On the other hand, sales covers everything you do to close a deal and reel in revenues. This includes branding, messaging, advertising, customer research, pricing, PR, social media campaigns, email newsletters, events management and other activities. In general, marketing encapsulates all the activities and resources needed to reach and persuade target customers. As companies grow however, sales and marketing inevitably diverge into distinct functions that are performed by separate teams. You can’t blame them, especially when it comes to small businesses where both functions are typically performed by a single person or department. People often use the terms “selling” and “marketing” interchangeably. So what can smart organizations do to prevent the perennial conflict between sales and marketing? Sales and Marketing: ROLES and Turfs And surprise, surprise: marketing and sales departments are populated not by furry creatures but by human beings who presumably possess the ability to transcend their beastly instincts. Heck, even when they ought to be doing just the opposite: join forces, execute a unified strategy, and reap the benefits of shared success.Īs many YouTube videos and Instagram photos affirm, dogs and cats do get along very well, especially when discipline and mutual understanding override the instinct to protect one’s turf and to bite back when threatened. In many organizations, they form the stereotypical cat-vs-dog relationship even when they hardly need to at all. Yet, despite their near synonymous functions and tight interdependence, sales and marketing teams often find themselves at loggerheads, sometimes as rivals but mostly as convenient scapegoats for missed targets and epic fails. In contrast, a discordant relationship between the two departments will reduce the bottomline and trigger productivity inefficiencies that cost companies around $1 trillion per year, as cited by Salesforce.
Marketing and sales working together in synergy have been known to achieve two-digit annual growth rates and improve a company’s chances of closing deals by as much as 67%. Sales and marketing share a lot in common - including the crucial roles they play in customer engagement, revenue generation and organizational growth. Guest Post by Max Altschuler, founder of Sales Hacker and the Sales Hacker Conferences.