Confusing Marketing And Sales Is Bad For Your Business Growth

There is a reason why sales and marketing are different terms. Many businesses I’ve worked with have struggled with one or the other. But for a business to succeed, you need both sales and marketing – so when businesses confuse marketing with sales or vice versa, they end up wasting a lot of time and resources.

So let’s first understand how they are different. Marketing is about telling the market who you are, what you do, who you serve, what problem you solve and why your solution is the best. It is a broad-based segment-specific single-direction communication activity that is designed to inform, educate and attract customers. Sales is about answering your customers’ questions, allaying their worries, recommending the best solution to them and helping them complete the transaction. It is an up-close customer-specific two-direction communication activity with the customer that is intended for discussion, persuasion and resolution.

Many businesses favour one over the other. When businesses favour sales over marketing, they typically have strict quotas, costly commission systems and an unhealthily competitive culture. Many B2B businesses operate this way, some because they believe they are well-known enough in the market to need any marketing, some because they believe repeat customers and referrals are enough to float their business, and some because they want to see visible results for the effort they put in. No doubt this is how many businesses with strong sales capabilities started out and achieved decent results, but eventually they stagnate. This is because sales is a time-intensive and person-dependent approach to business. There is no way to ensure every salesperson can function at the same standard and it is not viable to keep scaling with more and more salespeople especially if the closing rate is not high.

On the other hand, when businesses favour marketing over sales, they typically have unremarkable customer service, suboptimal business follow up and a demotivated culture. Many B2C businesses operate this way, some because they believe their brand is attractive enough, some because they believe customer service is not important enough, and some because their salespeople change so frequently they have to drive their marketing instead. While many large mass-market businesses with large marketing budgets tend to pursue this strategy, they also begin to stagnate when customer expectations rise and more agile competitors enter the market. This is because marketing is not and cannot be a replacement for sales. Good marketing and strong salesmanship have to work hand-in-hand: a good marketing system identifies, nurtures and motivates a lead into a prospect, while a strong sales team engages, convinces and converts a prospect into a customer.

In order to maximize your business growth, there needs to be a paradigm shift in business thinking with regards to marketing and sales. It is not about spending more money to run a marketing system and a sales team concurrently, which is one common reason why businesses tend to focus on one and not the other. It is about building a reliable marketing system that constantly generate leads and prospects, and then feeding them to a well-trained sales team to begin the conversion process. This way, your salespeople need not hustle so hard and losing morale, but instead focus their energies on interested prospects who aren’t going to nastily reject them, increasing your sales closing rate. At the same time, because of the improved closing rate, your marketing investment returns are higher, meaning you are actually saving on unnecessary marketing to leads who get lost during the sale process.

In the end, the businesses that will grow best are those who can integrate their marketing and sales teams and implement a coherent lead generation and customer conversion strategy.