It’s that time of year again! That’s right folks, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: it’s holiday office party season. Now, some of you readers might think that anyone who’s excited to spend a weeknight eating tiny, moderately priced entrees and drinking responsibly with their cubicle-neighbors must be out of their mind.
If that’s the way you think, then your office’s Smarketing (marketing + sales alignment) might be out of whack - if you subscribe to Smarketing at all, that is.
“Smarketing? That seems like an escape clause,” you say to yourself. “What does Smarketing have to do with my upcoming awkward office party?” To that, we say: “more than you might think.”
Having a well-aligned company means having a team that is built upon a foundation of communication. If your marketing and sales divisions are working together as a unit, then they probably like each other enough to buddy it up and enjoy a meal together. But when 87% of the terms that sales and marketing use to describe each other are negative, then unaligned teams are much less likely to get along.
When an aligned team gets together outside of a professional setting, the likelihood is that they’ll have no shortage of things to talk about. The sales team is familiar work that the marketers do and vice versa. Both teams share buyer personas and use the same lingo to describe them. They see each other face-to-face other on a regular basis-- sometimes even daily! This means that Smarketing teams not only work well together, but they probably know enough about each other to chat casually and goof around together over an appetizer sampler. This isn’t to say that non-smarketers are always estranged from the folks at the other end of the funnel, but they’re less likely to hang around each other at your year’s end bash when they haven’t really gotten to know each other in the first place. A smarketing holiday party is a festive one!
Thanks to a self-designed Service Level Agreement (SLA), your marketers and sales reps have been working together all year long. SLAs, by nature, are designed to reward both divisions equally for accomplishing shared goals. Aligned teams don’t see themselves as two separate entities under one corporate roof; they see themselves as two hemispheres of the same brain. The majority of unaligned teams feel estranged from their counterparts and sometimes even look down on each other. When marketing and sales are unified by a common goal, they cease to think of each other as opponents. This, in turn, drastically reduces the likelihood of cattiness or drama at your smarketing soiree.
Since aligned marketing and sales teams have spent so much time working through challenges together, they’re going to have a whole lot of memories to look back on from the past year! And what fun is a year’s end holiday party without a trip down memory lane? New Year's is right around the corner! Thanks to all the closed-loop reporting and transparency policies your team has been working with, they’ve got lots to remember together. Unaligned team members won’t have any shared tribulations or inside jokes like that to recollect. Not always because they don’t like each other, but because they simply never got a chance to build a working relationship! Without the help of closed-loop reporting, marketers and salespeople who would communicate effectively and get along like gangbusters might not ever meet face to face!
So in the coming year, consider this: if you aren’t interested in high-quality prospects, SLA benefits, a better organized marketing funnel, or increased revenue that smarketing leads to, perhaps you’ll be swayed by the promise of a jollier holiday office shindig.