Growing your MSP: What is Smarketing?
BY IT GLUE | July 27, 2017
You want to do marketing better. You also want more sales. Growth is the next big thing on your to do list. “And,” you think, “It’d be nice if I could do all these things without spending a dime.”
By now, you know how to use inbound tactics to effectively market your MSP for cheap. This week, we’ll upgrade your strategy with the power of Smarketing. Traditionally, sales and marketing have acted as separate functions, but in an MSP, you might not have either. So it only makes sense to think of the two together.
Smarketing (as in sales + marketing = smarketing) is an integrated strategy that coordinates goals, action, and feedback between the two functions to increase efficiency. According to a study conducted by the Aberdeen Group, companies with strong marketing and sales alignment saw 20% revenue growth annually. The numbers don’t lie: smarketing is powerful. So, how do you implement this strategy?
Get on the same page
If you have both sales and marketing departments, these two need to agree on the target audience. But even if you have a one-man shop, the same principle applies. Your marketing efforts need to match up with your sales efforts, so that you know who you’re targeting and tailor each step of the process to that particular customer. It’s kind of like fishing – to catch the fish you want, you need to go to the right spot at the right time with the right gear.
Share data and feedback
Share and learn from each other’s data. Regular feedback between the sales and marketing teams is crucial for understanding opportunities and challenges as well as improving conversion rates. Sharing feedback also helps analyze the effectiveness of marketing and sales tactics. Additionally, by implementing a feedback loop, a marketing-sales alignment can also help reduce cross-team friction by 108%. This is easier in small shops where sales and marketing are the same person, but the key is to examine when sales fall through late in the process. Be honest – was there a mistake in the sales process or did you waste time courting the wrong prospect from the beginning?
Establish a sales-marketing SLA
For larger MSPs that have both functions, the next step is to define a two-way sales-marketing service level agreement (SLA). This is the commitment each team makes to the other in regards to lead generation (marketing) and follow-up action with those leads (sales). The amount of quality sales that are closed depends on the amount of qualified leads that are generated through marketing. Try to quantitatively outline how many quality leads a sales rep needs from marketing and how many times a sales rep will engage with each lead. By coordinating sales and marketing teams, this can help an organization be 67% better at closing deals, so this step is important.
By harnessing the power of smarketing, your MSP will benefit from increased efficiency, valuable data insights, and (of course) a boost in revenue. Many hands make light work, and when it comes to sales, marketing, and overall revenue, that’s no exception.
IT Glue™ is a documentation platform for MSPs, designed to eliminate waste, improve productivity and help you hit your SLAs better. Document your sales processes and customer personas in IT Glue, and integrate it with your PSA to enhance your marketing and sales functions.
