Sales and marketing are the two major components one needs to run a successful business. Both marketing and sales work in tandem with the ultimate goal of finding, attracting, and retaining customers for a company.
These two departments have similar goals, but their methods for reaching them differ.
While marketing focuses more on the top of the funnel, like reaching a target audience or generating leads, the sales department focuses more on bottom-of-the-funnel transactions, ensuring customers go through with their purchase.
Learning about sales and marketing and the value each field brings to a business can build a company’s performance over time.
Difference between sales and marketing
Put simply, marketing builds awareness and attracts leads to your business. Sales convert those leads into paying customers.商业ses need to use a holistic, collaborative approach that involves both departments working together to reach common goals.
Sales vs. marketing
Sales and marketing may overlap in some of their goals and responsibilities, but there are several important distinctions between them.
Scope
How they’re similar:Marketing and sales strategies each work to target prospects and convert them into paying customers. Sales and marketing share the ultimate goal of selling, which increases a business’s revenue.
How they’re different:A sales team’s and a marketing team’s scopes can differ regarding who owns which part of the funnel. Traditionally, B2C andB2B marketingstrategies focus on the upper portion of the funnel, and there’s a handoff to sales somewhere in the middle of the funnel. Sales then handles the bottom of the funnel.
Tactics
How they’re similar:Both sales and marketing appeal to customer wants and needs.
How they’re different:Sales tactics often involve one-on-one contact with leads, including in-person meetings, product demonstrations, or conferences to engage with new customers directly.
Marketing tacticsinvolve wide-reaching actions like direct-mail campaigns, radio spots, search engine optimization (SEO), social media ads, or brand ambassadors to reach a broad audience. Marketing tactics may also involveautomation, to allow marketers to serve content to leads more efficiently.
Tools
How they’re similar:Sales and marketing both benefit from various digital tools that organize and track data.
How they’re different:Since sales often focus on direct interactions with customers, they need tools for relationship management. Customer relationship management (CRM) software, which collects, organizes, and analyze information about customers and their journey, is a core sales tool for any company.
Since marketing casts a wider net to reach customers on various channels, they need tools to get insights, measure performance, and managecampaigns.
Teams/roles
How they’re similar:Sales and marketing professionals follow a hierarchy of responsibility, where each employee has their own goals and objectives to drive engagement and profit. In some cases, both departments are responsible for lead generation and nurturing customers long after a sale.
How they’re different:Sales and marketing require different areas of expertise and experience. Marketing teams may include roles like writers, graphic designers, and illustrators, and have individuals who specialize in social media, video, content strategy, and SEO.
The sales team puts the marketing team’s work into play, ensuring customers make the final decision to invest in a product or service. A sales team sets quotas and volume goals to measure their performance. In most cases, these are based on a short-term period of time, such as a quarter or month.
Good sales reps are adept storytellers with high confidence and excellent communication skills. Sales professionals must know how to both pitch a product, leverage company messaging, and deal with people one-on-one.
A primer on sales
Sales refers to the entire process of facilitating and completing a sales transaction. Sales teams deal with every stage of the sales process, from prospecting to education to conversion. A sales organization can scale from a single person to a department subdivided into teams.
- Sales representatives.销售代表are employees who deal with customers one-on-one. Inside sales reps work remotely, while outside sales reps work with customers in person. Sales reps might be tasked with anything from cold calling to creating and sending educational materials to attending in-person meetings to meet sales goals.
- Sales manager.Multi-person sales teams usually need managers to oversee the sales process. Sales management ensures their reps have all the necessary tools and follow the sales strategy. They might set sales targets and strategies, analyze customer data, and train new sales reps for the company.
- Sales specialist.A sales specialist (or sales consultant—often used interchangeably) is the person with the most in-depth knowledge about a product or service. They are often responsible for product-specific market research, conducting product demos, and troubleshooting.
- Account executive.The higher-level sales reps typically focus on bringing in new business, writing sales proposals, negotiating with clients, and closing deals. Account execs don’t usually find and recruit leads, though they may be responsible for many high- and low-level responsibilities in a smaller business. For other business types, like B2B businesses, the account executive might be a full-cycle sales rep who handles the account from initial interest through sale.
- Customer success.Sometimes the role of sales doesn’t end with a transaction. Sales may also include the customer success function, which focuses on retention. They’re charged with fostering positive relationships with their existing clients, renewing sales, and facilitating new purchases.
A primer on marketing
Marketingis a set of strategies businesses use to attract potential customers to their product or services.
A good marketing strategy focuses on four key factors, known as the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. The product is the goods or service itself, the price is what the consumer pays, the place is where and how the goods get marketed, and the promotion is the advertising strategy.
Marketing team activities might include:
- Market research.Teams conduct market research to understand a company’s target audience and forecast trends in the market.
- Brand strategy.Marketing must answer the question, “Who are we as a company?” This impacts how the company presents itself—from the design of its products and website to the language it uses when talking to customers.
- Channel strategies.Marketing leverages “channels” to reach a business’s audience, including social media marketing, email marketing, digital advertising, direct mail, and more.
- Public relations.Publicists will reach out to media outlets to raise awareness.
- Customer acquisition and retention.This involves creating an excellent customer experience to get someone to buy for the first time.
These activities are usually assigned to various specialists on a marketing team—from social media strategists to brand managers—or, for small businesses, might be consolidated into a singlemarketing manager的角色。
Managing sales and marketing departments
There are a few strategies for managing the sales and marketing teams to help streamline your success.
Identify tensions
Marketing and sales can sometimes butt heads. If overall sales are low or a new product doesn’t perform as expected, marketers might lay blame on the sales professionals for their ineffective selling strategies.
On the other hand, if sales are poor, salespeople may feel like marketing isn’t providing enough qualified leads or even reaching the right audience. A lack of communication or understanding of the specific roles of each department can also cause tension, with both sides unclear about the responsibilities of the other.
Align the communication
Strong communication can be an effective way to align your marketing and sales teams. Aligning both departments with regards to the customer journey and a clear delineation of what is expected of each team can help clarify objectives and make better use of available resources.
A service level agreement, which clearly defines a partnership's terms and outlines each department's specific goals and accountability options if targets are not met, helps align everyone. Ensuring that data and research are shared across the teams is also crucial.
Know what to prioritize
Not all companies can—or want—to have both sales and marketing. Some businesses focus on digital marketing efforts, and charge marketers with the responsibility of both growing their reach and converting people to purchase.
For some, the rise ofdigital commercehas diminished the need for dedicated sales departments. Many customers (specifically in the beauty and fashion markets) no longer need a person to help sell them a product when they can make their own purchases online.
For some businesses, this can help them streamline their necessary expenditures and figure out where else to allocate their time and attention.
Other companies focus on sales efforts—aB2B companythat sells a specialized product to a niche audience, for example, might invest in a sales team first. A single sale might yield high revenue and a long-term relationship for these companies.
Gain competitive advantage by improving sales and marketing
Sales and marketing are heavily intertwined fields with their own separate objectives. Essentially, marketing is the launch pad of a sales plan, while sales is the actual execution. Aligning these departments can facilitate harmonious cooperation, which can help a company grow and impact its bottom line over time.