Achieve SMarketing: Marketing and Sales Enablement

At Relationship One, we love to throw around the term “smarketing.” When I first heard it, I found it a little off-putting. I thought, “You can’t just go around making up words.” But, the more I heard it, the more I grew to like it.

So what does “smarketing” mean? Well, it’s pretty simple. It’s how we define the hybrid set of skills needed to be successful as a modern sales and marketing professional. Best-in-class organizations have realized that it’s no longer acceptable to have siloed sales and marketing teams acting independently of each other. Sales and marketing need to be tightly aligned, have well-defined Service Level Agreements (SLA’s) in place, and work side-by-side to move someone from prospect to client.

As a modern marketer, I love seeing traditional boundaries that separate the sales and marketing teams erode. Providing sales with qualified leads is great, but why stop there? Any way I can find to make life easier for a sales person is something I’m interested in doing, especially if it’s automated, so I can develop something once and let it run. With the Oracle Marketing Cloud, there are tons of ways to automate the sales enablement process. Here are seven of my my favorites:

1) Engage 
Oracle Eloqua Engage eliminates the need to constantly re-create emails that are frequently used by the sales team and gives sales access to customizable, well-designed marketing emails they can send out to prospects And it lives within CRM so there’s no need to jump between systems. For example, you can set up email templates for meeting reminders, meeting follow-ups, proposals, event invites, or any other activity that utilizes similar-looking emails every time. (Engage also assures that the brand standards are met without skunkworks email templates floating around getting off-message without marketing aware).

2) Discover
Does your sales team ever wonder who they should be calling next? Or, could they benefit from knowing which contacts or accounts are really engaging with your content? If so, Oracle Eloqua Discover is the right tool. In CRM, your sales person just clicks on the tab that says “Eloqua” and are given a list of all the hot contacts and accounts assigned to them. Sort by activity or recency to create a quick list of who’s interested in your stuff. Discover takes the mystery out of prospecting calls.

3) Profiler
What if two minutes before picking up the phone to call a prospect, your sales team had a one-stop-shop for seeing how a contact was interacting with your marketing assets (i.e. emails, landing pages, website visits, form submits)? Wouldn’t that make the call go so much smoother? That’s what Oracle Eloqua Profiler can offer your sales team. In a matter of seconds, the sales person gets an understanding what the contact is interested in and can adapt questions and talking points to fit that need. It transitions the call from a blind “cold call” to a conversation about needs and pain points.

4) Reporting
If you can’t measure it, is it worth doing? Creating dashboards that allow your sales team to quickly see where they’re at helps them keep track of progress toward goals and allows management to ensure SLA’s and targets are met. Additionally, providing actionable data that gives insight into engagement for your sales team is crucial. For example, my favorite dashboard we create for clients is called the “Who’s Hot” dashboard. It incorporates data from support, sales, and marketing to give a holistic view of what’s going on with clients and prospects.

5) Pipeline accelerator campaigns
As a prospect moves along the buyer journey, there’s a chance their momentum will stall out along the way. Loss of momentum can be a real danger for your organization. You want to keep your solution at the top of mind for your prospects so they aren’t sidetracked by other rabbit trails competing for time and attention. To help keep the sales process moving along, smarketers can set up pipeline accelerator campaigns that automate the routine check-ins your sales team does. These campaigns can include content that’s been mapped to buyer needs at each stage in the funnel. For example: white papers and best practice guides for early stages, calculators and case studies for middle stages, and pre-made proposal decks and competitor comparisons for late stages. Automating this process frees your sales team up to do the supplemental follow-up such as phone calls and in-person meetings.

6) Triggered campaigns to prospects
Setting up triggered campaigns for prospects is what marketing automation is all about. The list of ways a smarketer could build a campaign to help the sales team is a long one. Prospects could enter a certain campaign when they reach a certain lead score, when specific actions are taken (like visiting a pricing page or filling out a contact us form), when a sales person does something in CRM, when it’s getting close to renewal time, or when a new, complimentary product is released. There are thousands of ways you could auto-trigger prospects to enter a campaign. Just keep in mind, the goal is to seamlessly move a prospect down a buying journey. Over-clogging their inbox or sending out poorly-designed emails is not going to do your sales team any favors. Keep campaigns well thought-out, well designed and provide great information that your prospects actually want to investigate.

7) Triggered notices to sales
This function is not used as much as I would like to see. I think that’s because it takes additional training for the sales team. Smarketers can step up notices to go to their sales team when a prospect is doing something noteworthy. The three most common would be when a marketing qualified lead is created, when a lead score reaches a certain threshold and when someone is currently on your website. Like I said, it will take some effort to train the sales team how to properly deal with these types of alerts (you don’t want sales people calling someone up and saying, “I see you’re looking at the pricing information on our website right now…”), but when done correctly, triggered notices can become an important arrow in your sales quiver.

Those are my seven favorite tools for the modern smarketer. What would you add to this list? What did I miss? Let me know in the comments below.