What’s the difference between sales and marketing?
At a high level, marketing is all about informing leads and attracting them to your company, while sales is about working directly with prospects to highlight the value of your company’s solution to convert those prospects into customers. Sounds simple enough, right? But it turns out that the difference between sales and marketing is more complicated than you might think.
In this article, I’ll go through what these two vital business functions are, as well as how they differ in terms of planning, goals, and more. Then, I’ll share some of my personal thoughts and expert tips on how to ensure sales and marketing are aligned within your organization.
Table of Contents
- Difference Between Sales and Marketing
- Marketing vs. Sales
- How Sales and Marketing Work Together
- The Power of a Marketing and Sales Partnership
Sales includes all of the activities that lead directly to a sale. Salespeople are responsible for managing relationships with potential clients, or prospects, as well as providing solutions that eventually lead those prospects to turn into paying customers.
In contrast, marketing encompasses all of the activities that help spark interest in your business. Marketers use market research and analysis to understand who their potential customers are and what they care about, and they run campaigns to attract people to their business’s brand, product, or service.
Digital marketing expert Kyrus Keenan Westcott offers a helpful analogy: “Marketing and sales are like siblings with the same goal: helping a company succeed. But just like siblings, they have their own distinct personalities and roles to play.”
Westcott continues, “Marketing focuses on getting people interested in a product or service, while sales focuses on closing the deal and making sure the customer leaves happy.”
Clearly, there is a lot of overlap between sales and marketing — but there are also a few important differences. So, let’s dive a little deeper. How exactly do these two business functions differ?
Marketing vs. Sales
To ensure your marketing and sales departments are set up for success (both individually and together), it’s essential to understand the core elements of each. Below, I’ll share some key differences between marketing and sales, including differences in planning, goals, tools, and more.
Planning
Both marketing and sales plans typically start with an overview of the company’s history and its overarching goals and initiatives. However, that’s where the similarities end.
After this basic information, a marketing plan lays out what the product is, its price, who it’ll be sold to, and where it will be sold. This is also known as the 4Ps of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion. Goals are set, marketing channels are chosen, and a budget is defined for the various campaigns that the marketing team plans to pursue.
In contrast, sales plans include details about the sales process, team structure, target market, and goals, as well as the action plan, tools, and resources that will be used to hit these targets.
Goals
Similarly, while the high-level goal of both sales and marketing is to generate revenue, the two departments pursue different specific goals in light of that larger objective.
The primary goal of marketing is to promote the company, offering, and brand. Marketing departments are responsible for pricing their company’s products and communicating how these products address customers’ needs and wants. These goals are often fairly long-term, as marketing campaigns can span many months or even years.
Sales, on the other hand, is focused on hitting shorter-term quotas and sales volume goals. Sales goals are often measured month-over-month, with sales leaders defining targets and calculating how much their department, team, and/or individual salespeople need to sell to meet corporate goals.
Tools and Resources
Sales and marketing teams also differ substantially with respect to the tools and resources they leverage.
To be sure, they do share some tools: A CRM database can be used by sales, marketing, and the company as a whole to help all departments manage relationships with contacts at any stage of the customer lifecycle. I’ve also found that both sales and marketing departments can leverage social media, with marketers using it to promote content and sales using it as part of a social selling strategy.
But beyond these basics, there are several tools that are specific to each department:
Marketing Tools
On the marketing front, here are some of my favorite kinds of marketing tools to consider:
- Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) tools.
- Project management tools.
- Data reporting software.
- Content creation tools.
Sales Tools
And on the sales front, here are some of the types of sales tools I always recommend:
- Meetings apps.
- Documents tools.
- Invoicing software.
- Email management tools.
- Inventory and order management software.
It’s also important to note that new tools and technologies emerge constantly. For example, AI and live chat are two newer tools that marketing and sales teams have begun using to personalize their communication with leads. While not every tool will be a good fit for every team, I firmly believe that to stay competitive, it’s essential for organizations to evaluate and consider adopting new tech as it’s created.
Strategies
Because sales and marketing have different goals, it’s only natural that these departments pursue different strategies as well. For example, common marketing strategies include:
- Internet marketing.
- Print marketing.
- Blog marketing.
- Search engine optimization (SEO).
- Social media marketing.
- Video marketing.
Similar to marketing strategies, sales strategies also vary depending on a company’s industry, products, market, and target customer. Some of my favorite sales methodologies are:
- SPIN Selling
- Solution Selling
- N.E.A.T. Selling
- Conceptual Selling
- SNAP Selling
- CustomerCentric Selling
- Inbound Selling
- MEDDIC
- The Challenger Sale
- The Sandler System
Each of these sales strategies can help prospects solve a problem, achieve a goal, or satisfy a need — which, hopefully, will help the sales team close a deal by turning those prospects into new customers.
How Sales and Marketing Work Together
Clearly, there are many differences between marketing and sales. But that doesn’t mean that the two shouldn’t work together.
To the contrary, over the course of my career I’ve learned firsthand just how important it is to ensure that sales and marketing are aligned in service of common business goals.
As branding expert Sean Dougherty explains, sales and marketing are “two departments that sometimes feel worlds apart. It’s a common and challenging dynamic: The marketing team crafts the message, and the sales team closes the deals. But the synergy between the two often gets lost in translation.”
But, Dougherty continues, “When these two departments work together, qualified leads improve and revenue soars. You experience a cohesive approach that drives success.”
In other words, making sure that sales and marketing are aligned is critical for any organization to succeed. But what does this look like in practice?
First and foremost, it means defining all the different processes, goals, tools, and strategies that each department will pursue — and then taking steps to address any conflicts or inconsistencies.
More tactically, one of the most effective tools I’ve used to keep sales and marketing working together is a service-level agreement (SLA). An SLA is a contract that establishes a set of deliverables that one party has agreed to provide another, making it one of the best ways for disconnected marketing and sales departments to come together into a fruitful partnership.
The SLA offers a framework for both departments to define their shared goals, identify their buyer personas or ideal client profile, and standardize lead definitions. It also sets a protocol for lead management, and it outlines how sales and marketing performance will be measured.
At the end of the day, I’ve learned that when sales and marketing teams establish an effective SLA that keeps them aligned, they’re able to work together to attract and qualify more leads — and ultimately, to generate more revenue.
The Power of a Marketing and Sales Partnership
I’ve learned that the best way for marketing and sales to succeed is for each department to have clearly defined roles and goals. This ensures no stepping on toes. However, since the two are ultimately part of the same business with the same goal, they need to be closely aligned to provide the best experience for customers and the highest possible revenue for the company.
