Sales & Marketing Teams Is There Really A Difference?

When it comes to sales and marketing teams, people often don’t see much of a difference between the two because they seem to go hand and hand. You may think of a company’s marketing department as the team that promotes products and makes you want to buy them, while the sales team sets the price and makes sure that the company is going to be able to earn a profit. While that may be true to some extent, it doesn’t capture the full picture of these departments.

People tend to think that “marketers create a need” (Kotler, Chapter 1) when in reality “marketers don’t create need, they promote the idea of a need” (Kotler, Chapter 1). The purpose of the marketing department in a company; is to identify the needs and wants of a customer and generate a response - whether it’s getting a customer to purchase the product/service, encouraging engagement, or simply hoping to leave an impression. The ultimate goal is to elicit some kind of response from the target audience.

The purpose of a sales team, on the other hand, is to sell the product or service to consumers.  They do this by evaluating potential consumer patterns, analyzing spending habits, and other behaviors to determine pricing, make sales calls, etc…While the two teams may perform different tasks for the company, their collaboration and communication is critical to the company’s success. Without it, the business risks losing money or even failing entirely.

Clear and consistent communication from both team is essential. If the sales team fails to communicate, the marketing team may fail and vice versa. For example; through their phone calls with customers the sales team learns that customers aren’t using a particular feature on the product that may solve most of their problems, if they don’t relay this information to their marketing team in order for the marketing team to then create content that can highlight that particular product feature it can potentially cause the business to lose customers or simply a missed marketing opportunity to limit some of the work the sales team may have, while improving user experience.

If the marketing team has old sales information but is making content out of it as a consumer, we may be less likely to trust the business because it may seem as though they are unorganized or don’t know what they’re doing which will cause us to either limit or stop our purchases and interactions with a business. When in reality, that is a situation that could have easily been avoided if the two teams were in constant communication with each other.

When a company’s sales and marketing teams are aligned properly not only will consumers the also be happier with their product(s). But the company will also benefit greatly because they will be losing less money, be able to sell products at full demand, and according to HBR Are Your Marketing and Sales Teams on the Same Page?,  Proper alignment between the two teams leads to “employee retention, the ability to solve problems creatively, and an increased speed of change”