An organization is made of a variety of teams that are filled with highly skilled people. These teams are the ones who make sure that the organization can meet all of its strategic goals and is ahead of the competition. Marketing and Sales are just one of these teams, and although, for an outsider, their jobs and responsibilities might seem the same, and it might be true to some extent, but when you go into the details, you find out that there’s more that sets them apart compared to what makes them similar.

Here are just some of the areas which can help us understand the line between marketing and sales;

• Goals

The major thing that differentiates a marketing person from a salesperson is the set goals that each of them has to achieve.

Generally, the salesperson is responsible for increasing the sales of their services or their product/item. And such goals are highly tangible and hence, easily trackable.

Marketing goals, on the other hand, are not this clear and rigid. Furthermore, the goals within the marketing department can also change from time to time. Sometimes it’s raising brand awareness, sometimes it’s launching a new product or campaign, sometimes it’s to bring in new consumers, while sometimes it is to retain the old ones. And hence because of the variability of these goals, they are not easily trackable.

• Data Vs Relationship Driven

Now that we are clear about the different goals of people working in the marketing and sales department, we can differentiate based on the approaches the latter has to take to achieve them.

Marketers might not have clear goals, but they do have a reliable and rigid source to achieve that goal. Because of the nature of their job, marketers rely more on learning facts about their consumers rather than building relationships with them. For this, they use different surveys to gather information about their customers and build consumer profiles based on their analysis.

Salespeople, on the other hand, focus more on gathering information that will help them connect with their consumers and build relationships with them.

• Customer Interactions

If you have ever met a salesperson, you would know that they interact with individuals directly, either in groups or separately.  This type of customer interaction is more personal.

While, on the other hand, you hardly see a marketing person interacting with consumers like this.

This is because when it comes to sales, you go to the consumer, while in marketing, you let the consumer come to you.

The type of interaction also depends on what goals we want to achieve through them and, as you will later read as well, marketing and salespeople have significantly different goals. The desired outcome of those goals may be the same, to increase the revenue of the organization, but the goals themselves are different.

Sponsored Content