Marketing is all about informing leads and attracting them to your company, while sales is about working directly with prospects to highlight the value of your company’s solution to convert those prospects into customers. Sounds simple enough, right? But it turns out that the difference between sales and marketing is more complicated than you might think.
DIFFERENCE:
Sales and marketing are both critical business functions that impact lead generation and revenue. But how do they differ? The term “sales” refers to all activities that lead to the selling of goods and services, while “marketing” is the process of getting people interested in those goods and services.
Sales includes all of the activities that lead directly to a sale. Salespeople are responsible for managing relationships with potential clients, or prospects, as well as providing solutions that eventually lead those prospects to turn into paying customers.
In contrast, marketing encompasses all of the activities that help spark interest in your business. Marketers use market research and analysis to understand who their potential customers are and what they care about, and they run campaigns to attract people to their business’s brand, product, or service.
A helpful analogy: Marketing and sales are like siblings with the same goal: helping a company succeed. But just like siblings, they have their own distinct personalities and roles to play.
PLANNING:
Both marketing and sales plans typically start with an overview of the company’s history and its overarching goals and initiatives. However, that’s where the similarities end.
After this basic information, a marketing plan lays out what the product is, its price, who it’ll be sold to, and where it will be sold. This is also known as the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Goals are set, marketing channels are chosen, and a budget is defined for the various campaigns that the marketing team plans to pursue.
In contrast, sales plans include details about the sales process, team structure, target market, and goals, as well as the action plan, tools, and resources that will be used to hit these targets.
GOALS:
Similarly, while the high-level goal of both sales and marketing is to generate revenue, the two departments pursue different specific goals in light of that larger objective.
The primary goal of marketing is to promote the company, offering, and brand. Marketing departments are responsible for pricing their company’s products and communicating how these products address customers’ needs and wants. These goals are often fairly long-term, as marketing campaigns can span many months or even years.
Sales, on the other hand, is focused on hitting shorter-term quotas and sales volume goals. Sales goals are often measured month-over-month, with sales leaders defining targets and calculating how much their department, team, and/or individual salespeople need to sell to meet corporate goals.
THE IMPORTANCE OF SALES AND MARKETING WORKING TOGETHER:
Clearly, there are many differences between marketing and sales. But that doesn’t mean that the two shouldn’t work together.
To the contrary, it is important to ensure that sales and marketing are aligned in service of common business goals. When these two departments work together, qualified leads improve and revenue soars. You experience a cohesive approach that drives success.
In other words, making sure that sales and marketing are aligned is critical for any organization to succeed. But what does this look like in practice? It means defining all the different processes, goals, tools, and strategies that each department will pursue — and then taking steps to address any conflicts or inconsistencies.
You can do this by making sure you are aligned with a contract that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide another, making it one of the best ways for disconnected marketing and sales departments to come together into a fruitful partnership.
This offers a framework for both departments to define their shared goals, identify their buyer personas or ideal client profile, and standardize lead definitions. It also sets a protocol for lead management, and it outlines how sales and marketing performance will be measured.
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