The Difference Between Sales And Marketing

To run a business in an effective manner, it is important that the marketing and sales of the company work accordingly. Most of the companies work on sales & marketing but, fail to understand the difference and roles effectively. The management has to understand that both the departments are different and have equal importance to give impressive results. In order to drive both the departments effectively and achieve the desired results, one has to understand the exact difference between brand marketing and sales. So, this article will help you understand the difference better.

Definition Of Marketing

If we go to the basics, marketing can be defined as the operations that helps in making people aware the targeted audience about the brand. The aim of marketing is to ease down the sales process. For instance, a brand which is known by the people is easy to accept for them but, selling something directly to the people whose name they are hearing for the first time becomes very difficult. Therefore, if sales department is facing issues like hearing the brand’s name for the first time then marketing efforts should be improved.

Definition Of Sales

All those steps that help a company in catering to the customer’s requirements through the company's products or services is termed as sales. Whatever is bringing business and improving the revenue in a structured or unstructured manner can be termed as sales. It is anything that helps the team in connecting with the user on a personal level which may or may not be diverted to you through the marketing efforts.

Approach

The efforts of marketing may or maynot be focused towards immediate results. Sometimes, it is done to determine the future needs of the targeted audience and prepare the products or services accordingly. Sometimes it is focused on making people understand what they are missing, if they are not using the services or products of your company, which may lead to conversion if lead into sales. Whereas, the sales efforts are meant to meet the current customer’s demands with the available services and the products.

Focus

Most of the times, online marketing is focused towards making people aware about the services, promoting the products, that company offers to the target audience. Whereas, sales is completely focused towards fulfilling the revenue targets of the company.

Process

Marketing has no defined process, it can be either market research, analysis of distribution channels, product quality or promoting it through different channels depending on the budget allocated. Usually direct interaction or through multi level channel.

Priority

In general, both are interdependent but, sales is the ultimate goal of any company thus, gets higher priority. It is marketing how to reach the audience and what is the group to approach whereas, the ultimate goal is to get those targeted group converted.

Identity

Marketing basically targets the building of a brand name whereas, sales is the process to take benefit of any opportunity to generate business for the company. The better the brand value, the better the number of opportunities will be.

The sales vs marketing is a debatable topic and none of them has a major lead over the other. Where marketing has different forms, sales can be also done through online and offline mode. So, it is important that one should understand the difference between the two categories and define the objectives of both the departments appropriately so that one can act as the backbone of other. If there will be a defined set of objectives for both the departments, achieving the set targets in a timely manner will become much easier.