Understanding the Difference between Sales and Marketing

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Understanding the Difference between Sales and Marketing

By Brad Shorr | April 29, 2008

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.

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4 Responses to “Understanding the Difference between Sales and Marketing”

Robyn Says:
April 29th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
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.
Brad Shorr Says:
April 29th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
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.
Andrew Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 5:07 am
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
Brad Shorr Says:
April 30th, 2008 at 5:19 am
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.