Vive la Différence?
Ah, sales and marketing. Two teams, one goal: Inspire customers to buy. The stories are endless of how sales and marketing can't seem to get along, even though they share an objective so important it means the life or death of an organization. No customers, no company.
The many tales of sales and marketing woes focus on their vast differences; salespeople are from Mars, marketers are from Venus, and all that. So I decided to take a closer look to determine if sales and marketing are so different after all. Here's what I've come up with:
Percentages
Probably the most striking difference between sales and marketing are targets. If marketing gets 10 percent of its target audience to accept an offer, click a link, or respond to a mailing it's cause for celebration. If a salesperson only hit 10 percent of her quota she'd be shown the door.
Bully customers
Sure, some marketers are out there talking to customers face to face. Usually, though, there's a "safe distance": the hidden room adjacent to the focus group, the vast expanse of the Internet (for online and email surveys), the opposite end of the TV or radio signal, USPS routes. Even if a customer is voicing displeasure, it's from a safe distance; a distance that gives marketers time to ponder how (or if) they'll handle the issue.
Salespeople, on the other hand, spend most of their time right there in the room with customers. And it ain't always pretty.
Creativity
Marketers are tasked with creating communications that catch people's attention and inspire them to act. Salespeople get to make stuff up too: "Sure, we can get you those 10,000 widgets by next Thursday. No problem."
Hard numbers
Although marketers do track some straightforward numbers like conversion rates and click-throughs, more often they work with formulas that can be difficult to calculate or face scrutiny: lifetime value, satisfaction indices, and more. Salespeople for the most part live by hard numbers: quota, pipeline, conversion rates, and the like. Although some might argue that in some cases there's more creativity than fact in the pipeline.
I know there's plenty more to compare and contrast (and poke a bit of fun at). What can you add to the list? What are some of the commonalities of or differences between sales and marketing most obvious to you?
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