Sales is the process of exchanging goods and services in exchange for payment. Marketing involves meeting customer needs while forging lasting relationships.
For this to occur, both departments need to collaborate. They should establish common standards, systems, metrics and values while sharing similar culture.
Sales is a short-term process
Sales is the process of selling something to someone for some value. By contrast, marketing involves studying customer needs so that whenever a new product or service is introduced it sells itself effectively.
Sales is designed to increase a company’s revenue, while marketing aims at maintaining and increasing consumer satisfaction and market share. Both activities share many goals; however, which makes sales-marketing partnerships an ideal partnership option.
Assembling and managing a systematic sales process is integral to the success of any business. Your sales process should provide your customers with a step-by-step experience from beginning to end and allow your team to work more cohesively together.
Marketing is a long-term process
Marketing is an ongoing process that involves careful planning, research, and experimentation. Key components of an effective marketing strategy include identifying your audience and creating content to attract them; then providing ways for existing customers to remain engaged with you once they become customers.
Marketing involves both building brand recognition and reputation as well as improving your website, so it is critical that it be undertaken effectively. A comprehensive plan should outline both goals and tactics used, then implemented over time to achieve maximum effectiveness.
Marketing strategies that create lasting impressions with customers are the most successful ones, whether through content, social media, or all three approaches. Utilizing such marketing techniques will allow you to build brand recognition, raise awareness, and ultimately increase sales while being easy and cost-effective to implement.
Sales is a people-oriented function
Sales is a people-driven field that relies on employees to deliver products or services to customers. This task takes significant effort, so providing employees with support and recognition is paramount for success in sales.
Sales representatives are responsible for prospecting, qualifying and closing sales. They typically work in teams and are given a revenue goal they must attain within a set period (such as quarter).
Sales professionals need to keep tabs on and monitor their results, such as pipelines, deals and contacts in a CRM system. Furthermore, they should regularly assess and update their company’s ideal customer profile (ICP), which helps them understand how best to serve prospective clients while solving their pain points.
Sales is an inherently interpersonal function; its focus lies on building meaningful and trustful relationships with customers to drive higher productivity, better service to clients and greater employee satisfaction.
Marketing is a media-oriented function
Marketing is the practice of selling goods and services to meet market needs, using activities such as research and development, advertising/promotion, distribution/sales/customer service as a foundation.
Most companies maintain a marketing function within their sales departments, working together in an organized fashion to bring customers through various steps that lead to purchases and, hopefully, lasting relationships with them.
Marketing provides support during all three stages, from prospecting and qualifying leads and opportunities, forming value propositions, designing sales tools and providing “solution collateral”, which salespeople can use to quickly design solutions to customer problems without reinventing the wheel each time.
At the same time, marketers are taking on tasks traditionally assigned to salespeople–for instance setting retail or list prices and promotional pricing–while simultaneously creating new avenues of customer outreach through methods such as social media marketing.
