Sales and marketing are the keystones to the growth, sustainability, and revenue of any business. While sales and marketing are both responsible for feeding a company’s bottom and line and contributing to its profitability, the distinction between the two is crucially important. Many companies who claim to have a stable sales and marketing strategy are often missing the mark in their distinction of the two.
Sales vs. Marketing
Although they are often grouped together, viewing sales and marketing as two different departments can help you to grow your brand awareness, industry leadership, and overall profits. Here are a few distinctions:
- Selling vs. Building a Brand
This should be obvious to anyone in the business field, but too often companies lump the roles of marketing and sales together in regards to the firm’s brand. It is a fact that companies who focus on building their brand as a separate project from selling their brand will have higher revenues and larger customer bases. It’s the goal of marketing to build the public’s perception of your company and industry leadership, while it’s the role of sales to demonstrate why your potential customers need to use your brand. In other words, marketing should be used to allow your company to speak for itself; the sales call should be a simple presentation of an already-convincing brand.
- Nurturing vs. Closing Leads
Once you have a pool of qualified candidates whom you want to market/sell to, allowing marketing and sales to play their separate roles will create for a higher rate of closed sales. First, use marketing to nurture your leads. This could include developing newsletters, content marketing, social media marketing, web redesign and other unique ways to demonstrate who you brand is, what you do, and why your services are valuable. Ensure that these messages make a touch point in one way or another with your potential customers. Nurturing your potential client base before selling to them is a great way to increase your likelihood of closing a sale. After the nurturing process, it is the role of sales to close the deal.
- Individuals vs. An Audience
This is an area where sales and marketing clash all too often. The end target of sales and marketing, while there is overlap, are often different. It is the goal of sales to focus on speaking with the one right guy who is in charge of making decisions. But it is the goal of marketing to make a touchpoint with multiple people at a single company to generate overall brand awareness amongst individuals whom you are trying to sell to. Without sales, marketing techniques and messages can prove too soft and impersonal to make a final sale, however, with sales the target focus is overly narrow which leads to low closing rates.
Conclusion
When utilized together, marketing and sales efforts employed in harmony with one another are guaranteed to further a brand’s profitability and customer base. Even though the differences may be hard to define at times, consistently treating the two as separate departments and disciplines is a sure-fire way to grow your company’s bottom line.
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