Sales and Marketing: What is the difference?
Hello there!
Today you are going to learn the differences between Sales and Marketing. You will read definitions of both concepts and will find out how they work together. Additionally, we will also study the concept of digital sales and its relation to digital marketing. Next, I will cover some software solutions or tools for successful Sales and Marketing alignment. Finally, I will wrap up the article with comments regarding Sales and Marketing alignment.
What is Sales?
Simply put, sales is an activity or business transaction where there is an exchange of money for a good, service, or both.
The aim of sales is to reach out to leads, who have shown a certain degree of interest or fit the description of the company’s, or individual’s target customer, in hopes of providing them with a solution, in which the lead has to purchase the products or services offered by the salesman.
There are several types of sales including B2C, eCommerce, and Direct Sales. To learn more about each type of sales, check this article by HubSpot.
What is Marketing?
A short, but powerful definition of marketing that I like, was given by Mark Burgess. He said that marketing is the process by which a firm profitably translates customer needs into revenue.
Another more detailed definition was provided by Trish Green, “Marketing is a way to connect what products and services you have to offer with customers who want and need such products and services. It is multi-faceted, starting with researching your target market and how best to deliver the message, to coming-up with a plan to execute your promotion via various marketing media. The goal is to develop a strategy to create, price, and distribute your products and services for an exchange that will satisfy both your and your customers’ objectives. It is an ever-evolving process – always evaluating that your message still meets the needs and wants of your market”.
As you can notice, sales aim for closing profitable transactions with one or multiple people or companies, in exchange for a good or service. On the other hand, marketing’s main purpose is to identify niches, and building relationships with the people or organizations within those niche markets, so they become aware of the goods and services offered by the marketing team’s company.
Marketing doesn’t stop here. Once the target niche is identified and aware of the company’s products, and the way these products can solve their needs (or problems), marketing moves on into building a relationship throughout the customer’s journey, from awareness to action.
Ultimately Marketing seeks to generate sales-ready leads for the sales team to contact. More recently, with the widest reach of digital marketing, the marketing team is able and expected to automate digital campaigns and processes that lead prospects all the way down the sales funnel (through digital channels, content availability, and search intent optimization).
What’s the difference between sales and marketing?
In a few words, sales starts, follow up, and close deals to make a profit in exchange for a good or service while marketing generates leads that are ready to be contacted by sales representatives.
If you are interested in knowing more differences between sales and marketing, check out this article by HubSpot, where they explain this specific topic in detail.
It’s important to notice that digital marketing and digital sales differences are not as clear in the digital era, where some of the functions of both departments overlap. This is something good, and it is powered by public access to digital devices and Information Technologies (IT).
The following table was published by Scout Digital Training and illustrates the differences between marketing and sales.
Do you agree with all these differences?
I don’t.
In my opinion, digital marketing is and will continue changing and fading the borders between marketing and sales, at the point that both departments should be totally aligned, and perhaps, depending on the circumstances, marketing and sales can be one single department (functional area).
The reason for me to think this way is due to the increasing reach of digital marketing in moving the prospects down the sales funnel. Although sometimes these differences apply, there are not always necessarily true.
In the following image by Steve Patrizi, you can see how the new marketing and sales funnel have evolved.
In his blog, Steve Patrizi continues to say, “As marketers take on more of the stages in the purchase funnel that was previously owned by sales, it’s likely that the prototypical marketer of the future will need a decent amount of “sales DNA” to best serve their organizations. It’s also likely that the role of the marketer will take on a greater level of prominence in their companies over the long haul…”
Nowadays, many people become leads, prospects, customers, and advocates, all through digital marketing. In other words, digital marketing has taken over most of the sales stages and adopted them into the automated processes (Drip marketing, display ads, SEM, landing pages, SEO optimized content, etc), allowing the marketing team to close deals without ever having had to hand it to the sales team.
Of course, with this, I am also suggesting that new marketers should now have a more comprehensive understanding of the art and science of selling.
What is Digital Sales?
Digital Sales is the use of digital channels and IT to reach out to prospects in order to deliver value while closing a deal. Digital sales powers the reach and influence of traditional sales.
Sales reps are no longer limited to gathering lists and cold calls, creating territory maps and doing regular “drop-ins”, or networking events and trying to meet people. Now, sales reps can utilize different devices and digital channels in order to reach already interested (sales-ready) leads.
What is Digital Marketing?
As mentioned in my previous article; “Begin learning about Digital Marketing with Alberto”, according to Hubspot, digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet. Businesses leverage digital channels... to connect with current and prospective customers”.
As you might have noticed, both digital sales and digital marketing make use of IT, internet, and digital devices to reach out.
As previously implicated in the “the differences between marketing and sales” section, throughout the sales department, a sales representative can convert leads into prospects, and prospects into customers. Through digital marketing, leads can also be converted into prospects, and prospects into customers. Here is where both departments overlap. In other words, the lines between the sales and marketing have blurred, and no longer does Marketing end when a lead gets handed to sales.
How can Sales and Marketing work together?
As I mentioned before, the current overlap in many of the tasks between sales and marketing is a good thing. These two departments must be aligned today more than ever. According to Mention, Sam Mallikarjunan, Principal Marketing Strategist at HubSpot said that “60% of the cycle is over before a sales rep even comes in the picture”. They continue to say, “Since more than half of the sales process depends on marketing efforts, the two teams need to work together to make sure leads convert into customers”.
Due to the need for the Sales and Marketing teams to work together, there is now a term to describe this combination; SMarketing.
What is Smarketing?
On their website, LeadFuze describes SMarketing as “The process of integrating the sales and marketing processes of a business. The objective is for the sales and marketing functions to have a common integrated approach”.
Tools for Sales and Marketing alignment
Communication tools
Communication is key if you are looking for a successful alignment between different functional areas. Here are two examples of communication tools you can rely on to support the communication processes within your company.
Slack: https://slack.com/ Slack offers many Internet Relay Chat (IRC)-style features, including persistent chat rooms organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging
Asana: https://asana.com/ Asana is a web and mobile application designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work
CRM platforms
As I previously mentioned in the article “What is SEO and why is it essential in Digital Marketing efforts?”, some of the most popular CMS platforms are:
Wordpress: https://wordpress.org/ WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database
Joomla: https://www.joomla.org/ It is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing web content.
Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/ Drupal is a free and open-source web content management framework written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Magento: https://magento.com/ Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. This software is created using the Zend Framework
Lead scoring and marketing automation:
“Automated lead scoring is when your marketing system places a numerical value on a potential customer, scoring every interaction the lead has with your company and weighting these scores based on the expected value”. Max Schleicher
Pardot: https://www.pardot.com/ Pardot is a lead generation and nurturing system. A Salesforce product part of the Marketing Cloud.
Eloqua: https://login.eloqua.com/ Marketing automation to create optimized, personalized campaigns across online and offline channels.
Marketo: https://www.marketo.com/ Marketing automation software for account-based marketing and other marketing services and products including SEO and content creation.
Sales Acceleration:
Sales acceleration refers to strategies that help companies move prospects through the sales journey with advanced efficiency.
Outreach.io: https://www.outreach.io/ The Outreach Sales Engagement Platform helps efficiently and effectively engage prospects to drive more pipeline and close more deals.
Sales Loft: https://salesloft.com/ Sales engagement platform that helps you understand your customers' needs and respond in meaningful ways.
Engagio: https://www.engagio.com/ It’s an account-based marketing platform that helps B2B marketers understand, act, and measure account-based initiatives.
Activity Management and Attribution Platform
According to Oktopost, “An attribution model is a set of rules that helps you determine a consistent way to assign credit for sales to the various touchpoints in your customers’ path to conversion”.
Google Attribution 360: https://www.google.com/analytics/attribution/ makes it easy to collect the data you need to gain attribution insights. You can use standard ad server log files or Attribution 360 tags.
People.ai: https://people.ai/ automates manual data entry, increases sales productivity, and provides actionable intelligence across all your management tools.
Nielsen Visual IQ:https://marketingeffectiveness.nielsen.com/ marketing intelligence software provider with a holistic approach to marketing measurement.
Wrapping up
A company is an organization that makes goods or services and sells them for a profit. As you also might know, a company is integrated by people and functional areas, such as human resources, marketing, sales, accounting, finances, distribution, research and development(R&D), management, production, IT, etc.
All these areas are part of a system, and therefore, they have to be tuned or aligned in order to make the company work properly.
Even though all these functional areas are part of the same system, some areas seem to be more closely related, say, for example, accounting and finances, or sales and marketing. It is paramount that these areas are aligned in order to increase productivity.
Due to the importance of properly aligning the Sales and Marketing areas is that I have mentioned the relatively new term; Smarketing. It might be hard to take this term seriously, but the importance of it is undeniable.
Read more about marketing and sales alignment in this Quotable article by SalesForce.
Research has shown that aligning sales and marketing generates higher revenue, retains more customers, achieves higher win rates, as well as higher brand awareness and average deal size.
There are multiple resources out there about the benefits of SMarketing, tips on how to achieve it, and successful study cases. If you are interested in reading some examples of Smarketing successful cases, visit WeAreMarketing.com where you can read about the SMarketing cases in the Mexican company Puerta Zama, the Danish toy company Lego, and the Texaco subsidiary in Brazil.
If you have any questions, suggestions, or comments, please, let me know down below. Every opinion on how to improve the content of this blog will allow me to make adjustments on the go, with the objective of providing quality information for you, my dear readers.
If you would like to read my previous post about “HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; Why they should be part of your e-marketing skills” click here.
Sincerely,
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