How many times have we thought of Sales and Marketing as one single profession or a skill? How many times have you hung up the phone as soon as you hear the person on the other end pitching a product or a service? And how many times have you stayed away from a profession, just because the role was of a Sales Person or a Marketer and you didn’t know how exactly you would fit in?
Oxford dictionary defines Marketing as, the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising and Sales as, the exchange of a commodity for money; the action of selling something. If you read the definition of marketing again you would realise, there is sales in it. And this is where the confusion begins and this is where it gets hazy.
To differentiate between Sales and Marketing, imagine you are out on the streets and walk past a car dealership, you see lot cars parked inside the dealership behind those shiny glass panes. What you just encountered is Marketing and let’s say, you decide to walk into the dealership and you are approached by one the individuals wearing a suit and a tie who works there, welcomes you and starts the conversation, that’s Selling.
“The new reality is that sales and marketing are continuously and increasingly integrated. Marketing needs to know more about sales, sales needs to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.”Jill Rowley
Over the last few decades we’ve seen both overlap though, where the marketer assumes that his job is to sell products and the sales person thinks he has to market his product to be able to sell. This is when we see the Sales and Marketing departments collide and get derailed from what their organisation’s ultimate objective was. We see marketing departments choosing a different path to that of what the organization wants and the sales department ends up marketing the potential customers relentlessly. In both cases it’s the organisation and the customers, who are impacted by this negatively. The customers are let down by constant bombardment of marketing emails, sales phone calls, endless sales pitches and unrelated marketing advertisements. All this impacts the organisation’s or the brand’s reputation and eventually their existence, as the customers start losing their confidence and trust.
“Sales and marketing alignment is about one shared goal: revenue that is delivered or over-delivered every quarter. There will always be tension, but that tension can be positive if there is a culture of clear expectations and communication.” Craig Rosenberg
For an organisation to succeed it is very important that both these vital levers work together instead of against each other. It is time for both these levers of the organisations to work separately but closely to their abilities. To define their roles again and come to the common grounds on their boundaries. It is important for both, the marketers and the sales people to start adding value to their customers in their own way instead of just trying to meet their respective quotas in any possible way. More importantly, it is time for the organisations to understand the difference in these two similar yet, different skillsets and get aligned to them.
In simple terms, Marketing is the process of making people arrive to your website, your store, your business and Sales is the process of making you understand what you are missing and showing the value of the product or service you offer with direct communication. Though they work closely, they are very different to one another as in the car dealership example I shared.
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