Sales vs. Marketing: How they are different and why you should know
As technology and business practices evolve, it’s easy to confuse sales and marketing. After all, it’s natural (and in most cases, encouraged) to group the two together. Is email marketing part of sales or marketing? What about pay-per-click advertising? Does it even matter?
The answer is: it depends, it depends, and yes, we believe it does matter. In cases where you are looking at specific business goals, knowing the difference between sales and marketing tactics can mean the difference between getting by and thriving. So, here are three key distinctions between sales and marketing, and what it means for your business.
1 / WINNING OPPORTUNITIES VS. CREATING OPPORTUNITIES
In essence, sales is about closing deals — everything and anything that will get your potential customer to say “yes, take my money.” Marketing, on the other hand, takes a broader perspective and looks at the full customer journey, from finding out about the company for the first time to getting their credit card out. In short, marketing creates opportunities for sales to win.
Traditionally, marketing will focus on the earlier stages in a customer’s lifecycle, by creating brand awareness and pulling in leads to be passed along to sales for them to win over. This is typically seen in B2B companies or brick-and-mortar B2C businesses.
However, as businesses become more digital, marketing managers will find themselves using more sales tactics and vice versa. In e-commerce, for example, it’s not uncommon for marketing teams to be more invested in the online checkout process, where sales occurs. On the flipside, you’ll find more salespeople, particularly in SaaS companies, spending the majority of their time finding, qualifying, and nurturing leads.
No matter what kind of business you’re running, knowing how sales and marketing operate according to your customer’s journey can help you better allocate your resources and ensure enough opportunities are coming and ending with a win.
2 / SHORT-TERM VS. LONG-TERM
With every stage of the customer’s experience in mind, marketing tactics and strategies naturally operate on a longer term basis. It takes time to build a brand and even longer to build a great one. That’s why most marketing efforts won’t see their work paying off until much later in time. It also makes tracking results and success much more difficult because there are so many ways a customer can interact with a business. However, once marketing is in full force, it makes selling much easier because people are already familiar with your company and are much more primed for conversion.
Meanwhile, sales works on a shorter term basis, focusing on the here and now. For sales, the question becomes “what needs to be said and done in order to get a potential client to choose you over a competitor today?” You can quickly see results from sales efforts because they are usually the last touch point before a customer converts. This means that if your business goals have a tight timeline, you will want to focus on sales tactics rather than marketing to meet your objectives.
3 / ONE-TO-ONE VS. ONE-TO-MANY
If you close your eyes and picture a salesperson, you’ll probably think of someone picking up a phone, going door-to-door, or setting up meetings over coffee. Sales strategies are usually quite high-touch with a heavy focus on relationship building. The more personal a sales tactic is, the more effective it usually is because it shows how you care about the customer’s immediate needs. In this way, sales can oftentimes be very time consuming and manual. We love leveraging technology to make this process easier, by automating emails for example or making scheduling meetings more efficient.
On the other hand, marketing takes a more “mass” approach, speaking to a group of people at a time. While this has typically made marketing impersonal and generic, technology has made personalisation much easier with tactics such as highly targeted ads and customised email marketing. By clearly defining your target segments, you can make marketing feel like talking to a friend rather than to thousands at once.
For many companies, it can be tough to find the right strategy to solve a certain goal, but knowing the differences between sales and marketing is a huge step in the right direction. Need more help getting your sales and marketing up to speed? Leave us a message at hello@junction43.co.
