Many people have wrong notion that both marketing & sales are one and the same. Its just that different terminologies are used depending on speaker’s preference.
However, It’s the other way around. Marketing & sales are two different functions. We all use various marketing & sales techniques in our daily life but very few know the difference.
Marketing refers to any activity, technique, ideas, process, systems used to attract your target audience. Marketing generates interest for your company’s product or service among target audience through market research, analysis and understanding their interests & decision-making process. Through this process, marketing function helps to spread awareness, generate interest & create demand among large scale audience for your products in a limited time. The goal of marketing is to help sales team to close more deals &, if possible, make sales superfluous!
Sales is a set of activities involved in selling a product or service to a target audience in exchange for money. Each salesperson can talk to one prospect at a time & needs lot of time to reach large scale audience.
To improve revenue, salesperson should close more deals at a faster rate within limited given time. To close more deals at a faster rate, salesperson should talk to a greater number of target audience & convince them to buy their product or service. Since they can interact with on prospect at a time, it’s very difficult to close more deals within limited span of time.
A market study has concluded that only 68% of sales people reach their targets. So, if any organization wants their sales team achieve their monthly, quarterly, or yearly targets consistently, sales team should be uninterrupted supply of qualified prospects to close more deals at a faster rate within limited span of time.
How will sales team get continuous supply of qualified leads to close more leads? You guess is correct – Its Marketing!
Marketing is a specialized function which helps any organization or their sales team to sell their products or solutions to target audience. For sales, those target audience who purchases your products or services are considered as customers. However, for marketing sales team is the customer.