Marketing and sales are very different, but have the same goal. Marketing improves the selling environment and plays a very important role in sales. If the marketing department generates a potential customers list, it can be beneficial for sales. The marketing department's goal is to increase the number of interactions between potential customers and the sales team using promotional techniques such as advertising, sales promotion, publicity, and public relations, creating new sales channels, or creating new products (new product development), among other things.
The relatively new field of sales process engineering views "sales" as the output of a larger system, not just that of one department. The larger system includes many functional areas within an organization. From this perspective, sales and marketing (among others, such as customer service) are labels for a number of processes whose inputs and outputs supply one another to varying degrees. Considered in this way, to improve the "output" (namely, sales) the broader sales process needs to be studied and improved as would any system, since the component functional areas interact and are interdependent.
In most large corporations, the marketing department is structured in a similar fashion to the sales department[citation needed] and the managers of these teams must coordinate efforts in order to drive profits and business success. For example, an "inbound" focused campaign seeks to drive more customers "through the door" giving the sales department a better chance of selling their product to the consumer. A good marketing program would address any potential downsides as well.
The Sales department's goal would be to improve the interaction between the customer and the sales facility or mechanism (example, web site) and/or salesperson. Sales management would break down the selling process and then increase the effectiveness of the discrete processes as well as the interaction between processes. For example, in many out-bound sales environments, the typical process is out bound calling, the sales pitch, handling objections, opportunity identification, and the close. Each step of the process has sales-related issues, skills, and training needs as well as marketing solutions to improve each discrete step, as well as the whole process.
One further common complication of marketing involves the inability to measure results for a great deal of marketing initiatives. In essence, many marketing and advertising executives often lose sight of the objective of sales/revenue/profit, as they focus on establishing a creative/innovative program, without concern for the top or bottom lines. Such is a fundamental pitfall of marketing for marketing's sake.
Many companies find it challenging to get marketing and sales on the same page. Both departments are different in nature, but handle very similar concepts and have to work together for sales to be successful. Building a good relationship between the two that encourages communication can be the key to success even in a down economy.
Another key area of conversation that has arisen is the need for alignment and integration between corporate sales and marketing functions. According to a report from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, only 40 percent of companies have formal programs, systems or processes in place to align and integration between the two critical functions. Traditionally, these two functions, as referenced above, has been largely segmented and left in siloed areas of tactical responsibility. In Glen Petersen’s book, “The Profit Maximization Paradox,” the changes in the competitive landscape between the 1950s and today are so dramatic that the complexity of choice, price and opportunities for the customer forced this seemingly simple and integrated relationship between sales and marketing to change forever. Petersen goes on to highlight that salespeople are spending approximately 40 percent of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables while leveraging less than 50 percent of the materials created by marketing, adding to the perception that marketing is out of touch with the customer, and sales is resistant to messaging and strategy. Internet applications, commonly referred to as Sales 2.0 tools, have also increasingly been created to help align the goals and responsibilities of marketing and sales departments.
