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Most people think that marketing and sales are the same. Well, they’re not. There’re significant differences in term of scopes and functions between them.

In the other side, there’s always a never ending argument among both professionals as to what is the difference between them. I would like to answer this questions briefly here. Hope this short article will be able to give better understanding on the definitions and differences.

To sketch them up, here are what marketing professionals should do:

• Discovering market needs with research
• Developing idea and concepts based on research
• Creating product that suit the market
• Pricing the product properly based on market affordability
• Creating and strengthen the brand
• Creating promotions and advertisement to push the product into market
• Selling and delivering the product to customer’s hands

And here are what sales professionals do:

• Sales moves after product and promotions started
• Persuading customers to purchase the products
• Helps marketing professional with feedbacks from customers

And here are the differences between them:

1. Marketing is for long term while sales is short term.
A marketing professional will sketch up something based on research in market. The results will be in statistics or graphic showing how should a product be developed and sold. A sales will start to work when the product has been completed.

2. Marketing is indirect and sales is direct.
What I mean here is marketing is not directly selling goods to customers, but they’re working in the backstage to help selling them. A sales person is someone who will ‘knock on your door’, tell some good words and trying to sell something directly.

3. Marketing is targetting customer’s mind and sales is targetting customer’s wallet.
Marketing is about knowing what customers would like to buy and create something that will satisfy them. Sorry if it’s sound so rude for sales, but that’s the fact.

4. Marketing helps build brand, corporate and product images or perceptions. Sales tries to make those images and perceptions into reality.

5. Marketing tries to draw the big picture, while sales help to fill in certain area in the picture.

6. Marketing puts the eyes up in the sky, while sales puts the eyes on earth.

In conclusion, marketing and sales are two important roots in a company. Both of them should work together nicely. There’re some issues occur that these two areas are not having good relationship. Some more, they would blame each other when the product is failed to go out from the warehouse.

Doing this is no good at all. Marketing and sales should get married and live happily ever after like husband and wife. If they do, the opportunities for the company to increase revenues will be widely open.