How is this different from a marketing agency or CRM consultant?

Agencies execute tactics. CRM consultants configure software. I build the operational system that connects your marketing, sales, and delivery into one revenue engine, and I coach your team to run it. When we are done, you do not need me anymore. That is the point.

We are only a $3M company. Are we too small for this?

If you have a sales team, a marketing function, and clients to serve, you have a revenue engine, even if it is held together with duct tape. The earlier you build the right systems, the faster you grow and the less painful the scaling process is.

What if my team resists the changes?

That is why this is done-with-you, not done-to-you. Your team is involved throughout: mapping their own processes, defining their own metrics, choosing the tools they will actually use. People do not resist change they helped create.

How is my maturity stage determined?

Three ways, in sequence. First, the Revenue Intelligence Platform connects to your existing tools and analyzes your actual data: CRM completeness, pipeline stage distribution, integration coverage. That takes about 30 minutes of your time and produces data-driven scores on 15-20 competencies without any self-reporting. Second, a structured questionnaire covers what data alone cannot assess. Third, a 60-90 minute assessment call with me personally, where I validate the preliminary scores and surface anything the data cannot capture. This is part of the engagement, not the free discovery call. You see the scoring rationale for every competency. Nothing is a black box.

I have been burned by consultants before.

I hear this a lot. Most consulting engagements fail because the consultant builds something in a silo that the team rejects, or because the engagement ends and nobody knows how to maintain what was built. My model solves both problems: your team builds it with my coaching, so they own it. And every recommendation comes from your actual maturity assessment, not a generic template applied to every client regardless of where they are.

Smarketing

When Marketing and Sales Stop Grading Their Own Homework

By Bradley de Wet, founder of Modern BizOps. 15 years in revenue operations, including building revenue systems at Contactually (VC-backed SaaS), founding Tasting Club, and serving as COO and leader of account management at a boutique digital marketing agency.

Last updated July 15, 2026

Smarketing is the practice of running sales and marketing as one team with one goal, one definition of a qualified lead, and one scoreboard. The word is a portmanteau of “sales” and “marketing,” popularized by HubSpot, and the concept is older than the word: revenue suffers when the team that generates demand and the team that closes it optimize for different numbers.

Here is the version of the definition that actually explains the problem. In most companies, marketing grades its own homework and sales grades its own homework. Marketing reports leads generated, and hits its number. Sales reports deals closed, and misses its number. Both scoreboards are green and red at the same time, every quarterly meeting becomes a jurisdiction dispute, and the founder ends up as the referee. Smarketing, stripped of the cute name, means one scoreboard that neither team controls alone.

What one scoreboard changes

The middle of the funnel is where two scoreboards show up in the data. Marketing hands over leads it calls qualified; sales works the ones it agrees with and quietly ignores the rest. Across industries, the average business converts only around 13% of marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads, based on First Page Sage’s multi-year analysis of client data across 25+ industries (First Page Sage, 2026 report). Read that number for what it implies: at a typical company, roughly seven out of eight leads marketing counted as wins never became something sales would count. Both teams hit their numbers. The company did not.

That gap is not a personality conflict, and it does not respond to alignment offsites. It responds to infrastructure: a written definition of a qualified lead both teams sign, a handoff with a trigger and an acceptance step, and a service level agreement that binds both directions. That is a buildable system, and the full version, all three pieces, lives in the marketing and sales alignment guide. The specific mechanics of measuring the handoff are covered in the MQL to SQL conversion rate guide.

The founder-sized version

Almost everything written about smarketing assumes a marketing department, a sales floor, and a RevOps function refereeing them. You may have two marketers and a sales team you still lead personally. That does not exempt you; it means your version is cheaper and faster to build.

At founder-led scale, smarketing is three decisions you can make this month. Decide, in writing, what a qualified lead is, in observable criteria both teams helped define. Decide what happens at handoff: what triggers it, what data must be attached, and how sales formally accepts or returns a lead with a reason. Decide what number both teams answer to together, and make it revenue or qualified pipeline, never raw lead volume, because any team graded on volume alone will lower the bar to hit it. The lead qualification framework is the shared-definition half of that work in detail.

The test for whether you have smarketing or just meetings: when did marketing last change something specific because of what sales reported back? If the answer is never, the teams are cohabiting, not aligned.

FAQ

What is the meaning of smarketing?+

Smarketing combines "sales" and "marketing" into one word to describe running the two functions as a single revenue team: shared goals, a shared definition of a qualified lead, and shared accountability for revenue rather than separate departmental metrics. The name is marketing-speak, but the underlying discipline is real and measurable.

What is a smarketer?+

Informally, someone who works across both functions or is measured on both outcomes. In practice, founder-led companies rarely need a person with the title; they need both existing teams bound to one definition and one scoreboard. The role matters less than the rules.

What is a marketing qualified lead?+

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that meets the criteria marketing and sales agreed indicate real buying potential: typically a fit test (right industry, size, and role) plus an intent signal (a demo request, a pricing page visit, a downloaded diagnostic). The definition only works if it is written, observable, and shared. An MQL defined by marketing alone is a volume target wearing a qualification badge, which is exactly the failure smarketing exists to prevent.

One shared scoreboard starts with knowing where the handoff leaks today. The five-minute Revenue Growth Scorecard measures marketing-sales alignment as one of the competencies it scores.

Get Your Revenue Growth Scorecard