What is the difference between sales and marketing?

Suze Bragg
What is the difference between sales and marketing?
August 4, 2008
I was having a discussion with an online forum this morning about the role of marketing in a sales organization. Having worked in both marketing and sales, I stated there is a huge difference between the two and they should never be mixed, nor lumped into one description. Every company should market themselves successfully and many don't. Hence the reason sales and sales support have to work so hard. Work the marketing of a company brilliantly and you've conquered 90% of the battle over your competitors. Ignore it--or do it for sales support only--and you have to work 100% harder than necessary.

Why is that?

Marketing is the company's story - the branding and all the components of its messaging - and sales takes the awareness marketing has created and sells to the people who now know not only about the product, but now want it. Marketing includes figuring out what makes the company tick, creating a need for it, leveraging customers emotional responses, providing the materials for the sales teams so they can close the deal, placing and creating advertising, running campaigns, handling social media marketing and all aspects of Internet marketing, launching products successfully (press releases, packaging, etc.), creating the style sheets for everything to look the same, etc, etc. In many medium and large sized business, the marketing team is divided into two now: e-commerce/Internet marketing and regular marketing. Both combine the necessarily awareness to propel the brand to the next level. If every sales team handled the awareness building, they'd never have time to close any sales.

In my 16 years in business, I've only worked with one sales person who could tell me why the best campaigns worked, or even cared about it for that matter. Salespeople normally want three pieces of information: who the company is, what are the features and benefits, and what will it take the close the sale. Marketing's role is to create demand. Sales' role is to find these people and distribute the supply. There's also a big difference in salary between sales and marketing. Sales people have the $$ incentive and receive commission. Marketing folks don't.

Understanding this relationship will make a company's success much easier, and much more profitable. This is one of the reasons some companies have attained cult status...Think of it this way: when people think of Apple, do they think of the sales people closing the sales, or do they think of the brand and have an emotional desire to buy the latest iPhone? That's marketing in its simplest representation.



Posted by Suze Bragg