You’d be surprised how many business owners believe the two are identical and continue to combine both as a job function and wonder why they constantly fail to achieve their targets.
When measuring the success of your sales and marketing people, their KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) are very different. Marketing KPI’s should be all about the number of leads generated. Sales KPI’s are all about conversion rates. There’s not a huge amount of difference between the words, but the skills required for each activity are very different.
Marketing
This is the management and administration of the four ‘P’s (Price, Place, Product & Promotion). Marketing should provide the answers to these questions
How much do we sell it for?
Where and to whom do we sell it?
What is it that we sell?
How do we get people to know about it?
Marketing is very much a support function and prepares for a future sale and creates awareness for the brand itself. It’s all about generating leads to your business through analysis, planning and promotional activity, be it word of mouth, advertising, social media, online activity – basically anything that looks to attract a customer or client to your business. This could be a one-minute cycle or a one-year cycle, the conclusion is the same – to show the customer how your product or service actually fits their needs.
Sales
Once the lead has been generated the Sales team take over by focusing on converting the potential customer into a paying one. The function of the Sales department is to generate revenue, not create awareness.
A Sales person will understand the inner workings of converting the lead and generating a sale and are great one-on-one communicators with good negotiating, analytical and customer service skills . It’s all about conversion, not lead generation.
Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and experience.
So, the next time you put the two words together to describe a job function, have another think. Do you need a Sales person or a Marketing person? You’ll be hard pushed to find one person who will be able to fulfill both roles, effectively and efficiently.
