As a lecturer, mentor, and consultant, that’s probably the question I get asked the most. Sadly, many people see it as the same when looking to engage a sales and marketing manager or director or general manager.
What is the difference between sales and marketing?
Marketing is a support role to many areas of the business and including sales. Marketing involves defining customers’ needs and understanding their desired experience (functional or emotional) for a product or service and feeds this information to product development and sales teams.
Marketing profiles customers’ wants, reviews pricing strategy to align with the brand proposition and assists the sales function to fill and keep filling the sales pipeline. Marketing activities push and pull people to engage, learn, interact with the brand its product and services for them to buy.
Your sales, business development team is employed to identify opportunities, form partnerships, drives sales, follow up leads and enquires and build long-lasting relationships with customers and other stakeholders, to get to know them, their wants, and desires. To be effective they must be relationship-driven and dig deep into each person to understand them before the meeting. They engage marketing to provide them with tools and tactics to make their job effortless.
Online eCommerce sites, email marketing or direct marketing, social sites are other channels that drive promotions and sales. Marketing is there to assist to:
- Create compelling call to action (CTA’s) campaigns and projects,
- Create promotions and offers to entice prospects to buy,
- Collect leads, answer enquiries, and
- Close sales
Brand campaigns and promotions are designed to attract leads and enquiries to be distributed to the sales team. They’re there to drive and tempt people to fill their shopping carts and to settle question where using online chatbots and FAQ.
Author tip: Respect the differences and embrace that both strive to generate leads and revenue. Work to each other’s strengths and you will see greater results.
It’s obvious how sales and marketing roles differ significantly and how important they are in their own right as both are working to achieve the same goals: securing business and helping grow the brand (company). To get your company’s product and services in front of prospects and customers to buy. That’s why you’re in business.
Proper alignment and collaboration between sales and marketing functions could lead to an impressive lift in sales figures and higher customer retention. It’s great to understand the benefits of both roles working together but it’s even more important to know how to get them to work effectively together – and that is another full blog article.
Author tip: Create a winning partnership that works and thrives.
Bottom line, organisations cannot be successful without a marketing and branding strategy that sales and business development teams can use to drive engagement, fill sales targets, form partnerships, alliances, identify new business opportunities and close sales. Both roles ability to collaborate increases the opportunity to maximise efforts, eliminate duplication and boost sales.
Author:
Tina Manolitsas, FFMG Co-Founder, Marketing Strategist, Business & Marketing Mentor & Advisor, Board Director & Business Judge
