Smarketing: A Smart Strategy to Align Sales and Marketing

Key takeaways

• Smarketing aligns sales and marketing around mutual revenue goals, improving collaboration, increasing accountability, and generating higher-quality leads.
• This approach improves efficiency by using clear processes, such as operating level agreements, and shared data, tools, and systems.
• Smarketing also improves the customer experience with consistent, personalized messaging across marketing and sales outreach.

Imagine you’re on a marketing team, and you’re rocking it. Your new ad campaign is winning awards and leads are pouring in. But then you hear rumblings from the sales team — their pipeline is stagnant. How's that possible, you wonder? That’s what happens when sales and marketing aren’t working toward the same goals. Without a shared strategy, even the most talented teams can end up pulling in opposite directions, and that doesn’t benefit anyone. You need to get on the same page, and fast. Enter “smarketing.”

To put it simply, “Smarketing” = Sales + Marketing. It's a process that integrates these two teams with common goals and business structures to improve revenue.

Smarketing breaks down the separation between the two teams. It creates a unified approach that involves frequent, consistent communication, collaboration, and information sharing. Smarketing makes each team accountable for clear, shared responsibilities throughout the sales cycle.

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Smarketing unites sales and marketing with a common language and shared goals. This alignment helps them move past the 'us vs. them' mentality and start thinking of themselves as a single, cohesive partnership rather than independent silos.

A critical component of this partnership is the Operating Level Agreement (OLA). An OLA is a formal commitment between internal, cross-functional teams that establishes accountability for each. In the case of smarketing, the OLA serves as the commitment of sales and marketing to one another to work together and drive the business forward.

Here are the core smarketing principles:

• Establish shared goals and metrics: Both teams work toward the same measurable goals rather than separate metrics, often using similar key performance indicators (KPIs) and customer data.
• Create transparency: By developing clear visibility into sales and marketing workflows and processes, teams can easily access the information they need to move deals forward.
• Enhance communication: Joint team meetings and shared messaging channels, such as Slack, contribute to open feedback loops between the two teams.
• Maintain consistency: Consistent messaging and positioning of the company through marketing efforts and sales calls help ensure that customers and prospects receive the same communication.
• Implementing OLAs: Defines what each team commits to doing to support the other so they can both reach goals.

When your sales and marketing teams finally stop working in silos and start "smarketing," magic happens. Instead of chasing different goals, they combine their powers to supercharge your business. It’s not just about “playing nice” (although that is a benefit). It’s about reducing friction and creating shared accountability for revenue outcomes.

Some of the top benefits of smarketing are:

Sales teams provide marketing with insights based on ideal customer profiles and what they hear in the market. In turn, marketing uses this information to attract more qualified leads to pass along to sales. This exchange reduces time spent contacting unqualified leads and ensures deals close faster.

Smarketing creates a consistent brand tone and voice across sales and marketing efforts, including sales demos and advertising campaigns. Your customers get the same story from the first ad to the final handshake.

Both teams are more productive by eliminating duplicated efforts and making better use of shared resources and tools. Because sales reps still spend 60% of their time on non-selling tasks like manual data entry, shared systems and workflows can free up their time for selling.

When the two teams share data and metrics on prospects and customers, they develop a collective understanding of them. For example, results can improve when both sales and marketing have access to the sales analytics dashboard in their CRM systems.

Smarketing breaks down the traditional barrier between sales and marketing. Instead of working separately, unified teams align their goals, tools, and performance metrics to support joint revenue and lead goals. This approach ensures a transparent process with clear information flow between the two teams. Here’s how smarketing works in practice:

• Shared goals are established: The two teams agree on common, measurable goals that are usually tied to a single revenue or sales target and a specific number of leads, holding each team accountable.
• Teams set expectations with an operating level agreement (OLA): The internal contract defines the shared goals, responsibilities, and metrics for each group’s commitment, including timelines and how leads are handed off.
• A unified view of customers is created: Sales and marketing define their ideal customer profile and buyer personas, fictional representations based on market research and customer data, that will be used to identify leads.
• Leads are handed off: Leads are generated by marketing through advertising campaigns, webinars, newsletters, and other content that target a company’s ideal customer profiles. Qualified leads are handed off from the marketing team to the sales team.
• Continuous feedback loop begins: Sales tells marketing which qualified leads became valuable prospects or resulted in a closed deal. Marketing refines its content based on the feedback shared.

Let’s say you work in sales at a medical software company. You’ve established shared goals and created an OLA with the marketing team that outlines revenue and lead targets.

Your marketing team runs an advertising campaign on a popular professional social network site. The ads target hospital managers with more than 200 employees, your agreed-upon ideal customer profile. The campaign offers a free hospital leadership playbook download in exchange for the target’s demographic information.

The playbook campaign generates leads, and marketing hands them off to your sales team per the deliverables outlined in the OLA. Your sales team contacts the leads and logs the prospect's sales data in the shared CRM.

During their weekly sales and marketing meeting, both teams review performance data summarized by software like Agentforce Sales and determine what worked and what didn’t. Based on the feedback, marketing refines its campaign to generate higher-quality leads for the sales team.

To implement smarketing, first evaluate your sales and marketing teams' current setup to identify opportunities for greater integration. Consider how often the teams interact, how many systems they share, and the quality of leads. This will help you identify areas that could be improved with smarketing.

Here are the essential steps to implement smarketing:

• Get leadership buy-in from the executives at your company and the heads of the sales and marketing teams. Secure approval for any additional resources or budget. This step will help you overcome any internal team resistance you may encounter when transitioning to smarketing.
• Formalize an OLA with clear definitions of roles, a description of responsibilities, and shared revenue targets. It should also include information on how leads will be handled, including lead handoff processes and lead qualification criteria.
• Set up your shared systems, tools, and processes, and implement smarketing workflow automation with AI tools for revenue tracking, forecasting, and analytics.
• Decide on your communication preferences, includingwhen to hold regular meetings and how you will share files and data. Create a smarketing email group alias.
• Co-create sales and marketing materials to ensure a consistent message for prospects and customers. The assets should be based on your ideal customer profile and may include proposals, case studies, demos, or pitch presentations.
• Institute change management initiatives to help teams adapt to the cultural shift in their roles and drive adoption of the new shared workflows and tools. This step could include joint training sessions to build new skills or provide sales enablement.

While smarketing offers advantages like higher-quality leads and potential revenue growth, it also has a few disadvantages to consider as you decide whether it’s the right business strategy for your organization.

• Consistent customer experience: Smarketing is a customer-focused approach from initial brand awareness to closing the deal. The customer has more effective interactions, leading to greater satisfaction.
• Better lead quality: Marketing knows what kind of prospects the sales team needs and designs campaigns to bring them into your pipeline.
• Improved forecasting accuracy: By sharing sales and marketing data in your CRM and revenue management software, everyone can see the same metrics and work from a single source of truth.

• Issues with technology integration: Organizations sometimes struggle to integrate sales tech with the tools that the marketing team uses. The result can complicate data sharing and lead tracking, and it can prevent the feedback loop that is essential to smarketing.
• Time-consuming initial setup: Launching a smarketing initiative takes time and resources because it requires a redesign of your organization’s sales and marketing structure, processes, and culture. Establishing workflows, learning new systems, and adapting to new routines requires significant effort and buy-in.
• Challenges with scalability: Smarketing can become more complex as an organization grows and adds more products and team members. This can lead to slower decision-making, miscommunication, or reduced agility in adapting to market changes.

Getting sales and marketing to share a presentation deck is one thing; getting them to share a strategic vision is another. To move from friction to flow, you need a strategy rooted in transparency and shared wins.

Here’s how to build a smarketing plan that sticks:

Make sure both teams understand what counts as a qualified lead and are working toward the same goals. Your OLA should define the marketing qualified lead (MQL) and the sales qualified lead (SQL). An MQL is a lead deemed likely to become a customer based on preset criteria and is handed off to the sales team. An SQL is a prospect vetted by marketing and ready for engagement by the sales team to close the deal.

Target a specific sales territory, a single product or service, or a marketing campaign. The pilot lets you test the smarketing workflows and refine them as needed before rolling out the program to the wider organization. You’ll be able to validate the workflow and build the credibility needed to drive organization-wide sales and marketing adoption. Ditch the “us vs them” mentality

Encourage sales and marketing teams to be curious and build understanding. Spending time observing each other’s daily tasks and workflows gives firsthand insights into how you could be working together. For example, a sales rep can watch a marketer create an advertising campaign to see how a strategy is developed. A marketer can join a sales rep on a demo to understand how a prospect views a product.

Presentations and case studies need to be accessible to both sales and marketing to ensure everyone uses the same materials and messaging. Review materials as a smarketing team on a quarterly basis to keep current with your buyer personas and customer insights, and update as needed.

If sales hits their target because marketing provided the right leads, that’s a shared win. Celebrate success together. Whether it’s an off-site outing or a simple shout-out in product.slack, rewarding the partnership rather than the department reinforces the idea that you’re all playing for the same team.

AI and technology support smarketing by automating processes, organizing data, and generating customer analytics and insights. These tools enhance productivity and support decision-making for both teams. Here are some of the ways:

• Seamless lead management: Forget manual data entry and "lost" leads. An AI-powered CRM acts as your team's single source of truth. It automatically captures, tracks, and assigns scores to leads based on your criteria.
• Predictive lead scoring: Not all leads are created equal. AI takes the guesswork out of prioritization by assigning values based on real-time behavior and historical data. This means Sales spends less time chasing dead ends and more time closing high-value deals.
• Personalization: Customers expect you to know them. AI allows smarketing teams to craft personalized emails, advertising, and support messages without spending hours on each one. Whether it’s a marketing nurture track or a direct sales follow-up, the messaging stays consistent, relevant, and‌ ‌ — ‌ ‌most importantly—human.

When your sales and marketing teams finally work as one, the results show up exactly where you want them: in your revenue. Instead of guessing what works, you get a clear picture of which leads‌ turn into customers. This means your marketing stays sharper, your sales reps stay busier with the right people, and you stop wasting time on leads that go nowhere.

Ultimately, this alignment makes life easier for your customers, too. They get a consistent, helpful experience from the first ad they see to the moment they sign a contract. By sticking to one shared game plan, you’ll close more deals, hit your goals faster, and build a business that’s much easier to scale.