The Difference Between Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing are not the same thing. Sit back for a minute and repeat that a few times because it is one of the most common misconceptions in both the worlds of sales and marketing. You can have all the marketing in the world and not have a single sale. Conversely, you can have all the sales you can handle without a drop of active marketing. Marketing supports sales, marketing drives potential clients to you, which may or may not result in sales, and marketing is supported by profits from sales, but marketing is not the same as sales.

The easiest way to differentiate the two is to recognize that marketing is a broad category that encompasses many different aspects of your process. Marketing, in fact, includes sales, but sales are only a small aspect of your marketing flow. In fact, marketing can be looked at as a flow of five distinct steps, each of which supports each other, with sales being the final, ultimate goal of the entire marketing process.

Step #1: Producing a Product or Service

One of the most important jobs in marketing is to choose a product or service that people want. This is the first step in your marketing strategy, and how you do it depends on how the marketing flow of your company is organized. In some companies, you design your own product or service as the first marketing step and then find a market for it. In other cases, you are not actually responsible for the production or design of your products and services but may instead be reselling products or services already created by another company. In this case, your first step in the marketing process is to choose a company making the product or service you want to sell.

Step #2: Identifying the Market for your Product or Service

A product has no place in marketing if there is no market for that product. Whether your company designed your own product or is involved in reselling an existing product, the second marketing step is to identify a group of people who want to buy or have a need for your product. In some cases, this may actually involve generating the demand for the product on your own, a much more difficult marketing job. Some companies may begin by first identifying their target demographic in the marketing process and then looking to see what sort of demand that demographic has before using marketing to craft a product or service to fill that demand.

Step #3: Setting a Price Point

For companies creating their own product or service, one important job of marketing is to set a price point for their products. This job of marketing entails examining the target market and identifying what the market will bear. That marketing information then goes along to other departments that are able to determine whether the product or service can be sold profitably at that price. Of course, if you’re selling another company’s product or service, this step in marketing can be largely ignored as pricing will likely be supplied.

Step #4: Promotion

This is the step of marketing that most people associate with the term marketing. Marketing a product or service means using every available means to get word of the product or service out to the target demographic. This can include an almost-infinite number of methods to traverse many different media, and this type of marketing is constantly evolving.

Step #5: Sales and Delivery

The final step of marketing is to sell the product, and it is here, of course, that sales fit in. Once a product has been created, once a market has been identified, once the price has been set, and once potential customers have been attracted through promotion, the product still needs to be sold. The sales aspect of marketing is responsible for closing the sales and getting the product to the customers, thus completing the marketing and sales cycle.