Is There Still a Difference Between Marketing and Selling?

Is There Still a Difference Between Marketing and Selling?

Reader Comments (6)

  1. Thank you Sonia, you’ve given me some great insight about sales. I used to do door to door and I got a lot of no’s, but when I worked arranging meetings cold calling I related to the person on their other end of the call, which would get my employer clients…
    They didn’t say no but a yes sir…

  2. This is a fundamental problem with many companies Sonia. Although departments have specific roles it is like walls prevent said groups from working together to create a seamless experience for the customer. This is why I enjoy being an entrepreneur building from the ground up; as I grow, I do things in flow, and as I scale, help folks see the benefit in creating a customer experience before getting all caught up marketing or sales speak, boxing themselves in.

  3. I agree with your main message Sonia – sales and marketing are intertwined, regardless of how the processes are viewed/practised by anyone. That said, there are distinct differences between the skill sets involved in each.

    The customer/client journey begins at the promotion stage and works its way through marketing to sales – therefore each stage is a relay race and must handle the baton effectively for its own part of the race (journey).

    Good marketing opens the process and creates questions (the correct questions) for sales to answer. Sales completes the education and helps the client to make the right decision to buy her solution (presupposing that the solution is right for the client).

    That people treat the sales process with suspicion, even fear, is simply a matter of confusion and misunderstanding! The most effective sales are non-sales, where the client decides to purchase from a position of choice.

    Remarkably, everyone uses sales skills everyday without realising. The most effective sales skills are wholly based on the powers of communication and interaction and we therefore need to study and hone these skills to produce the best sales – Highly Effective Sales (HES).

    The awesome bonus is that with these skills, selling becomes not only truly effective, it also become amazingly simple and easy!

  4. Having lead both Marketing & Sales Teams, I’ve stumbled through trying to get the “silos” to understand everyone’s’ roles and work together better.

    One of the resources I go back to often is the HBR article, Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing by Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy. It’s from 2006, but still has wisdom to share: https://hbr.org/2006/07/ending-the-war-between-sales-and-marketing

    One of the key takeaways is that the conflict arises from the fact that depending on the size/age of the organization, Marketing’s role changes while Sales stays relatively the same (only the scale changes). I find it provides an interesting context for building understanding in both departments.

  5. As someone who has spent over 15 years in B2B and B2C sales, I fully agree with your assessment of the silos that marketing and sales departments tend to operate, especially in larger corporations. I can’t remember the number of times where the sales team would argue with the marketing department telling them that the messaging was off and that customers wouldn’t buy into the marketing message. Or the number of times when the marketing department would force us to use marketing materials that were useless to the sales team because they didn’t talk to each other.

    As someone who is now in marketing, I agree that sales and marketing really should be intertwined and marketers should have sales skills and salespeople should have marketing skills. Sales is about offering a solution to a need or a problem and to me, marketing is really about making sure the solution is perceived to be a good fit for the need or problem.

  6. Hey! I recently started a blog and have been researching other people for inspiration. I want you to know that this post hit me really well in combination with a recent experience I had. Thanks for taking the time to write about the fine line between marketing and sales!

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