Sales and Marketing are different pieces of the same puzzle. They are both tools used to grow your business and yet in many organisations they aren’t aligned. This happens in all industries and all business sizes so in this series of lessons, I want to cover what you can do to ensure that sales and marketing play nicely together and make you more money.

Natural Enemies?

Sales and Marketing are two quite different disciplines and often attract two very different kinds of characters. One of the core problems is the perception that they have of each other and the roles that they play.

How People See Sales

We don’t like Salespeople. Generally speaking when the majority of us encounter sales people it’s an unwanted phone call for something you’re not interested in and often they’ve already called 9 times this week. The other major time we speak to salespeople is during that annoying trip to look for a new car. That car salesperson image is hard to shake for most people. We see sales people as sleazy pests willing to say anything to get your cash. (I think I should say at this point some of my best friends are sales people!)

Sales people are often cut off from the rest of the organisation and although I don’t think people look at the task of a salesman with envious eyes, they are often the highest paying “unskilled” roles in any company.

How People See Marketing

We don’t like marketers either, but for exactly the opposite reason. Nobody really understands what the marketing person does exactly. From what you can tell they make things look pretty and not much else. They work on things like SEO and PPC and BMA and tell you that these things are good for your business apparently, not that you understand what they are. (In fact I just made that last one up) The marketing team have colourful crap on their desks, and an awful lot of time for after work drinks but they don’t do any real work…do they?

Although we all see marketing in our day to day lives in many respects in has an intangible and largely un-attributable impact on the actual bottom line of a business…right?

Pot, Kettle, Black

They say stereotypes all come from somewhere, but the truth of the matter is that both sales and marketing play vital roles in the growth of your business. Although they have widely different jobs, there are many areas where sales and marketing can and should be closely linked. In this series of lessons we’ll be going through the different stages of converting a suspect into a prospect and into a customer and the different roles both Sales and Marketing have.