Alan Gayle is a sales and marketing consultant specialising in the construction industry. In this column he offers advice on how to make an impact in the market. This time he examines the difference between sales and marketing.
I read a blog post recently that was headed ‘Sales vs Marketing: Which is More Important?’ The author, Paul Barstow, is a former advertising salesperson for various building industry publications. He has created an interesting blog called ‘Advertising in Construction’ offering marketing advice to building product manufactures.
Not surprisingly, the blog comes from the perspective of big manufacturers with a sales force and a marketing team and the main point is the often tense relationship between the sales and marketing functions.
Ultimately, he points out, both departments are on the same team and should co-operate more for the benefit of the company.
Sensible advice.
I’ve worked on both sides of the sales/marketing fence, for both large building product manufacturers and small specialist contractors. I have certainly experienced internal conflict between sales and marketing in big companies and I’ve also seen how lax marketing has an adverse effect on the sales of smaller companies.
While there are some fairly large product manufacturers in the stone sector, the majority fall into the small and medium sized business category (SME). And while some have one or two sales/marketing people on the payroll, very few have a substantial sales force and a dedicated marketing team.
So which is more important for smaller companies, sales or marketing?
First of all, let’s sort out the terminology.
Strictly speaking, the phrase should be ‘marketing and sales’ rather than ‘sales and marketing’ because marketing always precedes sales.
The purpose of marketing is
1) to provide valuable leads and 2) to build a strong brand to help increase margins. While the purpose of sales is to generate the revenue the company needs to remain in business.
While marketing comes first in the process it is sales that will keep your business going. With ineffective marketing you’ll miss out on sales opportunities and you will probably end up selling at a lower price than you really need to. But with ineffective sales you will soon go bust.
Ideally, you should have a balance between the two functions. Sales and marketing should work in harmony with one another towards the same goals. Every business should allocate a budget to both.
To justify the cost to you of your marketing, it is vital your sales effort is focused on converting leads into sales.
I’ve seen far too many companies in this industry, both large and small, spend heavily on marketing, generate leads and then fall at the final hurdle by not following them up. It’s utter madness. If you’re not going to convert the leads into sales what’s the point of creating them?
As a rule of thumb, the better your leads to sales conversion rate, the more profitable you will be, especially if you have a targeted marketing campaign that generates high quality leads that you then convert into profitable customers.
Next month we’ll go back into the world of online marketing, looking at the value of blogs and email newsletters.
In the meantime, you can read Paul Barstow’s blog about sales versus marketing at http://advertisinginconstruction.com/b2b-sales-teams-important-marketing-team.