Entrepreneur’s Notebook—Sales and Marketing Aren’t Interchangeable Functions

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If I asked you to describe the goal of your company’s marketing program, what would you say? Chances are, your answer would make some reference to increasing sales. Although that seems appropriate, in actuality, marketing and sales are very separate functions.

No matter what business you’re in, the purpose of your marketing program should be to help your customers and prospects see the benefits of doing business with you and how your business can help contribute to their success. Marketing really has nothing to do with selling; marketing has to do with creating an environment such that making a sale is the natural next step. In other words, the role of marketing is to establish and continually reinforce an environment in which your salespeople and/or sales efforts can thrive.

This distinction between marketing and sales is very important. You certainly can’t or don’t want to ignore sales; sales just need to be viewed as separate and distinct from marketing. Within this context, good marketing programs tackle and effectuate awareness, brand identity, differentiation and quality leads. Let’s look at them one at a time.

-Awareness. Developing programs and tactics that create and increase awareness of your company and the products or services you offer in the minds of your customers and prospects is a major responsibility of marketing. For people to even want to do business with you, they must be made aware and continually reminded of what you can do for them. Consumers are bombarded with advertising every day, and even if someone is a customer of yours, it doesn’t mean he or she isn’t a customer or prospect of one of your competitors as well. When a need arises, whether we like it or not, chances are the company that comes to mind first gets the business.

-Brand identity. Creating an image of what your business stands for and how customers and prospects feel about your company and your products is a critical function of marketing. Your brand is your word, your promise of what you will deliver consistently over time. Branding is not selling product. The objective of branding is to elicit an emotional, positive feeling about your company. A brand is remembered, and building a brand is consistently communicating a message and delivering what your message promises and what your customers and prospects come to expect from you. Everything associated with your company from business cards and company letterhead to brochures and product advertising should reflect the image you want people to have about your company. This is a major responsibility of an effective marketing program.

-Differentiation. Establishing your company as the one your prospective customers want to do business with, and want to stay with, is also a responsibility of marketing. In many industries financial services, for example product offerings from one financial institution to another are virtually identical. And in all industries, there will only be one lowest price (though many companies may offer a product at that same low price). The objective for marketing, therefore, is to assist customers and prospects in understanding why it is more beneficial for them to do business with your company rather than another, to identify and communicate what makes your company unique and better than everyone else.

-Quality leads. Instead of focusing on how marketing can increase sales, a good marketing program will create a continuing flow of solid, quality leads. When leads are targeted properly and come in regularly, sales will follow. You don’t want to waste the talents of your salespeople on ferreting out prospects; their abilities should lie with closing sales, and that’s what they should be concentrating on. Leads should be the concern of marketing.

Good marketing programs reinforce sales efforts. For example, a well-executed annual report helps depict the strength and stability of your business. A concise, well-written brochure provides backup of salient points that your salespeople make in their verbal presentations. A professionally designed and easy-to-navigate Web site enables customers and prospects to learn more about your business at their pace and at times convenient to them. All these materials should help create awareness of what the business is, what it stands for, how it’s better than the competition, and they should, therefore, draw the right audience and prospective clients to your business.

Given this difference between sales and marketing, it would in all likelihood behoove the small-business owner to take a look at their current marketing program and remove all items and expenditures that relate to sales. You may also want to re-think the profile, compensation and recruitment strategy you’ve been using for hiring and retaining effective salespeople, given that different skill sets are required for sales and marketing personnel.

You might also want to re-think how you’re allocating your marketing dollars. Justifying marketing expenditures in terms of sales generated is really an apples-and-oranges approach to determining how much to spend on marketing efforts. Marketing doesn’t have to be overly expensive to be done well. What’s most important is that marketing efforts are integrated, professional, consistent and targeted to the right audiences.

It’s important to realize, too, that effective marketing does not necessarily produce results overnight. Marketing should be evaluated on such things as an increase in levels of awareness among targeted audiences; a growing, positive perception about the company by customers and prospects; an increased inflow of qualified leads; and the growth of all these elements over time.

Marketing is clearly different from sales. When it’s done correctly, sales will follow.

Evon G. Rosen is senior vice president and director of marketing for Celtic Capital Corp., a provider of asset-based capital from $500,000 to $5 million. She can be reached at [email protected]

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