What’s the difference between Sales and Marketing?
Marketing informs and attracts leads and prospects to your business and for your products and services too. Sales, on the other hand, works directly with these prospects to reinforce the value of the company’s solution to convert these prospects into customers.
Although these two business functions are different, they share a common goal which is to attract potential customers and convert them into customers thereby generating revenue for the company/business. The 2018 State of Inbound Traffic Report found that organizations with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between marketing and sales are three times more likely to be efficient, but surprisingly only 26% of respondents have a formal SLA.
What Do Sales And Marketing Do And How Can They Work Together?
Table of Contents
Sales and Marketing are two business functions within an organization that impacts both lead generation and revenue. The term Sales refer to all activities that lead to the sale of goods and services. While Marketing is the process of attracting people’s interest in the goods and services being sold. Sale is a term used to describe activities that lead to the sale of goods or services. Sales agents are responsible for managing leads and providing a solution to leads that ultimately lead to a sale.
Marketing also includes all the activities that help generate interest in your business. Marketers use market research and analysis to understand the interests of potential customers. Marketing departments are responsible for managing campaigns to attract people to the company’s brand, product, or company’s services.
There are general differences between marketing and sales. For example, marketing focuses its efforts on the general public or larger groups of people, while sales targets smaller groups of people or subsets of the general public. To create a cohesive partnership between marketing and sales, we need to understand the fundamentals of each department.
How The Sales And Marketing Process Can Grow Your Business
Whether you’re writing a marketing or sales plan, both will include details about the company’s history and its overall goals and initiatives. Next, the plans move into the aspects of the plan that are specific to each department.
The Marketing plan establishes what the product is, its price, to whom it would be sold, and where it would be sold. This is also known as the (4) Ps of marketing:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Goals are set, marketing channels are chosen and a budget is created for the campaigns the marketing team plans to pursue.
Sales plans include details of the sales process, team structure, target market, and goals. The sales plan also outlines the action plan, tools, and resources that will be used to achieve these goals.
Goals Sales And Marketing Set
What are the main goals set by Sales and Marketing?
Both departments have the main objective of generating revenue for the company. The main objective of marketing is to see the big picture and to promote the company, the product or service, and the brand.
Marketing departments are responsible for pricing products and communicating how the product meets customer needs and wants. Its objectives are often long-term because the campaigns can last several months.
For Sales, the point of interest is to hit quotas and sales goals – these tend to be shorter term. Sales goals are frequently measured month by month. Targets are defined, and sales control calculates how a great deal their department, teams, and character sales agent want to promote to fulfil the overarching goal.
Tools And Resources
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database is a device that could be utilized through sales, marketing, and the business as a whole. The database allows all departments to manipulate relationships with contacts, regardless of the level of consumer lifecycle they may be in.
Social media could also be leveraged through a way of means of each commercial enterprise unit. For Marketing, social media may be used to sell content material, and for Sales, it could be used as a part of a social promoting strategy.
Plus there is equipment which might be precise to every department.
Marketing Tools
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Project Management tool
- Data Reporting Software
- Content Creation tool
Sales Tools
- Meeting app
- Documents tool
- Invoicing software
- Email management tool
- Inventory and order management
The introduction of resources into a marketing or commercial strategy is particularly dependent on new technologies. For example, AI and live chat are newer tools that marketing and sales can use to build relationships with prospects. This type of personalized communication was not possible until recently, and businesses can adopt new software and technologies as they are created. Strategies marketing teams can take different strategic approaches depending on the type of campaign and the customer they are targeting.
Common Marketing Strategies Include:
- Internet Marketing
- Print Marketing
- Blog Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Video Marketing
Similar to marketing strategies, sales methods can differ depending on the type of industry, product, market, and target audience.
Common Sales Strategies Include:
- SPIN Selling
- N.E.A.T. Selling
- Conceptual Selling
- SNAP Selling
- Customer-Centric Selling
- Inbound Selling
- MEDDIC
- The Challenger Sale
- The Sandler System
Each of these selling strategies helps a buyer solve a problem, achieve a goal, or satisfy a need. Eventually, the sales technique of the sales team would lead to a sale and a new customer.
Sales and Marketing Alignment
How do we create a partnership between the two?
This can be done by aligning the two departments through a Service-Level Agreement (SLA). SLA is an agreement that establishes a series of products that one party has agreed to provide to another. This is one of the best ways to create a Marketing and Sales partnership/alignment.
In the SLA, the two departments will define their common objectives, identify the personas of the buyer or the profile of the ideal customer and standardize the definitions of prospects. It will also establish a lead management protocol and layout of how the Sales and Marketing performance will be measured. When Sales and Marketing are aligned, the business is ready to attract and qualify for more leads and generate twice the revenue.
