Many people group sales and marketing into one category, but these two processes are almost independent. In short, marketing is about raising potential customers’ awareness of your organization and brand. Sales convert these potential customers into actual customers, thereby turning their audience into profits. Here are some points to dig deeper into the difference between sales and marketing.
Sales work directly with potential customers to achieve conversions, while marketing focuses on stimulating interest in the product. Marketing is the first step to getting potential customers interested, but sales will grow with this interest.
Difference between Sales and Marketing
Marketing definition
Marketing is a process that involves various activities carried out by the company to promote the sale of the company’s products or services. The method first identifies customer needs and beneficially meets them by creating, communicating, and delivering products in exchange for prices they value.
It is a way to increase your target audience’s interest in your company’s products. All activities designed to make customers pay attention to the company’s products, such as market research and analysis, product development, promotion, distribution methods, sales, and after-sales services, are subject to marketing.
In more detail, any strategy or activity that a company uses to communicate with its target customers and encourage them to buy products is called marketing.
Marketing is:
- What you want to convey about your product?
- How you want to get the value of your product to your target audience?
- Why do your customers need to choose from all the options available in the market?
It is an advertisement provided through various platforms such as newspapers, TV, brochures, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter accounts, and other social media.
Sales Definition
Sales are the primary purpose of any company because all the company’s activities are to increase sales. It involves selling “products provided by the company to customers” within a certain period by convincing customers to buy its products to their advantage.
To this end, sales representatives need to have excellent communication skills and persuasive power to answer customer questions while effectively conveying the product’s benefits or service to customers.
Each company has a dedicated product and service sales department, usually divided into different teams based on the following factors:
- The geographic location where the team provides products and services,
- The products and services the team must sell,
- Target customers provide products and services.
Each team has monthly, quarterly, and annual sales goals that must be achieved. Use special offers and discounts (such as coupons and gifts) as strategies to attract customer attention and drive you to purchase products and services to drive sales.
Don’t confuse the term sales and marketing. Sales include sales that transfer the ownership of the product from the manufacturer to the customer at a reasonable price (i.e., price).
Process
In this section we will discuss process of sales and marketing. The marketing process focuses on familiarizing new and existing customers with brands and products. Several innovative ways to market their organizations need to know what their products and services are, how they solve consumer problems, and their prices. The marketing team has to find out who might be most interested in the product or service, and where to find them. Custom WordPress Website Design Services plays a vital role in successful marketing of brand or product.
The sales process involves developing a plan that outlines the organization’s behavior, tools, resources, and overall sales goals. The sales team is most interested in turning people with specific brand awareness into customers and profiting from them. They interact with customers, answer questions, and provide relevant information about products or services.
Goals
In this section we will discuss goals of sales and marketing. The company’s marketing goal is to promote products, companies, or brands through clear communication. The primary purpose is to look at the big picture and clearly explain how the product or service can serve as many audiences as possible and generate potential customers.
The sales team marks targets based on allocation and quantity targets. These are often based on short-term, usually based on accounting quarters or months. Goals and objectives depend on the amount the company needs to sell to generate enough profits to continue its business.
Strategy
In this section we will discuss strategy of sales and marketing. Marketing strategies are often based on collecting information about the target audience to understand what works and what does not work. If the marketing team knows the target demographic for a particular campaign, they can test their strategy. The marketing strategies include network marketing, print marketing, blog marketing, and focus groups.
Your sales strategy is based on connecting with potential customers, talking to them, listening to their opinions, and turning them into paying customers. Sales representatives usually first contact potential customers via telephone, social events, or online. Then, according to the scope of products and services, they sell to them, hoping to get their sales.
Appearance
There is differences between appearance of sales and marketing. When you find your target audience and increase visibility, your marketing prospects are more significant than your sales prospects. Marketers want to attract new potential customers, but the sales department wants to connect with known and existing customers.
Sales and marketing integration
Although their main goals are different, sales and marketing overlap in many ways and need to work together. They can adjust their interests by establishing partnerships and sharing the same materials. One way to do this in a large enterprise is to create a service level agreement (SLA). It is an agreement between two departments representing a set of deliverables that one department agrees to provide to another department. It helps to build partnerships between teams and clearly outlines expectations between the two groups.
For small businesses, this may not be necessary. However, management needs to clarify their position in the market for the two teams. The marketing team needs to notify the sales team when running the campaign. In this way, the sales team can do their best during this time. Similarly, the sales team needs to share the customer data it owns with the marketing team. It will provide you information regarding the demographics of your target audience and which ones work and which ones don’t.
There are lots of differences between sales and marketing, but they are essentially the same. Sales and marketing are closely related and play a vital role in the survival of your business in the long run.
Since sales are a people-oriented feature, appropriate training and incentives are needed for sales activities to improve morale and obtain higher returns. Marketing is media-oriented, so it is necessary to adopt the most appropriate advertising and promotion channels to enhance brand image and increase sales.