What is Smarketing? (Part 2.)

1. Customer journey

When companies take the step towards becoming more customer-centric, mapping the customer journey is an important part. Conducting a customer journey analysis helps shift the focus from the organization's channels and departments to the reality of the customer. Where are customers located? What online and offline channels do they use to gather information and find their suppliers? What are their needs, barriers and drivers? By visualizing the customer's needs and challenges in a journey, it becomes easy to, for example, identify opportunities, become more relevant and improve the experience.

By visualizing the customer's needs and challenges in a journey, it becomes easy to identify opportunities, become more relevant and improve the experience.

In this step, it is important to leave departmental thinking behind and focus solely on the customer's needs and their experience throughout the customer journey, instead of talking about which department is responsible for the customer in the different steps. A customer journey analysis should therefore be done jointly with stakeholders from different functions that have direct and indirect contact with the customer through the customer journey to truly understand the customer.

2. Common Language

Communication is essential for a successful organization.

"Communication is a prerequisite for the creation, existence and development of organizations. Coordination, management, learning, job satisfaction, customer relations and more are virtually impossible to create without communication. "

M. Heide, C. Johansson, C. Simonsson, Communication in organizations, Danish volume, Swedish, 2012

In order to drive development, ideas need to be disseminated and communicated effectively, and feedback needs to be received quickly. Therefore, collaboration between marketing and sales is key to success in digital, measurable and scalable sales, and communication requires a common language and vocabulary. This becomes even more important as new phenomena and concepts are constantly emerging in sales and marketing. Do sales and marketing agree on what is meant by a "lead"? Even in the same system such as Salesforce, the definition of "lead" differs in Marketing Automation and CRM systems. And that puts extra emphasis on defining different terms jointly and not allowing the system to define the terms and set the internal language.

For sales and marketing to lay the groundwork for a common language, they should conduct a number of different analyses together. Mapping the customer journey and the different stages of it, defining your customer segment and personas.

It is extremely important that marketing and sales have common definitions and a shared understanding of the different stages of the lead pipeline, from need to decision. When they agree, they can jointly develop common goals and KPIs for all parts of the pipeline. This will promote collaboration and break down silos by having a common focus and goal. Subsequently, continuous joint meetings can help to stay focused on agreed objectives and move in the same direction.

"Real-time information enables real-time adjustments and improvements."

‍Don Burkett

3. Unified Data

A prerequisite for creating a seamless customer experience and understanding customer behavior is to have a strategy for collecting data. Data silos are a common problem whereby important customer data is stored in separate channels and devices, or kept isolated by a particular department. In fact, data silos are synonymous with a fragmented customer journey. And this is where today's well-developed technology plays an important role.

To break down data silos, you need to unify your data. To do this, you need one or more integrated systems that collect different types of data and preferably a central platform where you can analyze data and create a unified picture of the customer. A good start is to integrate CRM data with a marketing platform such as a Marketing Automation system. This will allow you to improve your organization's efficiency and create a holistic view of your customers. The integration between these two systems will also open up completely new possibilities when it comes to personalization and segmentation.

In short, through a CRM-Marketing Automation integration, you will be able to start breaking down your data silos, elevate and develop your lead management process, and align the work between the sales and marketing departments of your company. Other important data sources that can influence the customer experience are support systems and customer service systems. This data also needs to be analyzed in order for companies to act on the results.

4. Agile Organization

Agile transformation is about developing the ability of an organization or business to work effectively. This is despite constantly changing conditions, goals and requirements. A challenge that becomes more difficult to manage for sales and marketing in a traditional organization. The use of an Agile working methodology enables teams to adapt more quickly to changing conditions while planning and delivering long-term.

Cross-functional teams can be temporary or more stable over time. Temporary teams are suitable for customer-facing organizations with fast-moving needs and short lead times. Temporary teams can be created on an ongoing basis to address current issues or the skills available in the organization. Stable cross-functional teams, on the other hand, suit functions like SMarketing. Where members from sales and marketing, operations and customer service work together to create coordination between functions and create smoother and more frictionless internal processes, from customer needs through production to supplier base, leading to a unified customer experience.

In other words, cross-functional teams are key to creating Agile organizations. And an Agile organization leads to an environment that embraces creativity and innovation, leads to continuous development and improvement while empowering employees and reducing top-down management.

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