In Conversation with Tom Steenburgh

Tom Steenburgh is the Richard S. Reynolds Professor and Senior Associate Dean for Faculty Development at the Darden School of Business. He is an expert in business-to-business marketing and sales, and co-founded the Thought Leadership on the Sales Profession conference. He is particularly interested in managerial issues in professional selling and sales force management.
We kick off our conversation with Tom by asking about “social selling” – when is it “selling” and when is it “marketing”? “In general, sales and marketing are becoming more aligned,” he told us. “Let me give you an example: I talked with one manager at Hubspot who said that their sales and marketing are so combined that they now call it ‘smarketing.’ There are a bunch of ways that these two things combine.”
Tom offers an example of a heavy machinery manufacturer who used a “smarketing” approach to create a website tailored to four buyer personas. The