Sales and marketing are two of the most important components of running a successful business. Salespeople often argue that sales are the most crucial practice of a company, responsible for turning leads into paying customers, while marketers argue that absence of promotion would create no leads for conversion. The reality is both sales and marketing must work together for an organization to thrive.
A paper published by Malcolm P. McNair and Benson Shapiro at Harvard Business School defined sales and marketing as the two central pillars for business profit. According to the authors, both marketing and sales need to work synergistically for a company to earn a consistent income. If the two “pillars of profit” don’t cooperate, the company cannot thrive.
Marketing and sales are the “twin pillars of profit” because they take complementary approaches to attracting and converting customers. While the sales professionals in your team are responsible for pushing your products, services, and solutions into the hands of customers, your marketing team are responsible for pulling potential prospects into your sales’ team’s path.
Sales refers to the art and science of converting leads into paying customers. Sales teams are the front line of the business’ operation, responsible for interacting with the customer base on a regular level, closing deals, and generating income. Strong sales people use tried and tested strategies to convince customers to make a purchase or subscribe to a company’s service.
The activities of sales professionals can inform marketing tactics. Sales statistics on the messaging and strategies capable of generating the most conversions can help marketing teams to better understand the pain points and needs of their target audience. This can lead to more relevant promotional strategies.
Sales professionals promote individual awareness in order to build personal credibility with clients. These experts push to drive products through the channel and into the hands of your target audience, with the goal of hitting a specific revenue number.
Marketing is the practice of generating wider interest in your brand, products, and services, so your sales professionals have a better opportunity to convert leads. Marketing professionals help with developing the best image and description of the product, at the best price point, to attract a specific group of potential buyers.
Marketing experts know how to speak the language of your target audience, and develop awareness for your brand, collecting as many potential leads as possible for the sales teams to convert. Marketing teams can even make it easier for sales teams to operate, by providing them with the right language and unique selling points to use, based on market data.
Marketing is concerned with driving credibility for the company, strengthening brand reach, and essentially “pulling” customers to your sales team. The goal of the marketing expert is to develop intelligent messaging that speaks to a specific group.
The twin pillars of profit, marketing, and sales, enable conversions by simultaneously drawing customers to your business, and pushing them into taking a specific action. While your marketing team improves your brand reputation and strengthens your presence within your industry, your sales team takes interested prospects and pushes them into the next stage of the buying process.
Both sales and marketing work synergistically to complement each other. Without sales, marketing professionals would have nowhere to send the prospects interested in the image they’ve built for a brand, product, or service. Without marketing, sales teams wouldn’t have the foundation of credibility and value required to help them prompt a customer to buy something.
Even the data avenues of marketing and sales are intertwined. When marketing teams create their campaigns to boost the appearance of the brand, they address the sales data they have about their audience to ensure they’re appealing to the things that matter most to their customers. When sales professionals pitch products to customers, they use marketing collateral and language to help demonstrate the benefits or value of the solution.
To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, companies can’t continue to look at sales and marketing as two separate solutions. The two elements need to be two halves of the same coin. Better communication and collaboration between the sales and marketing avenues in your company could be the key to outshining your competition and gaining more revenue.
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