Marketing vs. Sales: 3 Tips for Managing Expectations
These days, we’re all wearing a lot of hats. Job descriptions might have seemed a lot simpler a decade ago, but now it gets blurry when you try to chart where someone’s responsibility ends.
That’s certainly true in marketing. We’re often held liable for a company’s success in a myriad of ways: reputation management, brand awareness, and even driving sales.
And it doesn’t help that marketing compliments sales so well. These two tasks really do go hand-in-hand. But they’re not the same. In fact, businesses can benefit by clearly differentiating between the roles and responsibilities (and expectations) of each team.
Here are three useful tips to differentiate marketing from sales:
1) Marketing informs the decision-making process during the consideration phase. Today’s consumers are savvy, and they do their own research. This means that they often make up their mind about a purchase long before they speak to a salesperson or enter a store.
2) Marketers can tailor experiences to engage and satisfy customers. They do this by collecting information. Then, it’s easier for the other hand to close sales, because they have products and services that are informed by customer needs. Marketing can pass its insights along to the sales team, who can emphasize those benefits to primed buyers.
3) Marketing inspires trust and informs relationships. Salespeople need strong relationships with individual clients and businesses in order to close and renew deals. Marketers can identify potential candidates for those long-term relationships (through lead generation) and help them choose your company over others (through nurturing). Essentially, marketing sets the stage.
Understanding how marketing leads to sales will help your business drive and measure profit in a more streamlined and efficient way.
Plus, it underpins the teamwork that’s necessary: with effective communications, agreements on accountability, and company-wide understanding of who’s wearing which hats.
Mad 4 Marketing can help your organization identify its sales funnel, customer journey, and key audience demographic. With your strategy mapped out, it will be easy to tag who’s turn it is to step in at pivotal points in the process. From there, it’s smooth selling.
