How Smarketing Accelerates Growth for Healthcare Sales (+ Tools)

Okay, let’s face it: the medical sales industry is chock-full of acronyms and buzzwords. So, when a salesperson encounters one, it’s all too common for them to roll their eyes and promptly stop paying attention.

However, smarketing is a term that sales and marketing teams really should pay attention to. What is smarketing? How does sales and marketing alignment help healthcare businesses? What should healthcare marketing agencies know about smarketing?

What Is Smarketing?

The word “smarketing” is a portmanteau (i.e. combination) of the words “sales” and “marketing.” It is a strategy where marketing and sales alignment is used to drive business growth and long-term success.

How long has “smarketing” been a thing? According to sources like BlueSkyETO.com, “The word found its beginning at inbound marketing software platform HubSpot. HubSpot Sales Director Dan Tyre popularized the term in 2008.”

Smarketing begins with the question “what is sales and marketing and how can they support each other?” From there, sales and marketing team leads work together to create measurable goals with shared accountability.

How does this work? As noted by HubSpot, “Marketing might have a mutually agreed upon leads SLA (service level agreement) to hit, and Sales must agree to follow up with a certain amount of those leads.” In this example, both teams are cooperating to meet the organization’s goals, creating sales and marketing alignment while fostering stronger communication and cooperation.

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3 Benefits of Sales and Marketing Alignment in Healthcare

So, what are the benefits of aligning sales and marketing for healthcare companies? A strong smarketing strategy that helps integrate sales with marketing can have a few distinct benefits, including:

1. Increasing the Number of Leads That Convert into Opportunities

In any sales funnel, there is always some drop-off as prospective customers move through the funnel. Minimizing this attrition can lead to major gains for the company. As noted in an article for Entrepreneur, studies have found that “89.1 percent of companies that aligned sales and marketing lead generation efforts reported measurable increases in the number of leads that converted to opportunities.”

For example, if a company has 1,000 leads and 5% convert into sales opportunities, that would be 50 opportunities to close a deal. If the conversion rate were to improve by just 1%, then that would be an additional 10 opportunities to close deals—potentially leading to a 20% increase in revenue.

2. Improving the Sales Team’s Preparedness for Customer Meetings

Do sales team members know what the company’s marketing team is promising to potential customers? Are sales team members being given the intel they need on the leads that marketers are nurturing through the sales funnel? In many cases, the answer to both of these questions is “no.”

According to an Upland Kapost statistic cited by Entrepreneur, “57 percent of customers feel that salespeople are poorly prepared or not prepared at all at initial meetings.”

When marketing and sales aren’t aligned, it’s all too easy for important communications to be missed. This can result in the sales team being poorly prepared for their initial meeting, which customers can and will notice. As a result, what should have been an easy sale can result in a lost opportunity.

Aligning sales and marketing helps ensure that the sales team is better prepared to handle initial meetings—avoiding mistakes that can cost the company vital sales opportunities.

3. Reducing Internal Friction between Sales and Marketing Teams

Without marketing and sales alignment, it’s all too easy for each team to become frustrated with the other.

Marketing keeps bringing in leads, but sees that the sales team isn’t closing deals—putting their efforts to waste.

Sales keeps getting bad leads or leads they aren’t prepared for—so they waste time and don’t feel they’re being given the support they need.

This creates organizational friction that can have strong negative impacts on employee satisfaction, productivity, and turnover.

By aligning sales with marketing, both teams can be made to better understand what they need from one another, communicate more effectively, and learn how to support each other. This helps to reduce friction between the two teams so they’re more focused on generating the right results and less on playing the blame game for missed sales goals.

3 Tools You Need for Your Smarketing Strategy

What are some of the best tools to have on hand to implement a smarketing strategy? Some key tools include:

• Service Level Agreements (SLAs). One of the most basic (and important) parts of any smarketing strategy is the SLAs that the marketing and sales teams share. SLAs help establish some accountability between the two teams so they can slowly build trust over time as they both hit their SLAs and come up with cooperative strategies to achieve those goals.
• Internal Communication Tools. To work together effectively, sales and marketing need to be able to communicate easily and effectively. However, this can be difficult in a modern setting where employees work from home and sales teams are often in the field—or when working with outsourced sales and marketing services. So, establishing a simple and convenient communication channel is a must. Tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams can be useful here.
• Integrated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. Do your sales and marketing teams have a unified software that gives them both access to the same information about your leads? A CRM tool can be critical for ensuring that both teams have access to consistent and accurate information.

How to Implement Smarketing to Drive More Qualified Leads

Even with the right tools in place, smarketing success isn’t guaranteed. There are a few things that a healthcare marketing agency and sales team (or rather, their leaders) may need to do to improve alignment and improve long-term success.

Some quick tips for implementing smarketing to drive more (and higher-quality) leads include:

1. Encourage Communication and Collaboration

If marketing and sales aren’t really talking to one another, are they truly aligned? Probably not.

So, a key part of any effort to align sales and marketing is to encourage frequent communication and collaboration. For example, sales and marketing teams can talk about recent marketing campaigns, what specific qualities prospects and leads should have, what the majority of prospects ask about on sales calls, and the like.

This communication can help keep both teams in the know so they can work more effectively.

2. Try Aligning Sales and Marketing Team Vocabularies

It’s entirely possible for two teams in an organization to speak the same language, but have no understanding of what the other team means when they talk. Department-specific jargon can be almost like a different language to people who aren’t part of that department or don’t have experience in that field.

To help facilitate easy communication and keep things from getting lost in translation, it’s important to take the time to align the vocabularies used by sales and marketing as well as the actual teams.

This could be as simple as having a short training meeting where both teams discuss common reports and what specific terms mean to them. Alternatively, it could help to have a policy where, if one team member doesn’t understand what the other is saying, to just ask for clarification—and to add any terms requiring clarification to a big notebook that people from either team can read.

3. Close the Loop between Sales and Marketing Reporting

To help improve collaboration and ensure that both teams know what deals are in the funnel, when prospects are leaving the funnel (and why), and which deals have successfully closed, it’s important to establish closed-loop reporting between sales and marketing.

This includes doing things like:

• Integrating Sales and Marketing Reporting Software. Having both sales and marketing on the same CRM software can be immensely useful for ensuring that data about leads is continuously synced between both teams.
• Having Sales Give Feedback on Lead Quality. To help ensure that marketing is bringing the right leads to the sales team’s attention, it’s important to have the sales team provide feedback to the marketing team on lead quality. Going what separates high-quality leads from low-quality ones can help in tweaking marketing messages so that more high-quality leads are attracted versus low-quality ones that don’t close.
• Unifying Sales and Marketing Metrics. Are both teams tracking the same metrics for assessing lead quality and results from sales or marketing efforts? Establishing a unified set of metrics to track can help smooth communication and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

These are just a few ways that an organization can align sales and marketing—whether they use internal or outsourced sales and marketing teams.

Do you need help growing your sales and growth? Reach out to Axxelus today to get started!