What Is Smarketing? Meaning, Challenges, and 5 Steps to Nail It

Sales professionals at companies with aligned sales and marketing teams are 103% more likely to beat their goals than those without alignment, according to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Sales Report. Double the odds of hitting quota. And the only variable is whether two teams in the same building talk to each other.

I’ve watched this play out from both sides. Marketing ships a campaign, generates 400 leads, celebrates. Sales calls 40 of them, decides the rest are junk, and goes back to their own list. Nobody is lying. They’re just measuring different things and never comparing notes.

That’s the problem smarketing solves. In this post, I’ll show you what smarketing actually is, the five challenges that kill it in practice, and the exact 5-step framework I use to get sales and marketing running on the same numbers.

What is smarketing?

Smarketing is the alignment of sales and marketing teams to work together for a smoother customer journey and more sales.

The term comes from a combination of “sales” and “marketing.” It refers to a business strategy where both teams are closely aligned around an integrated approach.

The goal is to build a strong relationship between sales and marketing based on shared goals and a unified strategy to reach them.

Is smarketing effective?

Smarketing is one of the most effective strategies for driving business and revenue growth.

According to LinkedIn’s B2B sales data, businesses see 27% faster profit growth when sales and marketing teams work closely together.

The leadership side agrees. Forrester’s 2025 C-Suite Alignment Survey found that 88% of chief sales officers and 79% of chief marketing officers agree cross-functional alignment is important.

Here’s the honest caveat: agreeing that alignment matters and actually running aligned are two very different things. Most companies I talk to are firmly in the first camp.

Why is smarketing important?

Smarketing matters because it breaks down the silos between sales and marketing. That leads to a unified approach that boosts sales, improves customer experience, and helps businesses grow.

Imagine sales and marketing as two sides of a coin. They both work toward the same goal, revenue, but from different angles. Smarketing gets them working together.

Smarketing allows sales and marketing teams to:

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  Define measurable goals where everyone is accountable. For example, both teams collaborate on establishing a leads service level agreement (SLA) for marketing. It includes the contingency that sales must follow up with a certain number of the leads they receive. This mutual agreement guides both teams toward a unified strategy.

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  Work in sync to improve customer experience.

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  Re-evaluate the goals of both teams to identify opportunities and things to improve.

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  Shift all focus onto every customer.

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  Communicate goals and challenges openly across both teams.

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  Shorten the sales cycle.

A smarketing strategy requires sales and marketing to work in sync on several moving targets:

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  Qualifying leads

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  Shared goals and key performance indicators

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  Target buyer personas and related messaging

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  The process for transferring leads from marketing to sales

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  Centralization and visibility of data

Key benefits of smarketing

When you execute it well, smarketing pays off in ways you can measure.

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  Improved customer experience. With marketing and sales on the same page, customers get a consistent and relevant experience throughout their buying journey. No more mixed messages or confusing handoffs. This is where a shared inbox earns its keep: when every email, LinkedIn message, and reply lives in one view, marketing can see exactly what sales is saying to the leads it sent over.

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  Higher sales win rates. Smarketing ensures that marketing generates qualified leads that fit the product or service, which makes it easier for sales teams to close deals.

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  Shorter sales cycles. By working together, sales and marketing can identify and address customer needs more quickly, leading to faster conversions.

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  Increased customer retention. Smarketing builds a more complete view of the customer, so you can develop targeted campaigns that keep customers engaged and coming back.

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  Better resource allocation. When sales and marketing collaborate, they avoid duplicating efforts and spend budget more efficiently.

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  Faster revenue growth. Combining the strengths of both teams accelerates how quickly a company grows revenue.

Smarketing: main challenges and how to tackle them

When your marketing and sales teams are misaligned, sales operations suffer. The misalignment causes internal friction and creates a bad customer experience.

The signs are easy to spot once you know them. Bumpy lead handoffs between marketing and sales. Inconsistent or incomplete data that makes it difficult to track ROI on either team’s efforts. The loudest sign of all is low conversion rates paired with poor customer retention.

The most common smarketing challenges are:

1. Siloed teams.

Sales and marketing teams often have different goals, priorities, and even cultures. Breaking down those silos is hard.

Solution:

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  Set shared goals and a shared vision. Define common goals for both teams and align them with the overall business objectives. This creates a sense of shared purpose.

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  Organize joint activities like workshops, brainstorming sessions, and social events to encourage interaction and understanding between teams.

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  Establish Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that outline how sales and marketing will collaborate on lead qualification, handoff procedures, and communication protocols.

2. Communication breakdowns.

Without clear and regular communication, smarketing efforts fall apart fast. Misunderstandings about target audiences, messaging, and lead qualification lead to wasted resources and frustrated teams.

Solution:

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  Host regular meetings (weekly or bi-weekly) for sales and marketing to discuss campaigns, customer feedback, and lead qualification criteria.

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  Share communication channels like project management tools (CRMs) or communication apps (like Slack) so everyone is on the same page and information flows freely.

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  Push both teams to share content with each other, like sales insights feeding into marketing content creation.

3. Metrics and measurement.

Agreeing on how to measure smarketing success is tricky. Sales might focus on closed deals while marketing prioritizes brand awareness. You need common metrics and KPIs.

Solution:

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  Define common KPIs that track the success of smarketing initiatives. This could include metrics for lead generation, conversion rates, and customer lifetime value.

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  Map out the customer journey and identify touchpoints where both sales and marketing contribute. This helps track the impact of each team’s efforts on the overall customer experience.

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  Implement data analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and identify areas for improvement.

4. Technological hurdles.

The right technology infrastructure is essential for smooth smarketing operations. Usually that means a CRM system that connects to your marketing automation tools.

Solution:

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  Invest in integration. Pick marketing automation tools and CRMs that share data and track progress across departments without manual exports.

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  Go further than data sync and add timing. Signal-based outreach turns job changes, hiring posts, and funding news into triggers, so marketing’s intent data arrives on a sales rep’s screen while it still means something. Pair that with AI agentic enrichment and the incomplete-data problem stops being a standing agenda item.

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  Provide training for both teams on how to use the new technology and get the most out of it.

5. Lack of leadership support.

Smarketing requires buy-in from senior management. If leadership doesn’t see the value of collaboration, getting both teams on board is a slog.

Solution:

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  Showcase data and case studies that demonstrate the benefits of smarketing for revenue growth and customer satisfaction.

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  Start with pilot smarketing projects to prove the value to leadership. Early wins go a long way in securing buy-in.

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  Identify an executive champion who understands the importance of smarketing and can advocate for collaboration across teams.

No single solution fits every company. Your job is to tailor the fix to the specific problem your sales and marketing teams are facing. The sooner you address these challenges, the faster the growth shows up.

How to implement smarketing in your business?

Here’s a 5-step framework to nail it:

1. Lay the groundwork to determine how aligned your teams currently are

Start by evaluating your current sales and marketing practices. Set clear goals for your smarketing initiatives and make sure they align with your overall business objectives.

Then get buy-in from both sales and marketing leadership. Build a culture of collaboration by breaking down silos and encouraging communication between teams. Skip this part and everything after it is theater.

2. Build a strong foundation for your smarketing strategy

Develop detailed buyer personas that represent your ideal customer. You can speed up the process of defining your business’s ideal customer profile with the lemlist free ICP generator, and if you want to see what a finished one looks like first, here are some buyer persona examples to work from. Detailed personas make sure both teams target the right audience with the right message.

Next, establish clear SLAs covering lead qualification criteria, handoff procedures, and communication protocols between sales and marketing. An SLA is a document that outlines a commitment between a service provider and a client, including details of the service, the standards the provider must meet, and the metrics used to measure performance.

3. Use technology and implement tools to boost your smarketing strategy

Most smarketing stacks start with a CRM (Salesforce or HubSpot CRM), a marketing automation platform (Marketo or HubSpot), and a shared workspace where both teams actually talk (Slack for conversation, Trello or Google Docs for campaign planning). Those are real options and plenty of teams run well on them. Pick what your teams will open every day, then train everyone on it.

Where that stack usually breaks is execution: marketing hands over a list, sales runs outreach somewhere else, and nobody sees the full conversation. That’s the gap lemlist fills. It holds a 4.6/5 rating on G2 from 1,300+ reviews, and here’s what it gives a smarketing team specifically.

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  Personalized outreach at scale. You can build campaigns with AI-generated sequences that adapt to each lead’s context instead of blasting the same template, which means the message marketing promised is the message sales actually sends.

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  A shared view of every conversation. The shared inbox puts email, LinkedIn, and other replies in one place, so sales and marketing see the same thread history instead of arguing from separate screenshots.

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  Timing cues that move from marketing to sales automatically. Signal-based outreach catches buying triggers and routes them to the right rep, turning marketing’s intent data into a same-day action instead of a monthly report.

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  Automated workflows. Follow-ups and outreach scheduling run on their own, which frees both teams to spend time on strategy and real conversations.

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  Campaign data both teams can read. Open rates, click-through rates, and replies are visible to everyone, so marketing and sales measure success against the same numbers and fix the same weak spots.

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  Multichannel outreach across email, LinkedIn, phone, WhatsApp, and SMS. Buyers don’t live in one channel, and neither should your sequences.

4. Develop and execute your smarketing strategy through collaboration and planning

Work together on targeted content that attracts leads, nurtures them through the funnel, and positions your brand as a resource worth trusting.

Plan and run joint campaigns that use the strengths of both teams: co-hosted webinars, targeted email campaigns, social initiatives.

Track the results of every initiative using the common KPIs you agreed on in step one. No separate scoreboards.

Then analyze the data together, find the weak points, and optimize. Monthly works. Quarterly is too slow.

5. Focus on continuous improvement by reviewing, celebrating, and evolving

Schedule regular meetings to discuss campaign performance, customer feedback, and areas for improvement.

Recognize and celebrate wins that came from sales and marketing collaboration. It sounds soft. It’s the cheapest way to keep two teams invested in each other’s numbers.

Review your SLAs on a set cadence and adjust the thresholds when volume or lead quality shifts, because an SLA nobody renegotiates is an SLA everybody ignores.

Stay ready to adapt. Customer needs, market conditions, and the tools available to you keep changing, and your smarketing strategy has to change with them.

The future of smarketing

The next version of alignment won’t be built on meetings. It’ll be built on signals.

Here’s the shift I’m watching. For years, the handoff between marketing and sales was a list: marketing scored leads, exported them, sales worked them a week later. Now the trigger comes first. A prospect changes jobs, a target account posts a role, a competitor’s customer starts hiring. Signal-based outreach catches those events and pushes them straight into a sequence, which collapses the handoff from days to minutes.

AI agents handle the second half. AI agentic enrichment fills in the firmographic and contact data that used to sit half-empty in your CRM, and AI-generated sequences draft the message against that enriched context. Qualification stops being a weekly argument about MQL definitions and becomes something that happens continuously, in the background.

One warning, because I’ve seen this go wrong. AI applied to a broken system doesn’t fix it. It accelerates it. If sales and marketing don’t agree on who the ideal customer is, agents will just generate misaligned outreach faster than humans ever could. Get the SLA and the ICP right first. Then automate.

Final thoughts

Smarketing aligns sales and marketing around one customer journey and one set of numbers. The payoff shows up as higher win rates, shorter cycles, better retention, and budget that stops getting spent twice.

The challenges are predictable: siloed teams, communication breakdowns, metrics nobody agrees on, a stack that doesn’t connect, and leadership that treats alignment as a nice-to-have. Every one of them has a fix, and none of the fixes require a reorg.

Pick the smallest one you can do this week. Agree on a single shared KPI, or write the lead-handoff SLA you’ve been meaning to write since January. Then give both teams one place to see the same conversations and the same signals.

Start a 14-day free trial and run your next campaign with sales and marketing looking at the same screen.