The difference between marketing and sales
The difference between marketing and sales is that marketing is about building awareness for the product or service and sales is qualifying prospects and then converting them into customers. Recently, I worked with the VP of sales for a company who explained to me in no uncertain terms that, “the website isn’t working,” because it wasn’t generating any sales. The reason it wasn’t generating any sales is that the site hadn’t been built to funnel or direct inquiries into their CRM and they weren’t tracking their visitors. To remedy the situation we rebuilt the website, cleaned up the language to simplify the message, and began to track visits. Once the work was done, we collected about 1,500 qualified leads. That’s when the VP Sales told me there were, “too many leads to follow up on. We’re a small shop and I don’t have the bandwidth to follow up on these.” That’s when I realized the VP Sales wasn’t interested in selling anything. It’s often the case that managers whom complain about digital services, content, and the website are often trying to defelct attention away from themselves and their own responsibilities.
Another difference between marketing and sales is that effective marketing answers questions future customers have about your product or service. And the way they do that today is to search the internet. That’s why it’s critical to have a robust digital marketing strategy in order to own your own messaging. This is where SEO and content marketing come in. It’s why blogging and social media networks are so important. A robust blogging program will feature 12 posts/month on a blog, an RSS feed, Bluesky, Facebook, Linked In, and X as well as included in a weekly or monthly email newsletter. Coded correctly, that’s as many as 76 posts online per month. Over time, and depending on how competitive the vertical is that you’re in, these properly coded posts will be scrolled by Google and Bing which will effectively pull your brand to the top of an organic search.
The difference between marketing and sales in this case is also that the coded content marketing will drive interested parties to execute some kind of conversion. That conversion could be to ‘Like’ a post, subscribe to a newsletter, or purchase the product or service. And that’s where marketing and sales come together. You need marketing to build awareness, drive engagement, and convert sales. They work hand in hand but the marketing piece has to be built into your model in order to drive sales.
For more ideas on how to effectively execute this strategy visit the work page to view some case studies.
