The essentials: Understanding the difference between sales and marketing
It’s important to understand the difference between sales and marketing and it’s even more important to understand that you need to be doing both marketing and selling at the same time.
That may seem like a “no-brainer,” but in a small business it’s often the same person or people who are responsible for both sales and marketing. When that’s the case, it’s easy to tip too far in one direction to the detriment of the other.
For example, if your sales team is paid largely by commission, it’s easy to see how they would want to spend almost all of their time selling…but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. Let’s examine the important differences between sales and marketing.
Marketing
Marketing is a “big picture” enterprise. Marketing strategies convince buyers that your company is the right company to do business with; it works to bring buyers and sellers closer together. Marketing draws a picture of the market today and looks ahead to see what buyers will want or need in the future. Success is measured via general trends.
Sales
Sales persuades individual prospects that your product or service is right for them today. It measures success via incremental sales. Sales builds and maintains relationships with specific buyers.
The sales and marketing balance
As I was saying above, problems can arise if you fail to strike a balance between sales and marketing. Closely tied to this question are the talents and inclinations of your team. It’s extremely important that you have the right people slotted for sales and marketing positions.
If you have someone who is a top earning salesperson, you may not want to burden that individual with marketing responsibilities, and the reverse is true as well.
Since sales is demonstrably feeding the top line, it can be tempting to let marketing slide. However, if you do this you open the door for a competitor to come in and start out performing you in the medium-term future. Always be looking forward and task your marketing team with “preparing the soil for next year’s crops.”
The essentials: Understanding the difference between sales and marketing
It’s important to understand the difference between sales and marketing and it’s even more important to understand that you need to be doing both marketing and selling at the same time.
That may seem like a “no-brainer,” but in a small business it’s often the same person or people who are responsible for both sales and marketing. When that’s the case, it’s easy to tip too far in one direction to the detriment of the other.
For example, if your sales team is paid largely by commission, it’s easy to see how they would want to spend almost all of their time selling…but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself. Let’s examine the important differences between sales and marketing.
Marketing
Marketing is a “big picture” enterprise. Marketing strategies convince buyers that your company is the right company to do business with; it works to bring buyers and sellers closer together. Marketing draws a picture of the market today and looks ahead to see what buyers will want or need in the future. Success is measured via general trends.
Sales
Sales persuades individual prospects that your product or service is right for them today. It measures success via incremental sales. Sales builds and maintains relationships with specific buyers.
The sales and marketing balance
As I was saying above, problems can arise if you fail to strike a balance between sales and marketing. Closely tied to this question are the talents and inclinations of your team. It’s extremely important that you have the right people slotted for sales and marketing positions.
If you have someone who is a top earning salesperson, you may not want to burden that individual with marketing responsibilities, and the reverse is true as well.
Since sales is demonstrably feeding the top line, it can be tempting to let marketing slide. However, if you do this you open the door for a competitor to come in and start out performing you in the medium-term future. Always be looking forward and task your marketing team with “preparing the soil for next year’s crops.”