Sales are important because they are the bottom line. Marketing is all about publicizing a product. At the end of the day, it's all about business results and getting results. You can't sell a product without marketing.
Marketing can help explain the main differences between the two. The biggest difference is that marketing professionals target customers who may be interested in purchasing a product or service, while sales professionals make the transaction and sell the product or service. Marketing can take several months, even years, to realize its impact. Marketing at a high level is not much different.
Sales managers are very focused on revenues and KPIs. Having this same mentality in a marketing campaign is invaluable. Many marketing companies launch campaigns or can even generate a lot of leads without knowing the KPIs. After the lead role, it's not worth much.
You might think that marketing and sales teams, whose work is also deeply interconnected, would have discovered something similar. To achieve integration between sales and marketing, your company must focus on the following tasks. While both are core functions of a company and work together to achieve a common goal, sales and marketing departments have different goals and processes. In some cases, marketers show customers pain points that customers didn't know about until they were pointed out.
And finally, they use direct mail, telemarketing and trade shows to find and qualify potential customers for the sales force. During prospecting and qualification, for example, marketing helps the sales department create common standards for leads and opportunities. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that marketing that works can generate results, something that simply cannot be achieved with a sales mindset. At this stage, salespeople want salespeople to worry about future opportunities (long-term strategy) and leave current opportunities (individual and group sales) in their hands.
Companies rely on sales and marketing professionals to capitalize on increasing levels of customer engagement on a variety of platforms. More generally speaking, sales departments tend to believe that marketers aren't in touch with what's actually happening with customers. The sales group's contributions to bottom line results are also easier to judge than salespeople's contributions. These organizations must do more to facilitate communication between sales and marketing and create shared work.
The intermediate team uses market research and feedback from sales representatives to help sell existing products in new market segments, create new messages, and design better sales tools. The sales team, in turn, states that the marketing department sets prices too high and uses too much of the budget, which should instead be used to hire more sellers or pay higher commissions to sales representatives. Marketing professionals, who until recently had a more formal education than salespeople, are highly analytical, data-oriented, and project-focused.
