Sales vs Marketing: The Battle of the Words?
By ERIK GIFFORD
Been looking on the Internet for employment recently? Perhaps you spent a bit of time on job websites before starting your MLM business endeavours? No doubt you saw the dreaded, somewhat generic “Sales and Marketing” category staring you in the face.
Indeed, it’’s all very well to group these two terms together, but when it comes down to it - what do they both mean? Interestingly, it’’s certainly not the same thing. As is traditional with my articles, let’’s define the exact meaning of both sales, and marketing, before we jump ahead to look at the applicable techniques we can use in each area, such as funnels and individual strategies.
Sales is selling and marketing is marketing? Well, if you are highly simplistic then i guess you could pull that off. But modern business demands more clarity. In this world, sales is the art-form of taking a product or service in it’’s raw form, and imposing it upon an individual entity in return for a wealth generating factor.
Wow, that was a complicated explanation! In short, we are taking our product (ie. computers), and exchanging the computer for cash. By doing this, we are performing the task of “selling”, meaning that we have made a “sale”.
To contrast this idea, marketing is the process which goes before selling. In general it is extremely difficult to launch a widely successful business or product with no marketing. After all, how are people supposed to know your company exists? Hence, following this train of thought, marketing is the action we take to build knowledge of our products and services in the marketplace.
All those ads on TV? Marketing. All the ads in the newspaper? Marketing. All those brand labels stuck to the products we buy? Even more marketing. Amazingly, everywhere you look, at least one company will have their arm stuck out, waving madly for you to notice their brand.
So we have identified now that marketing is the precursor to selling. Without the first, it’’s difficult to achieve the second. So just how does marketing lead to sales? I”m certainly not going to analyse every fundamental aspect of consumer behaviour in this paragraph, but I will look at one technique that seems to work wonders - its a marketing funnel.
Imagine a real life funnel. Wide, open rim at the top, narrow chute at the bottom. Now, just imagine that the entire country stands at the very opening of the wide rim, and your product lies at the bottom of the chute.
Obviously, not everyone is going to fit down there to get your product. That’’s convenient, because let’’s face it - not everyone is going to be demanding your product or service. Hence, a marketing funnel is like a filter, where you promote your product to specific people, in the hope of dragging them closer and closer to the ultimate goal of making a sale.
A quick example? Online advertising. Sure, you could choose to run an ad on Google for instance, with no targeting at all. You will be marketing to everyone standing at the top of the rim. But as we already know, most of these people don”t want or need your product, so that’’s an absolute waste. Instead of generic targeting, how about focusing on a group of people who search for a specific term?
They have already progressed inside the funnel, self identifying themselves as people who may be interested in your product. It is here that your advertising should be targeted, and hence it is at this level where most of your sales will develop from (given this method of advertising).
There you have it. We have followed through our definitions, explanations, and examples. Now it’’s up to you to implement these ideas in real life. I wish the best of luck to you in your sales and marketing endeavours.
About The Author
It is important to know the difference between sales and marketing.Erik Gifford,a network marketing consultant and trainer gives FREE NETWORK MARKETING TRAINING.Please call 004722520239 and visit http://www.networkmarketing-guidance.com
