Many people nowadays consider both sales and marketing as the same thing but if you ask specialists, they will clearly differ on this thought because although sometimes they could be used as interchangeable, but their meaning still differ.
Both sales and marketing primary objective is to work in the success of the business, but marketing is more like convincing people to come for that stuff and sales is to actually sell them. In other words, marketing deals with bringing the people in store and sales is to convince them to buy it.
Marketing is a job in which great minds are needed to make that plan work because it has to deal with appealing the consumers to come for it and make a necessary adjustment in their useful life. Promotion, public relations etc. are the essential parts of marketing. It is a very wide term and the difficult job incur hear is to keep it in place. People sometimes gets carried away and drifts away from the real purpose of what they are doing and it is not because like they don’t have any option but they get so many options, they find it difficult to figure that which thing fits more closely.
On the other side, sales is rather the work of skills because once the strategy has been formulated, it then depends on the sales people to convince people to make sure that they go for it. As said above, it deals with people when they are there at the spot. Therefore, at that moment speaking skills comes in very useful because proper words will definitely work in the result that is expected.
If talking about small business, sales and marketing are the key things on which they should be focusing because a good marketing campaign will definitely bring in new customers. It should be not restricted to only one type of medium i.e. television or radio or newspaper, but to capture the large amount of audiences, one should use all type of mediums to attract majority number of consumers. This definition sometimes differs when there is a specific amount of target audience. When an organization is targeting mass size, they should not take a chance by leaving out any type of media.
Once the marketing plan has worked, then it would depend entirely on the sales team to make that work because once a dissatisfied customer, will not be a good sign. Last thing what a new company need is a bad word of mouth. Therefore, it is important to make that not to happen.
Both the sales and marketing management team has to make sure that their work is not been interfered by each other department because as the both tend to create a difference which is not easily understood by most of the people. It might create a problem for both sales and marketing department to implement the plan as it was actually planned.
Sales and marketing research is a very important tool, which should be taken into consideration beforehand.
Not only it just gives the overview but also it makes the work far easier for the particular company to make their position strong when entering their foot in market. This is a very detailed job because marketing segmentation is something, which should be taken into consideration quite carefully. When making a customer profile, it is very important to gather relevant data and it is not just the work of some weeks or months, but it takes years to do it perfectly. So these things could never be taken lightly because a lot of time and cost has been invested in it and you don’t want to go that in vain.
In addition, it is very important to make effective sales process because a proper preparation would help in capturing the required sales target and with that increase in profit. It depends on the sales people to make sure that whenever a customer goes out of the shop, he is satisfied because a satisfied customer would bring in new customers and dissatisfied customer would bring nothing but a bad image for an organization and no one would ever want that.
The reason why this can be used interchangeably is because the main aim for both marketing and sales is to bring profit to the organization and these two departments play a very important role in bringing money to the business. Moreover, their job is to bring a change in lifestyles of peoples by selling their own products and making them sure that the things which they are lacking in their life is available by them.
These are basically the wants, but it is the job of marketing department to make sure to present this stuff as a basic need for them. Moreover, this is a very difficult job to present because it is just like brainwashing people to put this thing inside their head.
Sales representative are required to be on their best behavior when they are facing a customer because once the marketing strategy is a success and it is then the job of sales team to make sure that their effort not go in vain. In addition, the ambiance of that place adds a lot of affect to the consumer mind. A proper colors and decoration, would certainly give a feel that it is meant for that person. Nevertheless, to make sure use that kind of stuff which would attract majority of the consumers to come in and go for that product.
Overall, sales and marketing management is a very important part for any organization, whether it is a new entrant or that organization has been there for a long time. Because if any company wants to be successful, they should take that as a priority and work for it.