Merging Marketing and Sales: Shared Understanding of Strategy for a Successful Digital Sales Strategy

Digitalization has not only changed the way customers perceive products and services, but it has also blurred the traditional boundaries between marketing and sales. Today, the close cooperation between sales and marketing plays a crucial role in the success of a company. The company’s success is only guaranteed if marketing and sales become a single unit and jointly develop a well-thought-out digital sales strategy.

In this blog post, you’ll learn how smarketing practices help streamline the entire sales cycle, improve lead generation, and ultimately increase not only business success, but customer satisfaction as well.

Smarketing aims to break down the classic silos between sales and marketing and create seamless collaboration. This includes not only the exchange of information, but also the definition of common goals, the use of common metrics and, of course, the development of a common strategy.

The latter point is the key to successful cooperation.

Setting common goals ensures that both sales and marketing are working towards a common end goal. No department should dominate the other, but the development of the strategy as well as the end goal should take place on an equal footing. It is crucial that both sides are equally involved in the drafting. Not only does this create a sense of collaboration, but it also ensures that the interests of sales and marketing are equally safeguarded. This partnership-based approach is fundamental to long-term success.

In practice, this means:

With the implementation of marketing strategies, the foundation for a digital sales strategy is laid. In addition to common goals and clear communication, there are of course other operational components that are part of a targeted marketing and sales strategy.

Developing customer profiles and buyer personas: Only those who know their target group understand them. Developing and identifying precise buyer personas allows you to tailor your marketing and sales actions to the needs and preferences of your potential customers. In addition to the personas broken down into the customers, the segmentation of customer groups and their buying behavior also makes sense. From these, it is possible to deduce which products are most likely to be purchased at which prices and, under certain circumstances, in which combinations and variants.

Building a targeted multichannel presence: Be where your target customers are. In times when digital channels are increasing rapidly, it is important to focus on the channels on which your buyers are also active. Use the various digital channels such as social media, but also classic email marketing, to create a comprehensive online presence. A targeted multi-channel strategy allows you to reach and address potential buyers in different ways. And very important for maximum internal transparency: in any case, map the communication measures internally, for example in a CRM system. The sales department needs to know what marketing measures are currently being carried out and what the success rate is. And marketing, in turn, needs to know what sales is doing with the leads they collect.

Content marketing as a driver for sales success: A clear content and ad strategy is the fuel for your digital sales strategy. Create relevant and informative content that appeals to your target group and distribute it across the relevant channels.
The keyword here is also social selling, which is a sales strategy in which social networks are used as a platform for sales. Networks such as LinkedIn are used to build relationships with potential customers in order to promote the sales process.

Integrate marketing automation: Take advantage of the possibilities offered by marketing automation software to connect content and automate recurring processes, such as within an event process. This enables you to generate leads efficiently, separating the wheat from the chaff through targeted nurturing , so that your sales team only has to deal with the really relevant leads. Here, too, it is important that the processes within the systems run smoothly so that leads with a certain maturity can be automatically passed on to sales, for example, and that the history of actions taken so far is also seamlessly transferred to the CRM.

Make data-driven decisions: Analyze your data regularly. However, in order to be able to measure success sustainably across all steps of the purchase process, it is imperative that the individual software components interlock seamlessly and that there is a uniform database. With the help of an analytics tool such as Microsoft Power BI , the collected data can be visualized in such a way that measures can be derived from it.

If you want to learn more about this, we recommend these two blog posts:

The key to long-term success in the modern business environment is undoubtedly the deep collaboration between sales and marketing. The smarketing strategy provides a clear path to break down the traditional silos between these two key areas and enable seamless collaboration. Setting common goals ensures that sales and marketing act on an equal footing and work together towards an overarching end goal.

In practice, this means defining clear objectives, holding regular meetings, and using common tools. Transparent communication and the exchange of experiences are fundamental for successful cooperation. The use of digital tools, especially a CRM platform, facilitates the flow of information and creates a coherent database for both departments.

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