Sales or Marketing—Who cares?

A couple of years ago, I was serving as chairman of the marketing committee of the Life Insurance Marketing Research Association. To start one meeting, I asked the 12 committee members (each heading up the marketing function at a major Life Insurer) to agree on a one-paragraph definition of marketing for use in the brochure for the next annual convention. Two hours later, we still hadn’t reached consensus. I suspect the same thing could happen with a group of sales executives.

Who cares? You should. Because Sales and Marketing are different functions, with different responsibilities requiring different skills. And if you try to put both functions under one person without understanding those differences, you won’t get optimal results in either area.

After a lot of thought, I’ve “assigned” the functional responsibilities like this:

Marketing is responsible for
Identifying the target customer
Matching the company’s products and/or services to the needs of the target customer
Telling sales where target prospects can be found

Sales is responsible for
The sales process (fact-finding, needs-analysis, recommendation, close, delivery)
The service process (providing information, relationship-building, conducting transactions)

Marketing and Sales should share the responsibility for
Developing better ways of approaching the target prospects
Maintaining a relationship with customers once the sale is made
Warming up prospects for the future in “not now” situations.

[To see how these responsibilities fit together into a clearly understandable process, check out the Sales Success Cycle Diagram on my website at www.yourcmo.com]

Marketers usually don’t enjoy selling one-by-one. They prefer persuading people in bunches. They really enjoy poring over data, attending focus groups, designing advertising, and creating automatic systems that are more dependable than salespeople. Marketers are motivated more by deadlines than by results. Put them in charge of sales organizations and they’ll tend to shy away from customer interaction and concentrate on production ratios, sales processes, and management systems.

Salespeople like to get face-to-face. They really enjoy personal interaction, and can be uncomfortable dealing with statistics, processes, and systems. As a result, they prefer ad hoc, customized sales materials over mass-marketing collateral like advertising and printed brochures. Because they’ve probably lived off commissions (where if you don’t make a sale, you don’t get paid) they can be overly focused on short-term results. This frame of mind, coupled with a salesperson’s natural optimism, tends to oppose the idea of targeting—most salespeople consider everyone a viable target!

This difference in mindset is why it is important to carefully assign sales and marketing responsibilities. People can develop an understanding of, and skill at, both responsibilities. But they rarely have the mindset and passion for both. And without them, something is going to get short-changed if you try to combine these functions.