The differences between sales and marketing

A key part of any business is the marketing and sales department. That’s because they determine the success of that business in terms of bringing new customers and retaining existing customers to generate revenue and increase profits. A business without an audience or potential customers is useless and a waste. A waste of a lot of things; energy, time, labour, resources, etc., it’s a huge waste. This is why the marketing and sales department is key to every business. Marketing department determines the audience and ensures that the sales department has an audience to sell to. The two teams may seem to be intertwined, but there are differences between the sales and marketing teams.

Marketing

Marketing, simply put, is the process of making a product or service known to a group of individuals with similar needs or wants with the aim of indicating the uniqueness of the deliverables and its usefulness to their needs. It is basically showing off your goods and services to an audience that will need it, to spike their desire to acquire the product. Marketing involves promoting discussion about and around your service or product to increase awareness. It also involves building a community of satisfied customers who repeatedly patronise your business and enthusiastically tell others about your business.

 

Importance of marketing

• It helps you determine your target audience
• Through routine updates and engagements online and/or offline, marketing etches your brand name in your audience’s mind. This helps to retain customers.
• Marketing helps you stay relevant. For most consumers, out of site is out of mind. So to stay relevant you need to be consistent in marketing.
• Marketing creates a customer-business relationship. People usually buy from who they like and what they’re familiar with.

Sales

It is the transaction that occurs between a business or salesperson and a customer (either another business or an individual) to exchange the product or service offered by the business for something valuable owned by the customer (usually money). Sales is not only selling, it includes all activities that lead to selling and retaining customers. It involves conversion of leads, potential customers or target audience into actual customers to generate revenue for the business and increase profits.

Importance of sales

• The main importance of sales is that it brings money to a business.
• It also leads to business growth.
• High sales rate make your business more valuable.

Differences between sales and marketing

• Definition

Sales is selling a product or service. Marketing is informing a target audience about a product that could solve a problem in their life.

• Goals

Goals are important because they help measure progress, give direction, and many other reasons.

The main goal of a sales team is to sell so the listed goals ensure the main goal is achieved.

Some sales goals include;

1. Increase sales revenue
2. Enhance profit margins
3. Close more deals
4. Reduce customer churn
5. Lower customer acquisition cost

The main goal of a marketing team is to gather and gain the attention, respect and trust of an audience to make the audience more inclined to give their money for a product.

Some marketing goals;

1. Increase brand awareness
2. Generate high-quality leads
3. Grow social media pages
4. Become an authority in a industry
5. Increase traffic to a website

• Duration of goals

Goals are usually short-term in the sales team. It could be quarterly, monthly or weekly. Whereas in marketing they are long-term(yearly).

• Strategy

Marketing strategy involves the methods you will use to find your target audience and promote the unique value your brand offers. Marketing strategies contains;

1. Company goals
2. Marketing goals
3. Unique value proposition
4. Buyer persona
5. Your solution to a problem
6. Marketing channels
7. Call to action

Sales strategy concentrates on converting the audience to customers.

1. Lead tracking
2. Forecasting
3. Prospecting
4. Discounting strategies

• Priority

Marketing team priority is building a community and creating an active audience for a product. This is to promote awareness of products and familiarity with a product. Marketing focuses on the audience’s needs.

Sales team priority is to sell as much product as they can and ensure customer’s satisfaction. Sales focuses on the needs of the organisation.

Then end goal of marketing is to sell and be profitable. So, I like to think of marketing as the investment process because a lot of money is spent in marketing whereas sales is the returns of investment (ROI) because that’s the main source of profit for a business.