Creating outstanding customer experience (CX) is a team effort. That’s why businesses need to fuse their marketing and sales departments to form one team - the ‘smarketing’ team.

In this blog, long-time friend and sponsor of the Marketing Association, Engaging Partners, share their insights into creating wonderful customer experiences and who’s job it actually is.

Marketing and sales teams are equals in smarketing as both are pursuing the same goals...in no way is marketing subservient to sales (or sales to marketing). It’s this partnership that can make or break your customer experience. Because when these two functions are disjointed, you better believe the customer can feel it.

Let’s take a look at how you can bring your sales and marketing teams together to create the dream smarketing team - and explore how doing so will improve the experience your prospects and customers have with your brand and, ultimately, sales.

Are you delivering an A+ customer experience at all times? Take our CX Grader quiz to find out!

Inbound marketing and inbound sales

Today’s buyers are spending more and more time online researching their options before even thinking of speaking to your sales team. In fact, according to HubSpot, 59% of people prefer not to talk to salespeople at all, and 70% of buying decisions are made before speaking to a company.

These stats indicate that there are several inbound tactics that the marketing team can assist sales with. For example, marketing can help create content that potential customers can use as they do their own research. Just by assessing sales conversations, the marketing team can pull together content that answers common prospecting questions before they’re even asked. Marketing can also pull together an eBook, VLOG or demo video, exploring your product so existing customers can make the most out of their experience with your brand.

'Smarketing' is, therefore, empowering potential customers and existing customers with the knowledge to maximise their experience with your product or service before they’re ready to talk to a salesperson.

Bring them both together...

Fusing your sales and marketing teams might sound like a bit of a daunting task... but if you follow these three key elements of a sales enablement strategy, you’ll be in good standing:

  • A clear goal: This shared vision and goal will help the smarketing team stay aligned with one another. Because we’re talking sales enablement, the goal must be focused on revenue.
  • A target buyer: With your clear goal in mind, your smarketing team next needs to define what a qualified lead/buyer looks like. To define your qualified lead, list the key traits of an ideal customer who is fit for your offering. To define your qualified buyer, identify the actions that indicate they’re sales-ready.
  • A content strategy: Now that you’ve defined your goals and target buyers, you can work to develop the content that is going to be helpful and relevant to their buying journey.

Learn more about the ins and outs of a good Sales Enablement strategy. Download our free eBook here.


Creating a culture of content creation

We touched on this earlier, but you still might be wondering, just how can sales help create content?

Your sales team can help create content more than they probably think! In fact, sales are already creating heaps of content - even more than the marketing team. According to HubSpot, 40% of content was found to be created by sales (compared to the 30% that was created by marketing). Here’s how marketing can extract the good stuff from sales...

In your smarketing meetings, have your sales reps bring the latest questions that customers and potential customers are asking. Compiling this information, you can create a FAQ page that prospects can refer to (on their own or by direction of a sales rep) to answer their questions on their own.

Once you have this copy, you can slice and dice it into a number of pieces of content. Expand on big questions by turning them into an eBook. Turn helpful stats into an eye-catching downloadable infographic. Create a blog post and share it across social media.

Of course, these are just some examples of marketing and sales can come together to create valuable content for customers and prospects. If you keep in mind the following questions, you should be able to whip up some great content:

  • What are your customers (or prospects) asking?
  • What do they need?
  • What value can we deliver them?
  • How can we make them feel important?
  • How can we make them feel understood?
  • How can we solve their problems?

Developing helpful content like this will provide guidance and help you build or continue to build great customer experience. If you’re trying to deliver outstanding customer experience, you must align your sales and marketing teams so they’re striving towards the same goals. When those teams are working together, your customers are going to feel the difference!

Keen to learn more about Sales Enablement? Download our free eBook here.

If you need a hand getting started, or want to talk more about outstanding customer experiences, get in touch with the Engaging Partners team today.

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