How sales and marketing differ?
Marketing emphasizes on customers’ needs and refer them products or services accordingly. On the other hand, sales focuses on company’s needs and convinces a customer to buy their products or services. This is the major difference between sales and marketing.
Pretty simple, isn’t it?
The business functions of these two approaches may be different. However, they share one common goal. Generating revenue. Both of them are closely intertwined. That’s why, people sometimes consider them as a replacement of each other. But, it’s not so. There’re many differences between the two. Check out the table shared below to understand clearly.
Difference Between Sales and Marketing
Similarities
The objective of both units is to boost the revenue of the company.
Both these approaches give effort to engage the audiences. They want to turn their prospects into customers, thus accelerating the company’s sales.
Tools Used
There are some common tools both sales and marketing departments can use. CRM database is a perfect example of it. Irrespective of where the customer belongs at his buying cycle, the tool helps all departments to manage their relationship with their clients or customers.
Both these business departments can also leverage the power of social media. Marketing unit can use social media to promote their products or services. Similarly, sales unit can use it to convince customers to buy. In fact, it is a very effective sales plan.
Marketing Tools
Content creation tool
Project management tool
Search Engine Optimization tool
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Data reporting software
Sales Tools
Inventory and order management software
Email management tool
Meetings app
Invoicing software
Documents tool
Strategies
While making a robust marketing plan, the team adopts various strategies. They consider targeted audience and campaign type while framing strategies. Some of the common strategies are:
Content marketing
Print marketing
Search engine optimization
Depending on the prospects, industry, market, and products, sales strategies are framed. Generally, it involves the following:
N.E.A.T Selling
SNAP Selling
Solution Selling
Spin Selling
Inbound Selling
Customer-centric Selling
MEDDIC
Sandler System
The Challenger Sale
Combining Marketing and Sales for Your Business
Both sales and marketing work towards accomplishing the same goal: accelerating the company’s growth.
If a business can align marketing with sales properly, then the company’s revenue generation can be 32% more. It will also accelerate the growth rate by almost 24% and retain near about 36% more customers.
It was stated in July-August2006 Edition of Harvard Business Review that “When sales and marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market entry-costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”
If you’re looking for a company to strengthen your marketing strategy, consider Elevan August Media.
