Understanding the Relationship Between Sales and Marketing and Its Impact to Your Business

Sales and Marketing

For so long there has been a sweet-sour relationship between sales and marketing. It has been one of endurance rather than enjoyment, similar to a marriage of convenience. Individuals working in sales believe they are more important than those in marketing and vice versa.

Not understanding each of these departments, their responsibilities, and relationships can be detrimental to your business. This is why we put together this post to provide clarity and understanding. Grab a pen and let’s go on this interesting and enlightening journey.

Differentiating Between Sales and Marketing

It is no secret that salespeople believe that they should have more contact with customers. Why? According to them, they are closer to the customers and understand their pains and needs more than marketers. Marketers, on the other hand, believe that they do more of the work in generating and nurturing leads.

The question is this, what do people in these different but similar departments do? Let’s try to differentiate between sales and marketing by stating who they are and their responsibilities in this section.

Marketing

Marketing helps to encourage leads by building relationships with the business’ prospects. They employ different strategies to achieve their aim. Such strategies include organizing trade shows, sending out newsletters, printing flyers, and digital marketing. For larger scale events, it can be beneficial to hire a professional event staffing agency to provide support and ensure the event runs smoothly.

Over the last decade, digital marketing has become an important aspect of marketing. The reason is that technology has completely transformed the way prospects search for products or services. Thus, digital marketing provides techniques that address this change to ensure positive effects on your number of leads and their quality.

So what do marketers do? They reach out to prospects and educate them about the company, explain products, and offer incentives. To achieve this aim, they make use of campaigns and promotions.

Sales

Once the marketing team is able to pull the leads in, the sales team has the responsibility of closing them. This responsibility involves striking a one-on-one relationship with customers. It also means that they have to put in extra effort to ensure that customers make purchases.

Here’s a summary of the responsibility of salespeople. They ensure that prospective leads make purchases and become customers. From here, they put in extra effort to convert these individuals to loyal advocates for the brand. They achieve this by ensuring repeated patronage.

One of the key responsibilities of salespeople is understanding the needs of the customers. They make use of this knowledge to solve customer problems by creating products that meet customers’ requirements.

From the above, it is clear that you need both sales and marketing departments in your company. Equip your business with these people and it will soar if only you can help them work together.

Why Should the Sales and Marketing Team Work Together?

Like we stated above, the relationship between these two departments has been strained for so long. Each one would love to do away with the other as much as they can. It is not one of those fairytale marriages in heaven.

With customer behavior experiencing a drastic change over the last decade, this relationship needs some cordiality. This is because as we experience changes in customer behavior, both marketing and sales are not left out. Their responsibilities are constantly evolving becoming more complex and in need of a partnership.

Today, marketing departments are saddled with holding onto the leads they generate more than before. Their new focus is to develop and nurture new relationships with leads. After this, they can forward the leads to the sales department. We are also seeing marketing organizations adopt lead qualifiers/inside sales which used to be more traditional to sales departments.

Sales and Marketing Can Leverage Respective Strengths

It makes the job of the sales team a lot easier. How so? Salespeople find it easy to connect with leads and continue from where the marketing team stopped. This is where you see the importance of sales and marketing departments working in tandem.

It results in more warm leads and fewer cold leads. This means that the sales team is able to close deals faster than before. What do you need to do as a business? You need to set up an efficient team of salespeople.

Doing this ensures that the efforts of your marketing team and their campaigns don’t go to waste. Both teams must value each other and what each one brings to the table. They must also recognize the heights they could attain if they worked together rather than loathed each other. In the end, it a game of balance.

Evolve The Sales Outlook

It is not uncommon to hear people ask the question of whether sales is dead especially when discussing conversion rates and marketing. Rather than consider sales dead, look at it like this, it has evolved.

Once upon a time, salespeople had to cajole, persuade, and intimidate customers. Today, it has changed. Now, their roles revolve around recommending the best solutions to customers’ needs. It is more about understanding what the customer wants and helping them meet their needs.

What all of this means is that salespeople do not just constrain customers to make purchases. They represent the business before the customers to create trust and build a reputation. This is why they must work in tandem with the marketing team.

Benefits of Understanding the Relationship Between Sales and Marketing

Even though these two departments have a strained relationship, it is clear that they were meant to be together. They work better and produce better results in tandem. What are the benefits of having sales and marketing work in tandem?

Better Qualified Leads

With both teams working together, information flows across freely. This means that the sales team informs the marketing team of the needs of the customers. They also state their opinions on how to reach clients.

The marketing team uses this information to improve their strategies and better products or services. With this, you can target the best-qualified leads for each campaign.

Clearer Feedback

When both teams communicate, they are able to forge a strong relationship. This means that there is more trust across all lines. The feedback is clearer, and then they can work on better strategies to generate leads and conversions especially when you are trying to launch a new product.

Beat the Competition

Having both teams work together gives you a huge advantage over the competition. Marketing teams are more focused on studying trends and can help sales teams with this information. This puts your sales team in a position to understand your competitors’ tactics. The result of this is better presentations to prospects.

Improved Revenue

The effect of the relationship between your sales team and the marketing team is most felt on your revenue. If it is great then you’ll have more revenue. Several studies show that companies with both teams working in tandem have better figures at the end of the year.

Wrap Up

Is your company already enjoying the results of sales and marketing teams working in tandem? Do you think that this relationship is beneficial to your business? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.