Sales and Marketing OR Sales vs. Marketing?

(This is Part 1 in a 3 part series: “No one will buy in this environment.”)

“I work in sales & marketing.”

“Give it to the gang in sales & marketing.”

“That’s a sales & marketing thing.”

We tend to compress the two functions of ‘sales’ and ‘marketing’ together in both our words and our thinking as illustrated in the above few examples. In my opinion, they are anything but the same function.

Here are my working definitions of the two processes of marketing and sales:

Marketing is the process by which you accumulate a reservoir of people who may, one day, be interested in buying.

When you market, you are not at all interested in an exchange of money. You are interested in gaining someone’s interest and attention. The goal is to get them interested in you, your product, your service, ultimately your value proposition. You want them to think of you first thing when they wake up in the morning. THAT’S what you’re interested in when marketing.

Selling is the process by which you help a person who is in the reservoir make an informed and well-timed decision to buy.

This is more of a ‘pull’ approach than a ‘push’ approach. If you’ve done your marketing properly, selling becomes almost effortless. They have been in your reservoir, or pipeline, for sometime, learning about YOU and how you will make their life better. Then one morning they wake up and realize, “Life has become such that I’ve got to get a hold of that person/product/company.”

Hopefully they have entered your reservoir by some vehicle of permission that you have given them. Email marketing works great. Blogging and blog readers are currently all the rage. (Great low cost marketing device. Get there, if you are not already.) And what about Facebook and Twitter? I keep hearing comments that Twitter is a passing fad, made for those who just want to tell us they just finished brushing their teeth this morning.

I’m here to tell ya that Twitter is here to stay. Those who are using it well for business promotion purposes are using it very effectively as a low cost MARKETING medium. No exchange of currency is taking place, but if I’ve signed on as your follower, I’ve just given you permission to keep reminding me how great you are through your tweets. Next thing you know, I’m thinking about YOU when I wake up in the morning.

In part two of this series, I’ll outline a tidy strategy for going about the low-cost/no-cost marketing process. The focus next time will be on marketing. If you go about the marketing process correctly, a steady stream of customers will eventually be yours, assuming there’s value in what you offer.

People WILL buy – even in our current economic climate. You can help them with their purchasing decisions. But you must first distinguish your marketing efforts from your sales efforts. 

What might happen to your sales if you began to market merely to develop a reservoir of potential customers rather than market to make the sale???

Tagged as: Low cost marketing, sales vs. marketing, the marketing process