Unshackle Your Team  (English, Paperback, Raghavendra Hunasgi)

Let Us Take a Smarter Approach to Sales and Marketing—Smarketing! In today’s world, where digital transformation is the norm, it makes sense for sales and marketing to work in tandem instead of as conflicting functions. The S in Smarketing is for smart sales. We must start by looking at the role that sales and marketing play to understand the changes we need to make to create an impact. Essentially, the sales cycle begins where the marketing function ends. However, today, the lines are blurred with marketing continuing to nurture the prospect and providing useful content throughout the customer’s buying journey for sales enablement. Sales also feeds marketing with insights they have gathered from their interactions with customers, which can help marketing efforts. The Smarketing team plays a vital role, which is why you need to focus on identifying, hiring, motivating, and retaining a smart and ambitious team. You can create a winning team with the right sales and marketing members supported by data, following the best practices that we have discussed, and by readying your organization for this move. But before you go ahead, do a cost-benefit analysis to determine the return-on-investment from your sales and marketing teams. Even as we talk about numbers and strategy, remember that this is a cultural change and you will have to start working from the grassroot-levels so that everyone is prepared for the change. Be prepared to face challenges, bottlenecks, and struggles around determining the size of the team and the way forward.