Sales vs. Marketing: What’s the Difference?

Both sales and marketing are critical pieces to the business puzzle. But if you invest in one without the other, your pieces won’t add up to the pretty picture on the puzzle box.

Every organization needs sales and marketing to effectively work together to drive results. Though both sales and marketing people work towards generating sales, they are strategically different. Let’s take a look at each role and how it can help make an impact on growing your business.

What is sales?

When we think about sales, we often get the negative image of a used car salesman or someone selling snake oil. The sales team can get a bad rep, but their role in an organization should not be overlooked.

Sales focus on selling the products or services to your ideal target market. They connect and drive customer relations by knowing their customer requirements, creating value around those products/services, and ultimately trust.

What are the goals of the sales department?

Sales goals can be driven by hitting monthly quotas, increasing the lifetime value of the customer, or strategic campaigns focused on specific products and services.

What is marketing?

In contrast, marketing’s role is to help drive awareness, interest, and sales for your business. Through market research, they understand the needs of the customers and know how to craft key messages across different channels to reach them.

What are the goals of the marketing department?

Marketing department goals are all about how they can communicate, promote, and drive awareness for the company and its different products and services.

Depending on the marketing campaign, goals and key performance indicators will vary.

How can Sales and Marketing work together?

Sales and Marketing must work together to help achieve the business’s long-term goals. Sales can provide marketing with much-needed feedback on whether their campaign is working. In contrast, Marketing can help sales by providing the tools and resources for every stage of the marketing funnel to pitch and clarify the company’s products and services.

In Summary

Sales and marketing work together to drive results. Sales bring customers to the business, while marketing gets their attention. Without sales bringing in revenue, there would be no money for marketing to tell people how to get. Marketing how people know about the business and how they can access it, but without sales bringing them in, there is no one at the door for marketing. They need each other’s help to be successful.

More Posts

Interested in working together?

Tell us about your project.