During interviews for marketing profiles, a candidate is very often asked to mention differences between Sales & Marketing. These two functions form the core of any business because no matter how great your products are, if you cannot reach out to your customers & make it available for them to buy, your business cannot succeed.
I remember having attended a mock interview session with one of our alumnus from a reputed FMCG company. He also asked me that clichéd question and at that time I replied, “As far as I understand, Marketing conceptualizes and Sales executes”.
Although I was conceptually confident about my answer I then found it very difficult to relate it to practicality because of my obvious lack of experience. With more than a year of experience under my belt, I feel confident about the differences between Sales & Marketing.
This post will shed some light on the differences between these two functions and their interdependencies and will also tell you why we need to have two separate functions.
For simplicity, let us imagine there is a company ABC selling product P to a distinct set of customers. M is its marketing function whereas S stands for the sales team.
What does the Marketing guy do?
I won’t go too much into what the marketing guy would do but in a nutshell, he has to come up with the right product that needs to be sold by the sales team to customers. Sounds simple eh? 
Well, for the marketing team, the most difficult part is to arrive at that product which fits the bill…
What I mean is that every customer has got some preferences and needs. Marketing has to create a product which caters to those needs, yet at the same time should be able to make business sense for the organization. Look at the image below…
All these bubbles represent different customer needs. The size represents potential (based on market size, future growth, internal capabilities of the organization and competition) of the opportunity. Now, marketing has to first understand those needs and then come up with suitable products catering to the same.
In this case, the ‘bubble’ colored deep orange provides us with the best potential of needs to be targeted. Once marketing identifies that ‘bubble’ (or an assortment of bubbles), then they can come up with suitable product (s).
One might wonder how some one identifies so many bubbles at the first place. I will deal with that in some other post… but if I have to state that very briefly, then I would say that market research is done to understand the needs of the customers.
So now, we have identified the relevant customer needs to be targeted and we have also created product (s) for the same… Marketing needs to make customers aware of the products that they have created.
This awareness part is very often confused with marketing. But as you would have understood from the post till now, it is only a small part of the entire activity flow. Awareness is done through a lot of media & retail activities like TV ads, newspaper campaigns, hoardings, point of purchase displays etc. It is aimed at generating interest for the product and inducing purchases.
Once customers are aware about the products and are willing to purchase your products, there is a need to make the products available for them to buy. So now marketing hands over the baton to Sales which takes care of the same…
What does the Sales guy do?
So our products are ready and customers know about them. They are willing to purchase from those goods… We need to make sure that they are available at desired retail outlets. The entire process of making our goods available at desired retail outlets comprises of sales.
Typically a sales guy would be responsible for pushing sales… So how does he do that? As would be clear from the process flow shown above, there are a lot of stages where intervention would be required so as to ensure smooth flow of goods from the manufacturing unit to the end customer. Say for example, the company needs to ensure that manufactured goods (produced as per demand) reach the depots (a.k.a C&F agents) which in turn forward the same to wholesalers. Depots typically are company owned so a sales guy does not have to ‘push’ his products to a depot. But, when the goods are sent from the depot to a wholesaler, the role of the sales guy becomes very crucial. Orders are booked at the wholesaler’s place. The wholesaler has options of buying goods from other companies as well. So the sales guy’s relationship with the wholesaler and his ability to convince (selling skills) will come to the fore and create a difference at this stage. Also, you would understand that the wholesaler’s decision to purchase goods will also depend on the demand existing in the market. So there is a big correlation between sales and marketing as is evident here. Marketing should be able to create the much needed awareness so that Sales team can easily sell your goods.
The job of a sales guy does not stop here… Any successful sales & marketing organization involves its sales force in a lot of decision making rather than making them to simply push for sales. For any marketing guy sitting in the Head Office, it is important for him to understand the ground realities. He can understand a lot about his customers when he interacts with the sales force. The reason being that the sales force is closer to the ground and faces the day-to-day issues. They are supposed to understand the customers better and come up with learnings, transfer the same onto the marketing fields so that they can design better products & services for customers.
Why are these two functions different?
You might wonder what is the need to have two different divisions when they are so inter-related? It is a very valid question but I believe it is possible to have the same person dealing with both the functions only when the scale of operations is small… When it is big, it is practically impossible for some one to handle both the functions.
Apart from that, sometimes, it is better to have two different people (or teams) dealing with it because of the nature of activities. A marketing guy should ideally be concerned about creating innovative products & services and devote maximum time to do that. Whereas a sales guy should deal with selling the goods… handle his sales force… be an administrative manager and lead to maximum sales.
Also, too much of field knowledge will inhibit innovations for the marketing guy… Say for example, a field guy who is too bothered about the practicalities of the field may not be able to make his creative juices flow which might hamper innovations… This does not mean that marketing should come up with a random product which is not practically sellable… Ideas should be generated in a free flowing manner… Ratification of the same can be done at a later stage… and the Sales force can play an active role in ratifying the idea(s)…
Conclusion
Sales and marketing are very much interrelated. In essence, they are actually like the two main pillars of any successful organization. Every company has to sell to make its living and S&M does that… in an effective manner. This does not deride the fact that other functions are also important… They are but if you think about making money, then eventually you have to look at creating value and that has to be done by the S&M guys.
Do post your comments… I would love to have some discussion/ clarify doubts.
