While sales and marketing are vastly different from one another, the two are more reliant on one another than just about any other two facets within an organization.
For instance, you could have the best sales representatives in the country, but without marketing support, their efforts will only produce a fraction of what they could.
For organizations that have only so high of a recruiting budget, choosing between one or the other can be difficult and often confusing. However, you're not alone.
Here is some insight as to whether a sales or marketing hire is best for your organization and how to approach combining the two positions.
How Sales and Marketing Differ
While many believe sales and marketing is one and the same, they are correct to an extent, however the job of a marketing employee is a lot different than the job of a sales representative.
For instance, sales representatives will make cold-calls, send out mass emails, attend client meetings and trade shows while the marketing professionals, in most organizations are the ones that make sure that the sales representatives have the marketing material behind said cold-calls and positive image behind those mass emails so that once they reach the recipient, that potential customer can visit a website that is informative, appealing and that clearly expresses the message that the organization is trying to get out.
Therefore, a typical day for a sales representative may be researching potential clients while the marketing representative will be figuring out best practices for generic search engine optimization so those potential clients can find the sales representatives as well.
The Importance of Sales and Marketing Working Together
Sales needs to listen to marketing as much as marketing representatives need to listen to their business development counterparts. It is the job of a sales manager to report to the marketing team regarding how clients are responding to a particular campaign and regarding what objections they are coming across which could / should be addressed in the company's marketing material or directly on their website.
All too often, the marketing team launches a particular marketing campaign only to be told something isn't working, yet subsequently ignore the sales team's warnings that the clients are not responding positively.
Therefore, one can assume that the marketing team does not work for the sales team or vice versa, rather they must work together to get the most effective message out to the prospective client.