4/29/2008
Understanding the Difference between Sales and Marketing
For small and medium-size business (SMB), sales and marketing tend to get lumped together in an indistinct mass of activities. Company leaders will say it’s inevitable, because everybody wears multiplel hats. Often, sales and marketing responsibilities fall on the owner, who also wears the finance hat and the purchasing hat and the IT hat.
All well and good, unless the owner in question doesn’t know what the marketing hat looks like, or thinks of marketing as perhaps the brim of the sales hat. This is no good. Marketing has to be understood as a business discipline separate and distinct from sales. Complimentary, yes. Subordinate to sales, most of the time. But separate and distinct nonetheless. So what is the difference? There are many ways to think about it.
Peter Kusterer says marketing creates opportunities, and sales brings about outcomes.
Some view marketing as the broad function of bringing products to market and sales as one element of it.
Then there’s the traditional 4 P’s of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
To see a list of activities marketing is responsible for, read this excellent article by Mark Smock.
If you’ve checked out all these links, I’ll wager you’re more confused than ever about what marketing is and how to make it mesh with sales.
A simpler way to understand marketing
Since we could debate the proper definition of marketing forever, let’s try to define marketing by describing what it isn’t. Marketing is not the sales function in your organization. It does not include the following activities –
- Making new calls
- Calling on existing customers
- Overcoming objections and closing sales
- Building long lasting business relationships
You might add an item or two to the list in your company, but essentially this is sales. What’s left is marketing. Your goal should be to let sales personnel think about these four very important activities and use marketing to fill in the blanks.
- Marketing assists in making new calls by defining and qualifying prospects. Marketing concentrates on who to call. Sales concentrates on executing the call.
- Marketing assists in making new and existing calls by arming sales reps with the collateral, Web presence, and promotional programs they need to make compelling presentations.
- Marketing assists in overcoming objections by researching and reviewing customer wants and needs, along with sales successes and failures. In this way marketing can reshape product/service offering to meet customer demands.
- Marketing assists in building long lasting business relationships by developing meaningful loyalty programs, reviewing customer experiences (see above), and crafting entirely new product and service offerings.
Have I left anything out? No doubt. But the key is to keep sales focused on selling, not become distracted by the 1001 things marketing can do to support sales. In an upcoming post I’ll talk about how to keep sales and marketing on the same page.
15 Responses to Understanding the Difference between Sales and Marketing
Brad, I was about to suggest that marketing is showing people products you offer. But, I’ll have to step back because there are subtle differentiations amongst marketing, sales and advertising, too.
Thanks for a great post that helps me to be more discerning about differences in marketing and sales.
Robyn, in theory, sales and marketing are easy to separate. In practice, companies often find it difficult to prevent overlap and gaps. It’s hard to say exactly why that happens but I’m going to attempt to tackle it in an upcoming post.
Just a thought, would it be right to refer to marketing activities as the ‘back end’ or ‘backbone’ of the sales function?
In my mind, marketing activities are activities which support sales activities. The function of marketing, in my opinion is to do everything possible to help make the sales effort as easy as possible. This includes many things, like brand recognition, product quality and features, market research, public relations and even corporate social responsibility.
Brad, you’ve stated that marketing activities must be considered a separate discipline to sales. May I ask a question – in the case of small enterprises, are there any noticable adverse impacts of them not being thought of as separate disciplines in cases where the owner, by intuition, actually does both types of activities?
Cheers
Andrew
Hi Andrew, I agree with you that marketing’s main responsibility is to support sales activities — you put it very well, as usual. In small enterprises, yes, there can be problems when one person is doing it all. Sales responsibilities can overwhelm marketing responsibilities. When customers need help, that becomes the top and immediate priority. Clients often tell me they are frustrated because they know there’s more they should do with their marketing, but they simply don’t have time because of customer demands. And also because time is in short supply, I see that many small business owners don’t keep current with all the developments in the marketing discipline — especially online marketing — so they don’t always know how strongly marketing can improve their business. I guess those would be the main drawbacks.
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I ran into this problem with terminology & position definement in a small business I worked for. I was hired & kept because of my abilities in marketing departments in the past – database programming management, web design & production, and print graphic design, in addition to being the only IT person and doing office support work, including sales support & receptionist type duties.
After a year and a half, they started pressing for more marketing. So I kept making proposals for further marketing strategies, and they were usually turned down flat or pushed off with procrastination. But yet they wanted me to do more marketing. Marketing marketing marketing. It became a rather disheartening situation and I really started to feel unappreciated. For awhile I assumed it was because I didn’t have enough technical experience in the product & services offered by this company (and nobody could be an expert on everything – I’m not an engineer for example — if I were, I’d be in a different job!) But my requests for product/service information to do proper marketing were almost completely pushed aside again and again. I had the most limited of technical support. Many times my leads were completely ignored. Eventually it became clear that what they really wanted is another person doing SALES. What’s more – someone who would do sales who needed no support at all. Such as calls to existing clients and cold calls (presumably miraculously with the knowledge of the target market & the services/products). But in that situation I not only had no marketing support in that, I had no technical support in it to even do the marketing support, let alone the sales. Not to mention I had no experience in sales at all, and I never claimed to – I never sought out any such position in my life, and I don’t plan to in the future. It’s not my bag. I’m good at what I do, and I like it, I don’t have an interest in being a sales person. Sales support – no problemo – cold calls to shmooze potential clients with technical information – not my forte. I eventually lost this job (“restructuring lay off”), because they decided they didn’t need what I did (though I imagine it’s one of those things where people don’t realize what they’ve got until it’s gone), what they really wanted was another sales person.
I realize it’s a sorry situation for a small business to be in, but the fact is, rare is the employee candidate that can be a web designer, a graphic designer, an IT specialist, a secretary, a computer programmer, and be a proficient sales force, be willing to handle the phone bank, do data entry & typing, and all at the wage with meager benefits a small business can afford. And rare should be the salesperson who would give up their potential commisions to spend time playing IT specialist & secretary for other sales people. Of course it’s hard to see the picture when you’re inside the frame. Small business owners often provide the most positive atmosphere in a working environment, but the downside is that they can sometimes be awfully thickheadedly unrealistic when it comes to expecting their hourly rate lowest on the totem pole employees to wear as many hats loyally, faithfully, and efficiently as they’d like to wear them themselves – even though they themselves aren’t able to wear them well, even at the top salary in the company.
Hi Ick, Been there. Not many people can be good at everything. Typically the qualities that make for a good sales person make for a not so good marketing specialist, and vice versa.
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Hi,
actually i am just confuse abt marketing & sales. thanks to google & thepersons updating this.
hi brad,
your article was spot on by stating what marketing is NOT. I run a small business enterprise that is in growth mode at the moment and I am recruiting at various levels. I was trying to find a Business Development (BD) & Sales and Marketing Head all in one but with a team of 2 sales executives and an assistant. The plan also includes hiring BD executives 6 months down the line. Does this sound realistic? 1 multi-tasking head with different category assistants? Do you have any suggestions? By the way, i run a design and retail furniture firm with 2 retail stores (boutique-style) and my husbands company manufactures most of the pieces for us.
Hi Shilpa, I think in a business your size a BD, Sales, & Marketing Head makes sense. Otherwise you’d have as many managers as staff, which to me does not seem efficient. If it’s the right person, he or she will understand the differences among these roles and guide activities and people accordingly. Good luck with your enterprise!
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hi brad, I being considered for the position of a business manager in an accounting firm. could u advise me on what I should expect myself to do and how I can excell and eventually become a high calibre BD manager?
Thanks.
Hi Ugonwa, It’s hard for me to say without knowing a lot more about how your firm is organized, but I ‘d say those are great questions to ask your manager.
hi brad i want some great marketing tips for my realesteat job in india hop u can thanking u and googal .
To my mind Sales is a component of the total Marketing function. Marketing embraces ALL the business functions involved in identifying customer needs/wants and then satisfying these , profitably. Under the Marketing umbrella one should expect to find Market/Consumer research,Product Development,Labelling/Packaging design, Pricing,Sales, Advertising, Merchandising and Trade/Consumer promotion. Clearly, Finance, R&D,Manufacturing, IT and Human Resources would expect to have a “concurrer” role in their respective areas of expertise.