Sales And Marketing – What’s The Difference?

Sales and marketing are terms often used interchangeably, but they have key differences in their crucial roles. Together, they push the business growth through sales as well as marketing efforts. Without them, business growth is akin to making a car without an engine.

But what are they? This article will review sales and marketing teams, their differences, functions, and how they push the business forward.

What are Marketing Teams?

Marketing focuses on understanding audiences, positioning a business’s product/services and reinforcing a brand identity. These three factors are used to both attract and keep customers and generate leads to follow up on. Ultimately, they can be split across several duties used throughout marketing campaigns.

Market research

Market research is the process for collecting and analysing data about three things: your target customers, your competition and the overall market landscape. Specifically, marketing campaigns will use customer demographics, psychographic and behaviours to better identify the target audience, then action them whilst outmanoeuvring their competition and take advantage of market trends.

Market research is done at all stages of a business – beforehand to find a launchpad for your business, post-launch to refine offerings, during scaling phases to identify new segments for expansion, and passively to monitor shifts in customer behaviour or industry changes.

Some examples of market research you can employ in your campaigns are:

• Social listening – By using dedicated software such as Brandwatch, Sprout Social etc. to monitor social media platforms for mentions, businesses can uncover unfiltered public sentiment. You can detect recurring, or emerging, pain points. It is used primarily for verification of your product or service efficacy, or testing the waters for a change in business.
• Competitor analysis – Your customers’ engagement and business is not the only thing you have to contend with, but also your competitors. Their presence alone doesn’t necessarily block off access to their section of the market, but their strengths may. Evaluating this, and their weaknesses, helps identify gaps in the market that are viable targets.
• Search trend analysis – The process of tracking what users are searching online indicates a lot about consumer interest, demand and behaviour. Insights taken from this form of market research helps identify emerging trends or opportunities.

The strongest possible example of market research is Apple’s launch of the iPod. In the late 1990s, MP3 players took up a strong place in the market, but consumers were unhappy with their clunkiness, poor interface and low storage capacity.

Apple used all of these insights in marketing strategies. They created the iPod, a device with a scroll wheel and clean UI to replace the tiny, unintuitive buttons that previously frustrated consumers. Furthermore, they made “1,000 songs in your pocket” a slogan to signal their USP – high storage capacity. They also ensured that music organisation was easy through iTunes, a full-service platform that became a focal point of the Apple ecosystem.

Within three years, Apple had seized 75% of the market share.

Strategic planning

The insights made by marketing departments is then used to set long-term marketing goals by identifying your current strengths, and your needs. Your marketing plan will allow you to align your business activities with your overall objectives whilst working towards a strong position in the market.

The following are examples of what marketing professionals use in their strategic planning:

• SWOT Analysis – This acronym stands for “Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats”. By listing measurable qualities across these four categories, you get a good idea of what to leverage, fix, pursue or defend against in your marketing campaigns.
• SMART Goals – This acronym stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound”. This is used to refine and verify your marketing objectives, ensuring they are well-designed for your business, and that progress can be tracked.
• Customer journey mapping – This creates an outline of potential customers, and the five points in which they can interact with your company’s products, services or brand that can cause the most friction. Understanding what the customer experiences and what they need at each of these steps and using that to inform your branding and products are key to earning their business and loyalty. These points are:
  1. Awareness – When the potential customer first hears of the brand.
  2. Consideration – When they evaluate your brand against others.
  3. Decision – When they decide to convert.
  4. Retention – Customer aftercare or follow-up engagements.
  5. Advocacy – When they become loyal and promote your brand for you.

Developing Buyer Personas

Through gathering information about prospective buyers and creating a fictional representation of said people, you’ll be able to better understand your target audience’s needs. This will inform and facilitate the backbone of your campaign, such as content creation and advert messaging.

Buyer personas include:

• Demographics (age, gender, location)
• Behavioural traits (buying habits, online activity)
• Goals and pain points
• Motivations and objections
• Preferred communication channels

The best ways to find the information required to develop buyer personas are:

• CRM Data analysis – Segment your existing customers by their most common traits and patterns.
• Sales team feedback – Sales and marketing teams often share information to inform the other. The sales process features a lot of direct and valuable engagement with customers.
• Digital marketing statistics – Use web and social analytics to track customer engagement.

Branding and messaging

Branding and messaging define how a company presents itself to the public, visually, verbally and emotionally. The marketing team uses everything from colours to font, to tone of voice/illustration to achieve the desired effects. They are trained in understanding the power of tools such as association, distinction and articulation required in crafting a brand that is not only recognisable, but made trustworthy through it’s coherent consistency.

The following examples of branding and messaging practices are often used throughout the marketing process:

• Storytelling frameworks – Stories go well in business. Stories are all about overcoming problems, and fundamentally, so is sales marketing. Highlight a pain point, intensify it, then resolve it.
• Value proposition – Highlighting not only the value of a brand, but who primarily benefits from it, helps differentiate your company’s products from competitors.
• Position statements – This is an internal-facing practice, helping condition the company’s representatives in how they describe their products or services.

Content Creation

Content creation is a tried and true part of marketing strategies, allowing for useful and engaging blog posts, videos, and infographics that can pull in a wider funnel of people and convert them into leads. Incorporating keywords into content can make it more prominent in search engines, boosting your visibility by a huge margin.

Marketing departments that use content to create brand awareness use some of the following tactics:

• Content calendars – Plan output based around campaigns or seasons.
• User-generated content – Encourage audience participation and create occasions to reuse their content to stay present.
• Digital marketing – Creating blogs and video content to dominate relevant keywords searched by your target audience. Websites have rankings, and improving those rankings puts more eyeballs on said websites. Using SEO strategies such as link building, keyword research and creating content will ensure Google’s trust in the site and give it more authority.

Email Marketing

By understanding the target audience, a marketing team can create email marketing campaigns for direct engagement. This type of marketing focuses on segmenting existing customers and tailoring emails to meet them where they are. They have a very high ROI compared to most marketing strategies (£36 for every £1 spent).

The following are some tactics employed in this marketing strategy:

• Segmentation – Divide audiences by behaviour, interest, purchase history or lifecycle stage.
• Automation – Flowcharts are created to process welcome emails, abandoned baskets and other situations that provide potential opportunities or comebacks.
• Interactivity – Some emails can have polls, countdowns or embedded forms included to increase engagement.

What are Sales Teams?

Sales teams facilitate deals that ultimately generate revenue for a company or business. They take leads that have been generated by the marketing department and turn them into paying customers.

Lead Qualification

Not all leads are equal. The sales department is responsible for qualifying leads to find out if they’re a good fit for the service or product. They do this by cross-referencing them with pre-determined criteria, such as industry, budget and alignment with buyer persona.

Separating unqualified and qualified leads allows sales resources to be used efficiently and ultimately raise overall conversion rates. Some tactics used in lead management are:

• BANT – This acronym stands for budget, authority, need and timing. During initial calls, sales reps ask questions tailored to these four points to help determine the quality of the lead.
• Lead scoring – The assigning of numerical values based on behaviours, such as downloads and site visits, tally up to identify the likelihood of becoming a qualified lead.
• Conversational qualification – Use discovery calls, live chats or AI tools to directly gather context.

Prospecting and outreach

A vital part of customer acquisition is reaching out to new potential customers to find leads independent of the marketing team. Whilst the marketing team does this through a measured and thought out process, the sales team does it in a much more opportunistic fashion.

The most common types of this sales duty are:

• Cold calling/emailing – This involves calling or emailing customers and using sales strategies to create a paying customer.
• Sales sequences – These are automated outreach cadences that use a mix of email, phone and social media marketing.
• Networking – Sales reps can also attend industry events, trade shows, etc, to network with potential customers and other professionals.

Needs Assessment

Understanding the needs of a prospect by evaluating their pain points, goals and challenges is how you create a sales strategy. Yes, the marketing team does this, and to a much greater extent that will encompass a wider market segment over a longer period of time. But sales reps are skilled in immediate, present customer engagement – meaning they are in a position to better understand a specific customer’s need. This information can be used to ensure sales and marketing alignment.

The most common needs assessment tactics include:

• Open-ended questions – Use non-leading questions after rapport to let the prospect specify their situation for you, identifying their pain points in the process.
• Challenger sales method – If your product or service can solve their problem in a different way, try to reframe their problem.
• Case development – Define a specific scenario, based on something highly relevant to the subject, in which they’d use your product to great effect.

Product and Service Demonstration

Sales reps should be able to use their products, or demonstration of a service, to establish direct links between the benefits and features of a product and a customer’s needs. Through good rapport building, a sales rep can identify a customer’s needs and tailor the entire demonstration to create a climax to the customer’s journey.

The most common examples of this part of your sales plan are:

• Interactive product tours – Let users self-navigate and explore the products for themselves, whether this be at trade show exhibitions or as a sales rep in a larger store.
• Role-specific demos – Sales team demonstrations should be made specific to job functions, such as finance, marketing, ops, etc.
• Objection handling – A crucial part of the sales process is dealing with objections against the product. Knowing of, and having the ability to counter points immediately and concisely is key.

Negotiation

Sales professionals are equipped with good conversational skills that allow them to navigate negotiations effectively for good outcomes. The process of agreeing involves an understanding of alternatives, the prospect’s concerns and priorities, and, essentially, a salesperson’s ability to craft a win-win situation.

The sales department focuses on some of the following:

• Mutual gains – Frame the deal as a win-win, and maintain that frame throughout.
• Anchoring – Set the first offer to influence price expectations.
• Deadlines – Use time constraints to ensure the deal is always moving forward.

Customer Relationship Management

Sales teams use centralised software systems that gather vast amounts of customer data. This data includes contact information and interaction history, as well as where they are in the customer journey. This is a vital part of the sales funnel and is used for efficiency in pursuing and closing deals.

With CRMs, you can:

• Pipeline management – Track your leads through clearly defined deal stages.
• Forecasting – Use historical and real-time data to predict revenue and rep performance.
• Lifecycle tracking – You can monitor the customer journey from first contact to renewal or upsell.

How do Sales and Marketing Teams interact?

While sales and marketing share the goal of increasing a business’s revenue, their approaches differ.

Sales have a laser focus on immediate revenue generation and closing deals. They operate via sales targets and measure their success via short-term metrics. The marketing team plays the long game, setting up infrastructure that can facilitate lead generation that can later be actioned upon.

They interact in some of the following ways:

• Shared Technology – Both marketing and sales teams use CRMS and marketing automation. This creates visibility of goals and information that both can contribute and form plans based on.
• Feedback Loops – Communication between marketing and sales teams provides clear customer acquisition insights and quality of leads. Marketing needs to know what makes a lead sales-ready, and bases much of their marketing strategies on acquiring those exact leads.
• Joint Participation – Marketing teams know how to set up infrastructure, but they typically don’t have in-depth information on every client they work for. This leads to cooperation between sales and marketing efforts, as Sales teams require knowledge of what each client offers to facilitate deals.

Building Strong Sales and Marketing Partnerships

Having your sales and marketing departments work closely together can provide exponential business growth.

• Shared Goals and Metrics – Move beyond a target for individual teams and instead establish joint KPIs. This can align sales and marketing efforts on growth objectives, such as revenue targets, lead conversion rates, etc.
• Team Integration – Integrate the marketing and sales teams by ensuring they meet regularly and communicate over informal channels. This can build camaraderie and encourage open dialogue about the campaign.
• Expertise Respect – Sales reps hold valuable customer insights whilst marketers understand the research. Encouraging mutual learning sessions can lead to more informed marketing and sales activities.

Conclusion

Overall, both are vital in the revenue generation of a business. Both hit the bottom line in different ways, with one taking advantage of massive opportunities of the naturally shifting market and the other being a long-term and stable set of practices. Only by enhancing both departments and ensuring close communication can business objectives be met.