Sales and marketing are often lumped together when they are different concepts with separate strategies, activities, processes, and goals. Sales usually operate via one-on-one interactions, while marketing interactions are often one-to-many.
Selling is ultimately a transaction where money is given in exchange for a product or service.
Marketing is the activity and process of creating and communicating offerings that have value for customers and persuading them to buy. Marketing generates the demand for sales to create the relationship and encourage the customer to complete the transaction.
Simply put, marketing builds awareness of the project or service to potential customers. Sales turns those potential customers into actual customers. Let’s go a little deeper into the differences:
Marketing is the first step to getting leads interested, sales teams build relationships with the leads and then close the sale.
Even with their differences, sales and marketing complement each other nicely. They both work towards the same goal – securing business and growing the company. Harvard Business Review puts it nicely, “There is no question that, when Sales and Marketing work well together, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: Sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.”
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