Sales and marketing are terms that are often used interchangeably, but they shouldn’t be. While the two are absolutely related, they are both very different and require a different set of skills. I can’t tell you the number of jobs early in my career that were “entry-level marketing” positions that turned out to be glorified sales roles. 

I think that oftentimes the people creating the positions might not even really understand the difference. So this should be a fun one. Let’s make some clarification between what is marketing and what is sales, and then we’ll bring it all together to explain why the two must work together. 

What is Marketing?

The goal of marketing is to create demand for your product/service. It is to highlight the benefits and show people why they need you. What are you bringing to the table and how are you solving a need for the customer? 

Marketing is very big picture and is more of a long game. It’s focused on “what are the ultimate goals for the brand” and how do we create a plan and campaigns that will support that larger goal. Some campaigns could span months, even up to a year. 

Marketing takes consistency and patience. You can’t implement a marketing tactic or campaign and give it a try for a couple of months and if it doesn’t create sales, abandon it. Examples of things that are considered marketing would be things like:

• Marketing Plan

• Developing Websites

• Creating Social Channels

• Blogging

• Email Marketing

• Developing Sales Collateral 

What do all of these things have in common? They are all things that will help establish brand awareness, generate leads, and engage with the customer. They are laying the foundation to make it easier for sales to close the deal. 

What is Sales?

The goal for the sales team is to close the damn deal. They have benchmarks and quotas that are expected and their positions are often commission-based so they have some skin in the game. Where marketing is the long game, sales is the short game. Usually, sales goals will be on a monthly or sometimes quarterly basis.

While marketing efforts are focused on larger target audiences and populations, the sales teams usually have territories divided up where each salesperson is responsible for a smaller more targeted audience. It is the sales team's job to use the information that will come from the marketing team and to convert the leads generated from the marketing activity into actual sales. 

Marketing & Sales Working Together

Aligning these two departments is where the good work happens. If you can’t already tell, when marketing is doing their job it is much easier on the sales team. And when the sales team is communicating with the marketing team they equip them with intel that will make their efforts more effective. 

These two departments need to be in constant communication. If the sales team is getting a lot of objections, or if they are all hitting the same point in the sales process where they’re losing people, those are issues that marketing can help to address; but only if they know about them. While marketing will formulate a strategy based on research and data, those strategies get adjusted and optimized as they start getting feedback from the market and customers. 

Here is an actual example of sales and marketing working together from my days running the marketing operations for a global food leader. I had a goal of increasing the company’s brand growth (instead of people buying the national brands), so I decided to do an email campaign promoting our company branded breakfast meats. I targeted all of the companies that were already buying eggs from us. While that was an effective strategy for getting the information in front of the right people, it took the salespeople coming in to make the ask to convert those warm leads into sales. 

While marketing and sales both serve very different functions in an organization, they both need one another to take the business to the next level. If your sales teams are struggling because your organization is lacking marketing support I’d love to chat to see how we might be able to work together. Otherwise, you can always follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, or sign up for my newsletter in the footer to stay up to date.