Sales vs. Marketing
Mon, Feb 8, 2010
Sales vs. Marketing
They drive growth, are always looking for results, and try to stay ahead of the competition. Innovation, creativity, and resilience are just some of the attributes of these departments. However, these departments are constantly butting heads. They each have similar goals, share the credit of a good job, and share the blame in failure. Rarely do they work together to define and execute goals.
What happens between them when the doors are closed? Do they even interact? Both departments are filled with results driven people. Competition is in their nature.
Marketing is what you do to reach, engage, and interest prospects. The sales process is everything done to close the sale and get a signed agreement or contract. Both are necessities to capturing new customers.
By strategically combining efforts, businesses will experience successful growth and collaboration within their companies. If the efforts are unbalanced, it can detour and inhibit growth. Challenges from within the sales/marketing groups should not hinder an organizations growth.
For all but the largest organizations, a joined effort will influence comradely between the two groups; responsibilities will be shared, divided and acheived. The mystery of what the other group is doing will be eliminated. Cooperation will yield better and more closable opportunities. Sales teams will have more time to close deals and bring in new customers.
We believe marketing and sales should work together to reach mutual goals. Marketing needs to understand sales conversion rates. Sales teams needs to utilize sales materials and leads the marketing group creates. Marketing teams need to rely on sales groups to influence future material to help their efforts leading to better conversion on leads. Poor communication leads to a culture of little change, hard feeling and stunted growth trajectories. A company that has marketing and sales team in sync leads to new revenue faster, new customers and lower cost of total sale.
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So where does Business Development fit into the mix?
Is is a subset of one? Does it stand alone?
Rick,
Good question. We view BD as a subset of the sales team. In our organization the BD team creates opportunities through direct sales activities. We view them as sales resources since they are measured by traditional sales metrics. However, if a BD rep were functioning more as a marketing resource; capturing market insights, creating sales material, etc., they would fall under the marketing umbrella. Ambiguous answer, yes, but a role that may vary from company to company. This illustrates the importance of defined roles/responsibilities in sales groups, so all resources are measured accurately and know who they roll up to.