Today I read an article in SalesForce XP Magazine and they did a beautiful job describing Smarketing in a sports analogies. Although they did not use the term Smarketing the article was all about and entitled: What's Next: Sales and Marketing Integration.

So here's the analogies partly from the magazine.

The roles of Sales and Marketing can no longer function as two parts of your business similar to a football team. You know where one group takes the field for offense (marketing) and then the other comes in for defense (sales).

In reality business development must now function more like a soccer team with a single group of players on the field– some primarily play offense, some primarily play defense and some (midfielders) play both, helping their team score and preventing the opponent from scoring. Sometimes, the ball gets booted all the way down field, but generally a soccer team moves the ball forward from one line to the next, sometimes passing the ball laterally or back a line for "support" until there is a clear opening to move forward. The whole team works toward keeping the ball in the scoring end of the field and preventing opponents from taking the lead.

Although I am not a big sports fan, this is a perfect analogy for the new version of business development where sales and marketing are working as a team for the same goal. I was talking to a small project based client the other day and one of the things they mentioned was the marketing side of things was working, but now they need to take a break on marketing to focus on sales. They also mentioned that although marketing was getting leads and web traffic, they were also getting a lot of unqualified people sniffing around like raccoons at a trash can.

The main reason any company has the raccoons sniffing around, is because sales and marketing are not aligned. The marketing team is working on getting people to the site, but if the sales team is weak or under performing, meaning they are unable to tell the marketing team exactly what a good lead looks like. Until marketing understands what a great prospect is, they are going to continue to bait in the raccoons.

If you can relate or any of these things rings true for your business, you can learn more about this new direction of sales and marketing alignment at one of our future webinars.