The Difference between Sales and Marketing

Written by Paschal Agonsi

There’s oftentimes many misconceptions about Sales and Marketing. There are both sparkling differences and similarities between sales and marketing. However, these two concepts work together to deliver the ultimate business goal which is customer satisfaction.

We can say Sales is like marriage and Marketing is courtship and so both of them are necessary to drive at our business goals.

Using the above analogy, we know logically that marketing should come before sales and not marriage before courtship.

Marketing is about building and maintaining relationships with the customer which will lead to understanding their needs better and sales thereafter.

There’s an interesting info graphic that clearly shows the different perspectives between sales and marketing executives as regards business goals.

Oftentimes, we make the mistake of thinking sales and marketing are the same thing but they’re actually different.

Times have changed and so has the understanding between sales and marketing.

Here we can see that in the past, marketing was about creating awareness and attracting customer interest. Today, marketing includes consideration, intent and evaluation while sales focuses primarily on purchase.

Lastly, there’s a difference between sales and marketing as regards time.

Marketing involves long term planning, understanding customer needs and the best approach, and sales is usually a short time process involving exchange of value with customers.

Sales is like making a marriage proposal.

If the Marketing is done right, the customer saying ‘Yes I do’ is 100% sure