I’m constantly amazed at the amount of companies that confuse sales activities and marketing activities. Those companies almost always have a mixed message they are sending their Clients. When sales and marketing are combined the message is rarely a coordinated one that helps produce high quality and high profit Customers and Clients.
Instead if we separate the two activities into proper silo’s in our companies we will have a more coordinated sales message that will target the people we really want to do business with.
What this comes down to is sales is an activity. It is the doingness that actually brings Customers into our firms. Marketing is the strategy the sales department uses. The strategy could be as simple as only call on these Customers who live in this area of town. Or, it could be much more sophisticated in not only helping the sales department know who to call on, but what sort of approach should be used with different types of Clients.
If our marketing department can help us understand what our Clients want, we then have a chance of providing the Customer with sales conversations they would be interested in reading or having a discussion about.
When your sales department has a roadmap for where they are supposed to go and what they’re supposed to do once they get there, you have a much better chance of having higher productivity and higher profit Customers produced by your sales team. You MUST manage your sale team to your marketing plan. Remember, many salespeople will move towards the path of least resistance. Often, your best new Customers are hard to find and hard to get infront of. Having your sales people follow a well thought out marketing plan can help with making sure the new Customers that do business with you are the type of Customers you want.
I strongly believe that sales people should not be involved in marketing and marketing people should be involved in the sales process. A good sales person is one who wants to call on Customers and book sales. They often don’t want to think about sales strategies, they just want to go out and sell. On the other hand, marketing people need to go out and make sales calls. If they don’t, they will have no idea whether their marketing strategies will work in the real world.
On a final note, it’s important to remember that advertising is not marketing. Advertising might help build your brand or get name recognition for your company, but it’s not marketing and it certainly is not sales unless you are pulling people to your company and have a measurement system in place to know if your advertising is actually producing new Customers. This understanding of how your sales program works for adding new Customers can’t be a gut feeling. It must be fact based for how many new Customers an advertising program produces and how many dollars the advertising campaign has brought to your company.
Remember, sales does not equal marketing. Having them operate as separate entities within your company will improve the quality of new Clients your company attracts.
Josh Patrick
Filed under: Ethics, For Business Advisors, For Business Owners, Marketing, Time Management, collaboration
