Marketing vs Sales: What is the Ultimate Difference Between Both?
Marketing and Sales are the two words that constitute the entire entity of a business. even though they are used simultaneously or together in a context, they are different. In this article, we will try to understand the difference and have an insight to strengthen our understanding of it.
To begin with, Selling or Sales is the primary or the purpose of a business. Any business in the world, regardless of its scale, aims to convert a customer’s interest into a purchase. However, on the other hand, marketing is the strategy that it employs to make sure the customer buys a product. It lets a customer know how a particular product is the best for them.
It is important to understand this distinction for a business to run judicially. If a business doesn't distinguish between the two and employ the necessary strategies, it will lose customers. Today we have a thousand alternatives to a product, with each outshining the other. Hence, not only do we have to focus on selling, but we also have to focus on marketing our product to make sure we get a conversion with a customer.
Let us look at, both concepts in a bit more detail beginning with their definition to
understand them holistically.
Definition Of Marketing
Marketing as a concept focuses on the product as its base rather than the customer. The main purpose of marketing is to make a particular product stand out. It is the most crucial stage in a customer’s journey with a business. Marketing makes sure not only the customer is aware of a product but is also interested in purchasing. It is the careful planning and implementation of various strategies that revolve around the target customer to ensure conversion.
The two most popular strategies used in marketing are Pull and Push Marketing.
Understanding these two will help you have a basic picture of the concept.
Pull Marketing:
Pull Marketing is the strategy where the customer is pulled toward a product by
showcasing its features and usefulness. It gives the customer a ready set of options, and the customer goes out to seek the product or is pulled towards it. Pull Marketing creates demand and establishes a personal connection with each customer. It does that through various media campaigns, discounts, advertising, and creating a sense of urgency to want that product.
Any big brand with an established customer base is known to use the pull marketing strategy. Since they already have a loyal customer base, it is very easy for them to keep creating demand through strategic product promotion.
Apple is the biggest example of a pull marketing strategy. Every time it launches a new product, it not only creates a demand for a new potential customer but also among its established customer base. It usually works for big brands or companies already surpassing the nesting phase.
Push Marketing:
Push Marketing is ideal for new or blooming businesses. It works best when a business is trying to build its brand and customer base. It works on exposing the product to any customer, regardless of their interest. Not only that, but it is the idea to push a product through social media, large-scale advertising, or even through direct selling.
In the case of push marketing, the product chases the customer. The customer base typically remains unknown to the seller and it tries to push the product in any way possible. It lets the customer know the details of a product and its advantages and tries to invoke interest and in turn conversion.
Push Marketing strategy can be implemented by any business of any scale. It depends on mediums like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and other social media to push content that promotes the product. Additionally, it makes use of tactics including door-to-door sales, and direct selling in showrooms. A business with a pull marketing strategy focuses more on the product rather than prioritizing the customer base.
Push and Pull marketing together makes sure a customer knows about a product and approaches the business with the intent to purchase.
Definition of Sales
We tend to mostly associate net profit with sales, but that is not the case. Sales is an approach to push strategies for your product in a way that ensures profit. It is the very act of selling or giving your product to someone in exchange for money. But it is not only limited to that simple concept anymore. The definition of sales now also accommodates the concept of driving revenues and generating leads too. It is the concept of ensuring that a business is always able to achieve its targeted revenue through various channels.
Sales can vary depending on the businesses, hence let us quickly understand what are the different types of sales.
B2B Sales:
B2B sales or business-to-business sales is when the customer base for a product is not an individual customer but a big business. That is when a business sells its product to another business and usually involves a large transactional value. It includes careful decision-making and a certain deal in place to ensure a repetitive process. For example, a shoe brand can buy fabric paints from another business to use on their product. Typically, the product being sold in B2B sales is not always the end product and is always modified further before it reaches the customer.
B2C Sales:
It is the selling of a product directly to a customer and is the acronym for business-to-customer sales. It is typically an end product and employs careful marketing strategies to ensure a conversion. The BC sale doesn't involve careful planning or discussions or any fixed deal. It solely depends on a customer’s demand situation.
Direct and Indirect Sales:
Another important concept in selling is Direct Sales, where there is no intermediate party between your customer and you. A direct sales model business takes the end product directly to the customer without relying on any third party. The best-known method of direct selling is when a seller communicates with the customer individually and uses conversational skills to pursue them.
Whereas, in indirect selling, there is a third party involved that takes the end product and pushes it further. It is when a business employs a third medium like an online platform or a distributor to sell their products. It helps the company to be exposed to a new and undiscovered customer base.
For example, if you buy a product from a company’s website it is direct sales. But if you opt for a selling portal like Amazon and buy it through there, you participate in indirect sales. Now we can understand that marketing and sales are inseparable but they are two different core concepts. Let us try to understand it by analyzing the differences.
Key Differences
The key differences between the two don't lie in the result, since the end goal is revenue generation. However, the differences lie in the implication of key strategies and tactics. Marketing works on different principles and points compared to sales. Let us try to understand them through the below points:
Marketing Strategies and Tactics
The most age-old and renowned concept of marketing that stands true throughout the test of time is to focus on the five Ps, which means to design a strategy that tells you how to address or navigate through the people, place, price, product, and promotion. There are various ways in marketing how you can appease your customers by focusing on these factors. You have to make sure you are catering to the right audience, in the right demographic with the desired price of the product. With the advancement in technology, marketing has become easier. Let us quickly look at a few such popular strategies.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is when a business uses social media to promote their product. It runs ads, and posts and sponsors them to make sure it reaches the right set of audiences. It is usually done to let the customers know about the product and its details.
Content Marketing
It is when a business uses various forms of content like content writing, video content, and others to reach the audience. It not only lets the audience know about the product but also highlights all its details. Furthermore, it adds a personal touch between the business and the customer. Content Marketing is done across any online platform through blogs, stories, shots, Instagram reels, YouTube shots, videos, online posts, etc.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the key factor that ensures your content marketing strategy is up to speed. It is the implication of curated steps and guidelines that ensure our site generates traffic. Following SEO guidelines for marketing will ensure your site reaches the maximum audience and in turn increase your conversion rate.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is one of the judicial marketing strategies that not only fetch you new customers but helps nurture and add value to your existing customer base too. It is a reward-based program, where your existing customer does your marketing for you by referring your product to someone. In turn, they are either promised discounts or other rewards if their referral converts into a closure. It is usually done through personalized links and fetches the undivided interests of new and old customers.
Affiliate Marketing
Mostly referred to as Influencer Marketing, Affiliate Marketing is one of the most famous and preferred ways to market a product now. It is when you select a partner to market your products for you. They make sure that they engage your audience and promote your product with their fan or customer base. It not only ensures a fair amount of exposure for your brand but it also adds a trust factor when an audience sees a familiar face using your product.
Sales Strategies and Tactics
Now that we know about different marketing strategies, let's see how various factors in a sales strategy can work in your favor and achieve the desired result.
Creating a demand
A good sales strategy should always make sure there is a false sense of urgency within the customers. They should see the product and understand that it is of utmost importance to them. It then only you can ensure a successful customer journey in this competitive market.
Cold emailing is when a business lets a customer know about a product without them asking about it. Without having any proper relationship with a customer, a business still approaches them regardless of knowing their purchasing habits and tries to convert them. It not only generates interest in your product, but a business gets to reach a wide number of people.
Free Samples
It is the oldest trick in the book that ensures a successful customer journey. It is obvious for a customer to be skeptical about a product. But if a customer sees that there is no potential financial harm in trying a product, it will ensure not only a spike in interest but successful closure later.
Pitching and Demonstration:
When selling a product you must make sure that your product pitching is not only top-notch but has a personal touch to it. Pitching the product and giving the demo is the beginning and end of everything in this cycle since they are the deciding factors for a customer. If a customer doesn't like how a product is being sold and doesn't relate to it, they will never opt for it. Furthermore, a precise demo also ensures a customer that the product is worth using and is durable.
Metrics and KPIs
Now that we know what sales and marketing are and how we can use different strategies to elevate our marketing game, it is very important to assess them too. We have certain key performance indicators and metrics that let us know our implemented strategy is foolproof. It tries to calculate the net revenue for a business through certain set parameters and determines a campaign’s credibility.
Let us understand a few of those strategies a bit more elaborately.
Marketing Metrics and KPIs
To understand the effectiveness of our marketing strategies, we have a few KPIs and metrics in place. They let us know if the implied strategy is the best for your business or not. We are listing a few such indicators for you to have a clear picture.
Return on Investment
ROI is the measure of the value that we get once we deduct the cost of implementing a market strategy to a business with the return it generates. It is the simple math of arriving at the profit percentage after investment. It helps us to understand if we are overboard with our expenditures or if we can reach our set target within the planned budget for a product campaign.
Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV)
It is a measurement to assess how valuable a single customer is to the business. It tries to understand the customer's purchasing power and how it will affect the business. Once you assess your customers' purchasing power and interest, you can drive your marketing strategy accordingly.
Customer Acquisition Cost
The CAC is the math to understand how much a business spends to bring or attract a new customer. It gives an overall picture of all the employed channels to understand if the right strategies are being employed. For example, if your LTV is lower than your CAC, then your marketing strategy needs an upgrade.
Sales Qualified Leads ( SQL)
It is the list of the customers who have a genuine interest in your product and are willing for a conversation with your sales team. These customers are on the way to having a fulfilling customer journey. The SQL parameter helps you understand your conversion rate and the merits of your strategy.
Website Visitors
A business needs to have an authentic website that induces trust in a customer. Hence, with this KPI you will be able to understand how many website visits your campaign is fetching to determine its credibility.
Sales Metrics and KPIs
Similar to marketing KPIs the sales campaign also has various KPIs in place that ensure your campaign is working in your favor. It helps you understand if the employed strategies are a good fit for your business or not. Let us look into them one by one:
Sales Revenue
Sales revenue is the periodic calculation of how much revenue is generated through sales. It is the most important parameter for business since this will not only affect all the major decision-making but also determine the strength of your business.
Customer Retention Rate
The CRR refers to the number of repeat customers for a business. A business can make sure a customer keeps coming back and, in turn, elevates sales. It is a cost-effective solution that chases new customers and generates new leads.
Churn Rate
The churn rate determines how many customers are lost by a business. It assesses your sales policy directly, by looking at the number of customers who chose to not continue with a product or subscription due to various reasons.
Sales Cycle Length
It is the time taken by a customer to convert after first being exposed to your product or its details. It can be used to optimize your sales policy in a better way to ensure more closures.
How Marketing and Sales Work Together
Now that we have seen the various layers of sales and marketing strategies, it is of
optimum importance for us to understand that they are not independent of each other. The marketing department exists to ensure there is a boost in sales. Moreover, the sales team is purposeless without a marketing team to help them assess the customer database.
The marketing team presents the sales team with a demographic of the situation which helps them with a better assessment of the products. They can work together in the following aspects and make sure it works in the favor of the business.
- Having a set service level agreement to achieve a common target together.
- Unified together during customer interactions to avoid misleading customers.
- Having a mutual dependency on each other and reflecting it in front of the
customers. - Collaboration will help with not only an improved face value with the customer but also in judicial lead generation.
- Lastly and most importantly, when two teams join their resources, it helps a
business understand its customer base and target customers.
Common Challenges and Solutions
There are a lot of challenges that a business encounters from a sales and marketing perspective. Since the competition these days is cut-throat and intense, both departments face a lot of common challenges. Let us look into them to have an insight.
- Leads Generation: It is very difficult to identify customers that will lead to a
successful closure. The identification of a customer base is the most challenging issue for both departments. However, it can be resolved by employing various marketing strategies like content creation, SEO, and reaching the goal. - Customer Retention: It is of critical importance to keep the existing customer base engaged and satisfied. The problem of customer retention can be solved by implying judicial strategies like referrals, discounts, and free hampers along with product enhancements.
- Adapting to Market Changes: The market is forever fluctuating. As a business, it is critically important to adapt to those changes. To counter this concern, both teams should be ready with ample strategies and be flexible with them. Furthermore, it is very important to keep up with the market trends to adapt or overcome any challenge.
- Building Brand Image: Both teams need to work in a sustainable way where the brand image is elevated in front of the customer. It is necessary for a customer to blindly trust their brand for a successful relationship.
Both the sales and marketing teams need to ensure there is a brand voice and a personal touch to it to connect with customers and retain them.
For a business to be successful, both teams need to be on the same page and avoid any communication errors. They need to be unified with their message in front of the customer as a business. Furthermore, they need to have a common goal and revenue projection in place and work towards it together. Since their symbiotic existence only will ensure a successful business.
Conclusion
So it is now clear to us that even though sales and marketing are used in the same concept they are different from each other. Without proper marketing, sales will cease to exist in a competitive age like this. Marketing is supposed to elevate sales and in turn the business. As a business, it is very important to understand the distinction and the codependency to achieve optimal results.
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