Difference between Marketing and Sales

"Marketing" is not "Sales". It's critical to know the difference.

 

Broadly, Marketing creates the atmosphere to make it easy for sales to happen. Marketing consists things like:

• Marketing Strategy: your product must be aimed at consumers in one only of the Mass Market, Mid-Market or High End (only one product in the entire history of marketing has ever succeeded in all three of those consumer areas). Aiming your product at all three in a shotgun approach confuses consumers resulting in your business going broke.
• Target Market: strategy includes identifying a specific group of consumers (age bracket, etc) within your one Mass, Mid or High End market area. The better we identify our target group, the easier it is to make sales.
• Research your competitors - "know your enemy".
• Point of Difference or Unique Selling Proposition (USP) as it is sometimes called. Why should a customer walk past my competitors to come to me? 
• Writing our marketing material: brochures, adverts, websites, etc, all precisely pitched to our Target Market.
• Developing our brand names and good reputation ('Image'). Chasing free editorial.
• Devising tactics to turn first time buyers into repeat customers.
• And, the list goes on and on ... marketing is anything that creates atmosphere to make it easier for sales to happen.

"Sales" obviously is getting out and writing the orders ... tough disciplined work. This involves skills like "closing" the sale - very different skills to Marketing.

 

A marketer is a creative person, a law unto himself, a person with few boundaries, a person who lives inside the head of your customer, a person who dreams and creates at any/all hours of day and night, a person who can send normal disciplined people crazy. For a marketer, the thrill of the chase is creating original thinking / products - original ideas that work, ideas that nobody else thought about. Top marketers are some of the world's highest paid professional people.

 

A salesperson, unlike a marketer, is a well disciplined person who works within a tight set of conventional rules to get the sales orders. A salesperson is motivated by the thrill of closing a deal and the attendant cash bonus. You drive a good sales person crazy when you don't give him/her sound marketing back up.

 

Good sales people do not make good marketers and vice versa ... Selling and Marketing are very separate disciplines involving very different ways of thinking.