common cause of this poor performance (Marketing Sherpa).
• 87% of these team members describe themselves negatively when questioned about each other (HubSpot).
• 89% of companies that have their two departments aligned report measurable increases in lead conversion (Quota Factory).
• 91% of the potential ROI on marketing investment is wasted when leads are ignored by the commercial department (The MX Group).
• 100% of companies must do smarketing to align their goals, achieve objectives and increase their income (Square Color).

Aligning both departments will allow you to directly link sales revenue with inbound marketing activities, a situation that has not occurred until now. Sales reps who follow up on new contacts are 60 times more likely to qualify a lead than those who wait 24 hours or more.

In conclusion, closing sales and having a significant ROI is the goal of every company and this is achieved by implementing a great Inbound Marketing strategy. For more ideas, you can review the Vissani case study.