Smarketing: a word that, believe it or not, we did not make up. “Smarketing" is a combination of the words “sales" and “marketing" and should describe how your sales and marketing teams are two peas in a pod.

We're willing to bet that those departments aren't BFFs, though – and that's a bad thing. Why? Because you're missing opportunities. Sales thinks marketing will follow up and vice versa, marketing thinks sales isn't doing enough with their leads, sales thinks marketing isn't giving them qualified leads ... and on and on.

Consider these ideas to get smarketing in your business:

• Attend events together – whether it's an industry meetup group, happy hour, or a conference, spend time together outside of your office space. If team members get to know each other as people versus the arch enemy marketing team (or vice versa), they'll work together more effectively.
• Have monthly meetings – the marketing and sales teams should meet on a monthly basis to analyze results and evaluate goals. Important numbers to analyze include lead generation, percent of leads worked, and lead-to-customer conversion rate.
• Make sharing information easy – Evernote, Google Docs, Dropbox, a group email address ... all ways to make information accessible to everyone. Make it easy for sales to access marketing information, such as brochures and upcoming marketing campaigns, and for marketing to access sales information, such as the quality and progress of generated leads.
• Encourage learning – just because your sales and marketing teams are sharing information doesn't mean that they understand each other's information. Let the marketing team “train" the sales team on how an email template works, let the sales teams “train" the marketing team on how they follow up with a lead, etc.

If you have trouble making smarketing work, you are absolutely not alone. Read this case study for some statistics related to the lack of smarketing most companies have, or check out this blog for more smarketing ideas.