Sales and Marketing - Ying and Yang, or Oil and Water?

Have any two areas of business ever been more mixed up and misunderstood than sales and marketing? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to clients who have complained about their marketing when it was really a sales problem; OR gone on about their no-good lazy sales reps when what they really had was a marketing failure!

So let me first bring clarity to the question: what is the definition of sales and marketing and how are they related?

Marketing is the process, investments and activities that create leads, whereby leads are people who have expressed some level of interest in your company’s products or services. Marketing involves identifying a universe of suspects (your target market), communicating your existence to that universe, converting suspects into prospects, and then nurturing those prospects through ongoing education and communication until they are ready to become leads.

Sales is the process and activities related to communicating with leads one-on-one and converting them into customers. This process includes qualifying them (the time honored “money, authority, need and timeframe” or MANT), understanding their real wants and needs, presenting a solution, overcoming objections and closing the sale.

Now that we’ve separated and defined sales and marketing, let’s do something much more important – put them back together!

One of the eternal truths of business is that marketing and sales are co-dependant on each other in order to be truly effective. Marketing must effectively communicate its strategy, key messages (i.e. unique selling proposition), and target markets in order for sales to support and continue the marketing initiative.

In addition, marketing must create the right kind of leads that have high potential for sales reps to convert into happy long term customers. Sales, on the other hand, must support the marketing strategy, follow up on leads in a timely manner, and communicate back to marketing in a closed-loop fashion what’s working and what’s not “where the rubber meets the road”.

When both sides of the house recognize their co-dependence and work together as a team, the synergy can be simply breathtaking. Conversely, when sales and marketing ignore each other – or even worse, work against each other – the business impact can be devastating.