Sales vs Marketing: Align Them With Smarketing

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter, your go-to podcast for eliminating random acts of strategy and marketing in your highway construction business. Hello, friends. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. I'm a third-generation asphalt contractor and an absolute brand strategy and marketing geek.

Welcome to The Contractor's Daughter. I'm your host, Jeani Ringkob. So excited to be with you here as always. Today I want to talk about two things that are near and dear to my heart. It’s super essential to our businesses but oftentimes, these two elements inside of our business are working at odds or they're not very balanced. We're really heavy on one side and not as heavy on the other side.

If you've been in some of my presentations, sometimes I talk about the analogy of an airplane. The two elements that we're talking about today and how they should be working together is marketing and sales. It is essentially the two engines of your plane, the left engine and the right engine.

I always want to say you do not want to put an engine for Cessna 210 on one side, and Boeing 777 on the other side. It's inefficient. It's not balanced. In that scenario, you're probably not even going to get off the ground, you're probably tipped over. But even if those are a little bit off in an airplane, you're not running optimally. Even if you can get it off the ground, you're not super efficient. That's kind of an analogy for how those two departments should be working together.

The term that I hear a lot because I'm always out, going to marketing events, listening to my favorite marketing leaders in the industry, really thought-provoking leaders, doing all or some of that geeky stuff so that you don't have to, one of the new terms that we're hearing a lot is smarketing, which I actually love because I allude too that let's blur the line between sales and marketing in our business, especially when we are pushing our marketing client facing and not workforce facing, then it's almost blurring the lines between marketing an HR. HR becomes almost a sales. They've got a little bit of sales integrated in with them.

But if we think about that in a traditional sense, we've got sales and we've got marketing, to make them both as efficient as possible, to not have too much overhead or have sales cycles that are too long on the sales side, we need to have marketing. But to control and make sure that we get the most out of our marketing efforts and we are tracking metrics and they’re optimized, we also need to have a strong sales side.

What is the right balance for your business? If we define this new word smarketing, it's sales and marketing alignment through constant and consistent communication. I'm going to take it beyond that. That's the definition I've heard but I also think that it's also an implementation side.

If you look at the customer journey, which oftentimes in my presentations, I show this and we'll have a link in the podcast notes because if you follow me on social media, we'll have a video, we'll have a slideshow about this, but I'll also try to include on the website, you can link this in the show notes on my website and we'll actually have a picture of the customer journey.

But let me explain what that would look like. If you start on the left-hand side, you start with awareness. They're just coming into contact with you. They're hearing about you, just the whispers that you exist. Then they move to knowledge and this is where they're consuming information. Somebody's telling them about maybe a problem that you've solved for them, and they're consuming information.

I want to stop right here at this point because this knowledge in between awareness and then being right in knowledge before we move on to consideration, even still a little bit in consideration, we are really finding that’s where people and especially generations that are moving into those leadership and decision-maker roles, this is where they are really investing their time and energy.

They are consuming content at a massive rate. Even our government agencies, those are still individuals who are wanting to learn and educate themselves before they are in any type of sales conversation, before they're putting things out to bid. They want to know what's out there. They want to know what their options are. They want to know what solutions might be available to them, what brands are offering those solutions. How are those brands showing up? Are they thought leaders? Are they sharing content?

B2B, B2G, same thing. They are going and starting to consume more information. Pre-COVID, a study showed that consumers were 70% of the way to a decision before they would even engage with a company. I would argue that post-COVID, we're actually seeing that number higher, closer to that 80% mark, and B2C is always an early indicator of how B2B and B2G are going to be consuming things, making decisions, going through processes, and we’ve already significantly seen it in B2B and we're also seeing it in B2G.

Knowledge is really, really important. That piece is something you don't want to skip over. We started with awareness, we moved on to knowledge, and then to consideration. This is where maybe they're looking at a proposal, you're bidding on something, and they're about to make a decision.

Then we kind of have that pivot point. It can be called the selection trial or it's the purchase period. It's when they actually approve something. They accept it. They sign the dotted line. Maybe you’ve bid, you've got a contract with an agency, but you're going out and trying to get POs written. It's that moment where they say, “Yes, we are going to allocate money for this project.”

Then they move into satisfaction. If you look at the Clock Model, this is the post-purchase. We have to be aware of things like that immediate regret. There's always that post-purchase, “Did I make the right decision?” Even when we hire people, when we bring them in, if we don't have a really strong onboarding process and we're not still communicating very clearly, incorporating them, helping them reach productivity quickly, they are starting to already think, “Maybe I made a mistake.”

People that make those decisions early are already looking for a way out of that relationship. We want to take them from that satisfaction period and then move them into loyalty. Then right after that becomes advocacy where they're actually helping to promote, they are aligned with your brand. They understand that they can fluidly talk about it. They're easily giving testimonials even on their own in conversations and situations. That is what a customer journey cycle can look like and it's really important to know.

If I lay this out, what I do for a lot of clients is if we're going through a strategy piece, we've identified that there are some opportunities in sales and marketing to align and optimize, we actually lay this whole process out and we get super into the weeds about what we're going to be doing at each level.

If you go and you visit the website, you can see this diagram. It's going to be the sales offering on the top. What are the sales activities that are happening during each phase of this journey? On the bottom, what we see is marketing. What are the marketing activities or collateral or things that they're engaging with at each one of these phases that are elevating the sales team, making the sales team conversations easier, shortening that sales cycle, helping them understand the value of what we bring, the differentiation of what we bring, how it's relevant to them, how it benefits them to partner with us and trust us with their problem to help them find a solution?

We go through this entire thing, and we actually get really, really clear with both teams what is happening, what kind of collateral do we need to make, what kind of activities do we need to be engaged in at every single phase so we can really see what the gaps are and how we need to fill up.

This is how I think of smarketing. We have the original definition that says it is the alignment of sales and marketing through constant communication but then also taking that a step further and actually mapping out what are the assets we create, what are the activities we engage in, what are the KPIs that we measure at every single phase of our customer’s journey with us which is hopefully a very long time, and it's continuing to bring value over and over again?

But how do we get really intentional about that? How do we have fewer unqualified leads? How do we increase sales win rates? How do we shorten the buying cycles? Make closing deals easier, increase customer retention rates, and even faster revenue growth. These are the things, the objectives that we're looking at when we really are intentional about aligning sales and marketing inside of our businesses.

I want you guys to just be thinking about this. Think about your sales team, envision your sales team, or envision your marketing efforts, going to conferences, staging booths, creating brochures, creating materials, talking about your products and services on social media, proactively prospecting, and business development online, at conferences, and at networking events.

Even if you're in that government side, but you're still having to go out and get those POs and you're having sales conversations, this stuff can be really, really valuable. It can also be a great way to optimize all the things that you're putting resources to inside of your business.

These are two things that really should be working together. I like to think that sales is also bringing back information, data, feedback into the company, and the marketing is adapting and improving constantly with that. It almost turns into instead of vertical funnel that starts with marketing and goes to sales and then converts to customers, instead, it's more of a flywheel approach, and you guys know how I feel about flywheels.

Anytime we can create something that creates momentum in our businesses, if we can attract, engage, delight, and then continue to do that over and over and over again, even incorporating those customer experiences, and making them optimized and celebrating them in a way that continues to attract, engage, and delight all over again, those are incredible ways to continue to grow our businesses and really get a competitive advantage.

Think about your sales. Think about your marketing. Think about this new term that you're going to hear bantered around smarketing. How could you push those two things together? How could you optimize them? Are yours balanced inside of your company? What would you need to do? What kind of adjustments could you be making to make sure that they're more aligned and more balanced so your business is optimized?

I wanted to share this with you and also make sure that you're going to go and you're going to check out the visual aid that goes along with this. I really tried to walk you through it so you could imagine that journey in your mind, but really seeing it visually can be helpful. We're going to have a link to the website where we will actually have a visual and an example of when we build this out for a sales and marketing team that are really trying to improve their collaboration, build a process where they are streamlining everything that moves customers into their world, and delights those customers so they turn into advocates for them is happening.

I hope you enjoyed this. I hope that you're excited about the opportunity. I think it's a new way to think about eliminating that line, getting our companies working more effectively, and it's a great strategy to grow your business. Make sure you're subscribed. Make sure also that you are on my calendar. There's a link in the show notes always for you guys, and it's also right on top of my website. You can go to storybuilt.marketing and if you add a slash and schedule to the end of that, it's going to take you directly there, but it's always quick access to get on my calendar and I love it when you guys are on my calendar.

I want to talk about what does your marketing look like? What does your sales look like? Is there a way to optimize that to grow your business faster, to give it more security, to streamline your expenses? Be thinking about that. You can get on my calendar and we can discuss this. Until next time. This is Jeani Ringkob on The Contractor's Daughter Podcast signing off.

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Contractor's Daughter. If you liked what you heard, be sure to subscribe and review. But most of all, share this with all of your friends, partners, and customers in the highway construction business. Thank you for building the infrastructure that we all rely on.