Jump starting any business into the market is not a task for the faint in heart. It takes an iron stomach, a wealth of knowledge, and then an ongoing persistence to make sure that everything works in your favor. One of the fine lines that companies will have to juggle is the difference between sales and marketing.
Both relate to each other as parts of a larger process but, they’re far from identical. The roles of sales and marketing are often misunderstood by small businesses because these organizations may be forced to drastically multi-task both functions and it is this multi-tasking that creates the confusion itself.
Clarifying these roles, and then integrating them into a small business, is highly recommended. Knowing the difference between sales and marketing will allow your business to efficiently manage its efforts in order to maximize your results. Mastering the ability to avoid overlapping responsibilities is a skill that separates the rookies from the pros.[Tweet “There’s a thin line between sales and marketing! Learn the difference!”]
The Common Misconceptions
In sales, the objective is to encourage a purchase and it is culminated by that exact moment when a buyer decides to acquire a product or service. The work involved in getting to the close is also selling but, all of this magic doesn’t start in the manner that most businesses assume.
The work done with customers directly (sales), and that which creates public sentiment (marketing), are different tasks. While marketing helps to set the stage for sales, this prep work only gets the playing field ready for the ideal customer. Businesses who do not understand how to leverage the role of each, are quite likely to invest their time and money into the wrong tasks and the wrong focuses.
The Intricacies of Sales
Your sales team promotes your products and services. Operations takes on the responsibility of actually creating products to sell. The accounting department manages money and controls spending. Sales is then charged with the process of negotiating prices and tracking the progress of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly performance quotas.
The business as a whole is focused on generating profitable revenue, however, the sale can only happen when the roles of all other departments have been mastered. Whereas sales might be charged with placing a product or service, marketing is discovering the perfect audience to pitch it to.
It is the job of sales to ensure that customers are made aware of, and are shown, the relevance that a product or service will have in their lives. It’s true that most people don’t buy based on rational decision making alone. Therefore, regardless of the fact that a business may have put hours or years of work into the development of a profitable and marketable solution, creating that “ah-ha” emotional moment in the customer’s mind is still done with sales.
Marketing research has shown that there’s a need for the product and has identified the optimal place to leverage that with those customers who are most likely to purchase it but, until a customer reaches this “ah-ha” stage, it’s unlikely that they will ever generate enough of an emotional connection in order to find a product useful. What many salespeople don’t understand is that this gap exists between every customer and every product and a true sales professional will help a customer to bridge that gap.
Bringing a Product To Market
Marketing focuses on bringing a product or service that will align with the right customer. It’s the work done to identify the perfect environment for a solution. Marketing looks at an industry from the perspective of the customer. Marketing attempts to understand how people think prior to them ever taking the actions needed to satisfy their needs.
Not every product or service is useful for every person on this planet. Instead, marketing finds the right community of people that are the most likely to invest in the product or service that they are representing. Marketing is also charged with how a brand is positioned within the marketplace.
Most people want to hear the larger story of a company. They want to be able to understand who a company is and this enables a brand to be identified, on a long-term basis, within their selected market. Marketing is always a process of continuous data collection and analysis which will then allow that businesses to leverage their brand within a specific business sector.
The Faults In Having One Without The Other
Because of the intricate role that marketing plays, the sales revenues of a company will decline when marketing is overlooked. The fact is, there’s a great deal of strategic work put behind the process of both sales and marketing. There is also a steady stream of competitors who are assessing, and entering, your markets in search of their piece of your pie.
Businesses succeed by positioning their products or services to meet the overall needs of their targeted customer. This is why sales and marketing will rarely work effectively without each other. A product offering will be poorly leveraged if it has no marketing platform to support it.
All businesses need to understand their collective strengths and weaknesses. Having that information helps companies make the right decisions that will move them in the right direction. Information is priceless when competing in a large market and/or against other successful brands.
The work that a company does to improve their marketing means nothing if they don’t understand the effectiveness of selling and how this skill moves their products. Acknowledging, and leveraging, the dynamics of both, sales and marketing, will allow you to manage the work that you do and this will enable you to fine tune your overall processes and to deploy your most effective strategies.
Mollie McDonnell
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- The Thin Line Between Sales and Marketing - November 16, 2016