What is Called Marketing? What is called Sales?

What is Sales? Selling What’s in Stock

Sales is the team whose job it is to “sell what’s in stock”. The company has specific products or services and—and it's up to Sales to sell those things. Sales develops relationships with customers and/or channel partners. They knock down the doors, overcome objections, negotiate prices and terms and often work internally to be sure their customer’s orders are filled.

The perspective of Sales is from inside the company out toward the customers and their horizon is focused on this week, this month, and this quarter. If sales is not focused on the now, then there may not be any revenue this week, month, or quarter. 

What is Marketing? Aligning with Customers, Now and for the Future

A key job of Marketing is to understand the marketplace from the perspective of the customer looking back towards the company and helping lead the company where it should be in the future. Marketing’s job is to direct the organization toward the segments, or groups of customers and channels where the company can profitably compete. It should help the organization see how it needs to modify its product offerings, pricing, and communication so that it meets the needs of the distribution channel or end customers. (This is a function of your market positioning strategy.)

Marketing also needs to convert the market understanding into tools and tactics to attract the market, build (often digital) relationships, and develop leads. WIthout Sales, Marketing efforts run short. Marketing directs Sales as to where they should be hunting and what ammo to use. Note, however, that if Marketing becomes a sales support function focused only on the now, the future can become lost.

Without Marketing, Sales Suffers

Not even the best hunter can bring home dinner if they are shooting blanks at decoys. Markets are constantly changing. The job of marketing is to stay ahead of the changes, and help the hunters see where they should be hunting and provide them with the right ammunition. If Marketing is only focused on delivering the ammunition for today, nobody will see where the industry is moving or where the company needs to hunt next. This limits growth not only for Sales and Marketing, but also for your entire organization.

Every Sales organization feels they have a good understanding of their customers. But every Sales conversation with a customer has a sales transaction lurking in the background. Therefore, customers can never be completely open about their needs and wants when talking to a sales person.

For a company to really grow, someone must have the job of looking out the window towards where the company needs to go in the future. For many companies, this is the job of the CEO and Sales hires someone to do some sales support and gives them a marketing title. But as companies grow, the job of CEO starts to become a full time job in itself and the strategic role of Marketing gets short changed.

Sales and Marketing: Today and the Future

Sales needs to be focused on the now. You can’t run a company unless your sales team is focused on bringing in today’s business. But you can’t really ask your Sales leaders where the company should go next and to develop the 18 month plan to get there without losing focus on today’s revenue. Besides, if your sales executive was really good at developing future-focused business strategies and tying that strategy to the plans and tools of marketing to make it happen, they would be a marketing person and not a now-focused sales person.

Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as "the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

The purpose of marketing is to attract attention and create interest. Marketing can create a brand image, change that image and get people interested in what's for sale. Marketing a product or service was once done primarily with billboards and print ads and now is often done online and via social media. 

Selling is first and foremost a transaction between the seller and the prospective buyer or buyers (the target market) where money (or something considered to have monetary value) is exchanged for goods or services.  Sales is activity related to selling or the amount of goods or services sold in a given time period. The seller or the provider of the goods or services completes a sale in response to an acquisition, appropriation, requisition or a direct interaction with the buyer at the point of sale.

Sales and Marketing: two terms we often hear together when working with mid-size companies. In some ways, this is logical because the two need to work together.

But in fact, Sales and Marketing are two very different functions and require very different skills.

Marketing is about advertising what you have. but when i say advertising i mean that first we have to know well about the products we want to sell and have a research about the targeted people only then we can know what to sell and to whom to sell.

sale is achieving the whole marketing process by convincing our target customer to buy our product to whom we made every effort to show  and make the product meet their desired needs and wants.