From Marketing to Sales… Are They the Same?

From Marketing to Sales… Are They the Same?

It has been said that the job of Marketing is to put breadcrumbs on the lawn to attract the ducks, and that the Sales job is to shoot those ducks.  Perhaps crude but a good analogy of what needs to take place in almost any business.  Put differently, marketing needs to make the phone ring, or get people through the door, and sales needs to work with those customers to get them what they need and ultimately close the sale.

A lot of businesses think of Sales and Marketing as the same discipline, and while they are related, they are cousins at best.  Sales and Marketing have different skill sets and few people are good at both, and when Marketing is done well it makes the Sales effort much easier.

Both disciplines have different processes that can best be visualized in the shape of a funnel.

Marketing

The Marketing funnel takes everyone that uses the advertising channel that is chosen, such as TV, social media, Print, and Internet Marketing, and dumps them into the top of the funnel.  At this point these are unidentified potential customers, and we don’t know anything about them.

From there, we create awareness about our company or product, many will not have an interest in what we sell so the volume of people we are communicating with becomes less as they travel down the funnel.

Next, we try to educate those left in the funnel about what we sell and why we are unique in the industry and can meet their needs.  More fall out of the funnel because they are not ready to buy, or after learning about us they find our uniqueness is not important to them.

Lastly, we try to get them to take some kind of action.  This may be for them to call us, visit us, or at least provide us with contact information.  Those that act is the bottom of our Marketing funnel which becomes the top of our Sales Funnel.  Marketing’s job is done.

Notice that at each stage of the funnel you end up with less than you started.  Measuring what goes in versus what comes out can tell you two things:

1. Perhaps we can improve our message or advertising channel to improve this ratio.
2. If we want more out of the bottom of the funnel this ratio will let us know how many we need to add to the top of the funnel.

A good example of a Marketing funnel is Zillow or Realtor.com.  If I am a realtor….

1. I place my ad on the website.
2. People use search criteria to narrow down what they are looking for.
3. My ad tells them important information about the property I’m selling.
4. I educate them about uniqueness of the property.
5. The ad invites them to leave their contact info so that I can reach out to them.

 Sales

Now that we have good leads, customers calling, or standing in front of us the Sales process can begin.  Depending on what you are selling and where you are selling it, the sales process can vary from 1-2 steps to 8-10, but most steps are about removing roadblocks from getting to the close of the sale.  Here is a typical list of steps but yours may be very different:

1. Contacting Prospects, to hopefully set up a more formal meeting soon.
2. Qualifying Leads, to make sure they have the money and authority.
3. Presentation, to make your sales pitch, where you describe your product, and business proposition.
4. Address Objections, remember to listen for these all the way through, and always respond respectfully.
5. Closing the Sale, try to look for buying signals, and then, ask the buyer for their order.
6. Follow-Up, make sure your customers are satisfied, so that the customers continue to purchase from your business.

The more interactions between the customer and salesperson there is, the more need for CRMs and Sales Funnels.  Organized sales do not happen with sticky notes.  You have spent a lot of time and money obtaining leads, each one is precious and needs to be treated like a valuable company asset.  They need to be nurtured and be provided with proper follow-up.  And remember, repeat Customers are more profitable than new Customers.

Once again, measuring the fallout at each step of the Sales Process or funnel will tell us how many we need to start with to get to our sales goal, but also let us know where in the process we are losing prospective customers so that we might adjust our process or our pitch to plug the leak.

Conclusion

If you are selling groceries, or are doing internet sales, then you rely heavily on the marketing process.  If you are going after government contracts, you rely mostly on your sales process.  If you are selling cars, then you use both extensively.

It is important to map out your Marketing and Sales processes, follow those processes, and then measure the processes for effectiveness as well as ramping them up or down.

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