Alignment between sales and marketing, or “smarketing”, directly impacts lead quality, revenue growth and efficiency. Yet many teams still work in silos, creating friction, unclear ownership and missed opportunities across the funnel.
By establishing shared goals, data and processes, teams can capture more leads and accelerate growth.
In this article, you’ll learn what smarketing is, why it matters and how to implement it. You’ll discover practical steps and best practices to help your sales and digital marketing teams collaborate better and close more deals.
Key takeaways
Smarketing aligns sales and marketing teams around shared goals to improve the bottom line.
Aligning sales and marketing teams helps businesses generate higher-quality leads, create faster sales cycles and achieve stronger revenue growth.
Misalignment between sales and marketing often creates friction, wasted effort and poor lead follow-up, but clear processes and data-driven accountability solve these issues.
Pipedrive supports smarketing with shared pipelines, sales-first automations and unified reporting – sign up for a free 14-day trial.
What is smarketing?
Smarketing is a business strategy that aligns sales and marketing teams to work toward shared goals, metrics and revenue outcomes.
Combining sales and marketing teams helps businesses increase revenue through better collaboration and data-driven decisions.
For example, marketing can deliver higher-quality leads tailored to the sales team’s needs, while sales can provide feedback on which prospects are most likely to convert.
There are three major components of smarketing:
Aligned goals. Both marketing and sales attract qualified leads and turn them into customers. How they get prospects across the finish line may differ, but realizing that sales and marketing have shared goals helps both teams work together effectively.
Aligned roles. Sales reps and marketers often view their roles as distinct, which can create friction. Positioning sales and marketing under one umbrella with shared goals can build camaraderie and promote collaboration.
Aligned tools. It’s easier to achieve optimal alignment when using powerful marketing automation and collaboration tools. Tool alignment gives both teams access to full customer insights, enabling them to focus on what’s most important.
Traditionally, sales and marketing teams work separately to achieve distinct goals in business. The marketing team works at the top of the sales funnel to attract leads, while the sales team works at the bottom to convert leads into customers.
This separation of roles made sense before the digitization of sales and marketing.
However, the sales landscape has changed significantly over the last few decades. Customer needs and behaviors now reflect a need for greater cooperation between these two previously distinct teams.
How aligning your sales and marketing teams can boost revenue
Smarketing helps businesses increase revenue by aligning teams around shared goals, qualified leads and performance metrics.
Here are some of the benefits that smarketing can help you realize:
Benefit | How it boosts revenue |
Improved lead generation and nurturing | Sales and marketing collaborate to attract, qualify and nurture leads with shared messaging and content. Better-qualified leads convert faster and close at higher rates. |
Better efficiency | Sales and marketing share customer data and processes instead of working in silos. Reduced duplication and clearer workflows free up time for revenue-driving work. |
Increased return on investment (ROI) | Increased efficiency and better lead generation improve marketing campaign effectiveness. |
Greater team cohesion | Shared tools like a customer relationship management platform (CRM) improve communication and coordination between teams. Faster execution and smoother handoffs increase deal momentum. |
Better customer experiences | Unified customer insights enable more personalized and consistent engagement. Stronger experiences improve customer retention and increase customer lifetime value. |
Aligning sales and marketing around shared goals, data and processes helps businesses shorten sales cycles and increase revenue.
5 steps to integrate smarketing and close deals
Effective smarketing involves aligning your teams around shared goals, clear communication and helpful tools to drive collaboration and close more deals.
Here’s how to build a cohesive smarketing strategy to align your sales and marketing teams.
1. Assess your current level of alignment
Understanding your current position helps you identify gaps between sales and marketing, allowing you to effectively align both teams.
There are a few questions you can ask yourself to gauge your current level of alignment:
How often do your sales and marketing teams meet?
Meetings facilitate communication between sales and marketing. If they never meet, their ability to collaborate will be hindered.
Do your meetings run smoothly, or is there friction?
The quality of communication is just as important as its frequency. If your meetings are adversarial, they’re unlikely to be productive.
How do the department heads interact, and do they have a good relationship?
If the department heads don’t interact or if they have poor-quality interactions, it’s unlikely they’ll improve the relationship between their teams.
What is the current quantity and quality of leads?
Knowing how many leads are coming in and their quality helps you gauge alignment between sales and marketing. If the sales team is unsatisfied with their new leads, marketing may be focusing on the wrong kind of lead and not communicating effectively with sales (and vice versa).
How many leads does sales pursue, and how many convert?
Low follow-up or conversion rates indicate low-quality leads. Addressing these issues will help set the sales and marketing teams working toward the same goals, increasing conversions and revenue.
Once you answer these questions, you can set goals that outline how to align your sales and marketing team. These goals will depend on how connected your teams already are and what your other business goals are.
Here are some example goals:
Implement combined weekly marketing and sales meetings that will increase collaboration and instill a culture of smarketing in my sales and marketing teams
Facilitate stronger, more effective communication between sales and marketing by encouraging data-driven, constructive feedback
See sales and marketing drive 5% revenue growth by collaborating on an ideal customer persona, generating higher quality leads and closing more deals
Assessing your current alignment and setting goals helps you create a roadmap to bring sales and marketing together.
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2. Promote smarketing and get organization-wide buy-in
Promoting smarketing and securing buy-in ensures all teams embrace collaboration, reduce friction and work toward shared revenue goals.
However, it’s not easy to convince everyone and switch from separate to perfectly united teams overnight.
That’s why you need to shift the company culture to support smarketing, starting with small changes and gradually ramping up to full-scale sales and marketing alignment.
Here are some tips:
Begin at the top and work your way down. Get the department heads and other key people together and work on a strategy to achieve greater organizational buy-in. Lead by example.
Focus on the benefits. Explain how smarketing improves collaboration, increases lead quality, shortens sales cycles and drives revenue. Show concrete examples and data where possible so employees understand how alignment directly impacts their success.
Schedule regular meetings. Use weekly smarketing meetings to unite sales and marketing. These meetings should address weekly successes, challenges and new ideas and enable constructive feedback to improve on current campaigns and targets.
As you expand your smarketing approach, you should implement smarketing culture as part of the onboarding process. New employees can meet both teams and experience how your organization now approaches sales and marketing.
3. Encourage consistent and open communication
Increasing the frequency and quality of communication between your sales and marketing teams helps them stay aligned, resolve issues quickly and improve lead quality.
Here are some of the ways to encourage open and consistent communication:
Support closed-loop reporting. Provide sales and marketing teams with full visibility of the other team’s actions and progress toward common goals. Closed-loop reporting lets both teams track performance, identify what’s working and quickly adjust strategies.
Create clearly defined common terms. The company should have agreed-upon definitions for qualified leads and other key terms. This clarification helps marketers know exactly which kind of lead to attract and when to hand them to sales.
Create an ideal customer profile. Identifying the ideal customer helps both teams focus on the target audience, giving them a clear understanding of what makes their ideal customer tick so they can attract and convert them effectively.
Host regular meetings. Schedule meetings so the sales team can give feedback and sales data on which leads are most likely to close. These conversations allow marketers to generate higher-quality leads.
Improve friction management. Encourage discussions of any frustration between the teams so that misalignments can be corrected proactively. Approach this in a constructive and data-driven manner, without finger-pointing.
Effective communication is key for smarketing alignment at your organization. When done well, it helps you discover, address and fix problems with your business strategy or culture.
4. Create a service-level agreement (SLA) and define the strategy
An SLA commits sales and marketing teams to a shared set of responsibilities and expectations.
A marketing-sales SLA can:
Create accountability through agreed-upon expectations
Define quantitative goals that remove emotion for easy tracking and reporting
Reduce wasted effort through better definitions and a streamlined sales pipeline
Accelerate revenue by removing inefficiencies and setting unified goals
The SLA should describe the following information:
SLA content type | Example |
Services provided – what each team delivers | Marketing generates 50 qualified leads per month. Sales follows up on all leads within 24 hours. |
Processes for change – how to handle updates or adjustments | Any changes to lead definitions must be approved by both teams before implementation. |
Phases of the revenue cycle – phases of the revenue cycle and the responsibilities at each stage. | Marketing nurtures leads into MQLs. Sales converts SQLs into customers. |
Here are some top tips for creating an effective SLA:
Define the lead scoring metrics
A lead scoring system helps provide data in case of disputes between sales and marketing about the quality of leads. Assign points based on engagement, fit and buying intent so both teams have a clear way to prioritize leads.
Define the lead generation metrics
It’s important to agree on what qualifies as a lead so both teams have clear expectations.
For example, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are prospects that come from a website landing page and marketing deems likely to buy. Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are ready for the next stage in the sales process. Test the SLA before wide-scale implementation
Your SLA won’t be perfect after the first draft. Consider testing it in a small group before extending it to the wider organization. Make adjustments as needed to ensure clear expectations and strong accountability.
5. Integrate your software for collaboration and data sharing
Connecting sales and marketing software ensures seamless collaboration, real-time data sharing and more effective, data-driven decision-making.
Total alignment between your salespeople and marketing teams is only possible with integrated sales and marketing software that lets them glean important information like lead quality, campaign success and any marketing strategy gaps.
When the sales and marketing software is integrated:
Sales and marketing both have a complete picture of the customer’s lifecycle, enabling greater collaboration between the teams
Sales teams can see a prospect’s behavior and discover patterns, pain points and opportunities and improve their sales strategy
Marketers get real-time reporting on what is working so that they can optimize their marketing efforts and content strategy
Prospect information is transparent, meaning that teams are held accountable
With Pipedrive, for example, sales and marketing teams work from a shared CRM that centralizes lead data, deal activity and communication history.
Here’s a quick breakdown of how the CRM organizes all this information:
Marketing teams can track how leads enter the pipeline and progress, while sales teams see the full context behind each lead, including campaign engagement and prior touchpoints.
Here’s how to integrate software effectively:
Connect your CRM with marketing and analytics tools | Set up integrations with key platforms to keep workflows seamless and information consistent. |
Automate lead tracking and follow-ups. | Use automation tools to configure triggers and task assignments to reduce manual work and ensure no lead is overlooked. |
Share dashboards and reports across teams. | Create shared dashboards to track pipeline metrics, conversions and campaign effectiveness in real time, aligning teams on performance. |
Collaboration tools can also significantly benefit cross-team collaboration, particularly if it’s hard for your teams to meet (or if they are remote). Tools like Slack can improve communication, with open threads easily tracked by each team member.
Smarketing best practices to achieve true sales and marketing alignment
Smarketing best practices help sales and marketing teams build consistent collaboration, stay accountable and work toward shared revenue goals.
Developing deep collaboration between your sales and marketing teams is a step-by-step process that takes time to accomplish. However, true alignment is an achievable goal with a strategy in place.
Here are some high-level tips to ensure that your teams collaborate successfully:
Celebrate shared wins fairly
Recognizing contributions from both sales and marketing reduces friction and reinforces collaboration.
Review results together and clearly attribute outcomes to joint efforts, not individual teams.
Hold both teams accountable
Clear measurement builds trust and ensures each team understands its role in revenue performance.
Track marketing on lead volume and quality, sales on lead follow-up and close rates and review gaps in weekly meetings without assigning blame.
Rely on data, not opinions
Data-driven discussions keep conversations objective and prevent conflicts based on assumptions.
Make sure teams support claims with metrics, such as historical lead volume or conversion data, before making decisions.
Follow these smarketing best practices to create lasting alignment between sales and marketing, improve performance and drive predictable revenue growth.
How Pipedrive helps align sales and marketing teams
Pipedrive’s CRM keeps sales and marketing working from the same data, goals and processes, making smarketing easier to implement and scale.
Key Pipedrive features that support sales and marketing alignment include:
Shared sales pipelines and deal visibility. Sales and marketing can view the same pipelines and deal stages, ensuring both teams understand where leads are in the funnel and what actions are needed next.
Custom lead statuses and fields. Teams can define and track MQLs and SQLs using custom fields, creating a shared definition of lead quality and readiness.
Sales-first automations. Automations trigger follow-ups, task assignments and deal movement based on customer behavior, helping marketing hand off leads smoothly and sales respond faster.
Activity and communication tracking. Log emails, calls, meetings and notes in one place, giving marketing insight into sales follow-up and sales visibility into lead engagement history.
Custom sales dashboards and reports. Both teams can track shared metrics like lead conversion rates, pipeline velocity and deal value using clear, customizable reports.
Third-party integrations. Pipedrive integrates with marketing tools, email platforms and analytics software, allowing teams to centralize data without relying on complex all-in-one systems.
By centralizing data and simplifying workflows, Pipedrive aligns sales and marketing teams to drive revenue together.
Pipedrive in action: Spark Interact (a marketing agency) used Pipedrive to unify lead management and sales workflows, giving teams a single view of inbound and outbound activity.
The agency has sustained an average annual revenue increase of 12% by using custom dashboards, automations and real-time insights to prioritize conversations and nurture leads through the customer journey.
Final thoughts
Smarketing aligns sales and marketing around shared goals, data and processes to boost lead quality and drive business growth.
Start by setting joint objectives, improving communication and defining clear responsibilities across both teams to create a culture of collaboration.
Pipedrive makes smarketing simple with shared pipelines, sales-first automations and unified reporting, helping teams work together efficiently. Sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how it can transform your sales and marketing alignment.
