Marketing versus Sales: What’s the Difference?

September 30, 2016

How do you generate leads for your sales team?

By Maureen McCabe

Marketing and sales are the same thing, right? Wrong. These two words aren’t even synonyms in the thesaurus. Because they both ultimately deal with getting more customers for your business and increasing overall revenue, it can be hard to understand the difference between marketing and sales. In order to effectively use both, you need to understand the differences between the two. When you do understand this, you can open up windows of opportunity for your business that you didn’t know were there. To this end, let’s compare and contrast marketing vs. sales.

The Definition of Sales, or Business Development

Sales is the process of convincing a lead to invest in your company’s offerings. In most cases, the lead is already interested in your company and has proactively engaged your company, starting them in the sales process before they may even be aware of it. For example, when a lead interacts with your company’s website, be it filling out information on a landing page or downloading an e-book, they give you the information you need to contact them further. It’s up to your sales team to determine how to take these leads and turn them into paying customers by providing them with the right information, at the right time, and leading them through the sales funnel.

That’s why it’s important for your sales team to have a full understanding of your products and services and the ability to concisely explain their benefits.

The Definition of Marketing

Marketing is everything you do in order to bring sales leads to your company. Marketing efforts should always target those who are most likely to have a need for your company’s products and services. One of the key goals of marketing is to convince potential clients that your brand is the best for them, and they want to buy into it. This involves educating customers about your brand and why you’re the best for them.

When marketing is done well, leads will be more easily converted into clients as your sales team won’t have to spend much time convincing them to buy.

Why Your Sales and Marketing Plans Need To Work Together

Although you can compare marketing vs. sales independently, you shouldn’t treat them as independent business functions. Instead of putting them into their own silos, you need to use them synchronously. The well-known adage, you can lead a horse to water but can’t make it drink, stands true in the marketing world, which is why we need marketing to make the horse thirsty and a strong sales team to make the horse drink.

It’s your marketing team’s job to create and send your sales team leads. However, simply sending off people who have an interest in your company, and the ability to buy your products isn’t enough. If, on the other hand, your marketing team does their job successfully, and assures leads there is an important value in your company’s products and services, the leads will come to sales better prepared to close. This means your sales team can do their job much more efficiently. This ultimately means more customers – and more up-sales per customer – for your company.

Your sales team needs to support marketing’s ability to deliver the best possible leads by communicating with them. For example, if your salespeople keep getting leads that don’t understand an important difference between two products you offer, griping about this isn’t the answer. You should already have a dedicated channel of communication that lets your sales team communicate this issue to marketing and make recommendations for how to fix it.

How Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams Doing?

You need to know the difference between sales and marketing – and understand how to use each business strategy. This will give your company the ability to attract more customers and increase the potential value of each one. For help in gaining new leads that can be transformed into increased sales, contact McCabe Marketing for an initial free consultation!

Check out our other marketing tips:

Branding Strategies for Your Business
How Do You Make and Receive ‘Great’ Referrals? What is Your Process to Handle Sales Leads?
Four Ways to Turn-off Prospective Clients. Tips Business Owners Can Use to Close More Sales.

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