Sales & Marketing and Vice Versa

How We View Ourselves is Who We Are

A friend and I have had a long running discussion about the way that many companies have departmentalized the functions of “sales and marketing”.

First of all it seems that many agri-food technology startups put them in the same box on the org chart. While it might seem logical due to a perceived inherent close relationship between the two, upon further inspection these distinct disciplines are as different as software development and accounting. Which begs the question why any organization would have IT coupled with accounting – which some do. But that is a different discussion entirely.

Looking at the functions of each one sees that while they are tasked with the ultimate goal of moving product or services to the intended market their methods for doing so are not in the least way related.

There is a Difference

Marketing, and I am going to simplify here, is all about product definition, perception, branding, pricing, positioning, messaging, promoting and all of that other stuff that goes into laying the foundation for the sales staff as a means to assist in the adoption process.

Sales is the act of converting a prospect into a customer by having those people or organizations exchange money for those products and services. OK. I have really oversimplified that one!

It is very difficult to have one without the other. Salespeople are not good marketers and we all know that marketers can be lousy salespeople. We need the unique expertise and talents of each in order to be successful in the agri-food technology market segment.

Carts and Horses

Secondly, a common error in establishing the department name is when companies assign the name as “Sales and Marketing”. Combining them is the first mistake but when we don’t lead with marketing in order to support sales and not the other way around we have missed a key step towards success. It may seem trivial but by transposing these activities we fail to recognize the true nature of the challenge in engaging the market.

In any business planning process one cannot possibly establish sales projections without conducting the necessary market research first. Market size, demographics, customer profiling, value propositions, pricing, SWAT analysis and all the other things that marketing provides the sales group are what position them for success.

This is not to say that there might be some overlap of sorts in a few of the functions of the two but for the most part there is a definitive line of demarcation that necessitates separate boxes on that organizational chart.