SMarketing Alignment | Tech Marketing Leaders

A few years into my career, I wrote a six-hundred-word LinkedIn post about a Starbucks barista named Janette Navarro who couldn't get childcare sorted because her schedule kept changing at the last minute. I wasn't selling anything in that post — I was three weeks into a new job at a scheduling software company and just reacting to a New York Times article. It went viral, the city of San Francisco called me to a bill signing, then the Obama White House called asking if I'd weigh in on a national retail workers' bill of rights. All from one blog post that never mentioned my product.

That experience is what I brought to Kerry Guard's show, Tea Time with Tech Marketing Leaders. Marketing and sales fight because they're optimizing for different things — marketing is judged on stage-one leads, sales is judged on closed deals, and somewhere in between a BDR is stuck reporting to two different parents. I picked up the term "smarketing" from a CMO named Andrea Brody, and the idea is simple even if the execution isn't: both functions need to be rowing toward the same outcome, not fighting over who gets credit for a lead that took seventeen touches to close.

The math I use to keep that honest is sales velocity — opportunities times deal size times win rate, divided by how long the deal takes to close. It's a better conversation starter than "marketing sent bad leads" or "sales can't close," because it forces both sides to look at the same numbers instead of their own version of the story.