Sales versus Marketing

by Maceo Keeling

Marketing and sales are both activities aimed at increasing revenue. They are so closely related that most people don’t make any distinction between them. In small business where resources are limited many times the owner is responsible for both functions and the differences are often over looked.

Marketing is different from sales, and, as the business grows, each function becomes more and more important.

Marketing activities include consumer research (to identify the needs of the customers), product development (designing innovative products to meet existing or latent needs), advertising the products to raise awareness and build the brand.

The typical goal of marketing is to generate interest in the product and create leads or prospects.

Sales is focused on converting prospects to actual paying customers. Sales involves directly interacting with the prospects to persuade them to purchase the product.

Marketing thus tends to focus on the general population (or, in any case, a large set of people) whereas sales tends to focus on individuals or a small group of prospects.

To learn more about these distinctions and others Asheville SCORE would like to invite you to the SALESMANSHIP Seminar that is scheduled for April 16, at 9 a.m.  The seminar will be located at the Enka Campus of A-B Tech.

In this class you’ll learn new ways to effectively generate more purchase orders, get more sales and ask for referrals.  It is widely known in the sales industry that 80% of all the money made in sale is generated by 20% of the sales force.  More interestingly to me, 80% of sales people who make presentation, or go on sales calls do not ask for the business that they are seeking.  They just don’t ask the question, “Would you like to buy today?”

Once again we invite business owners to come out and begin to pump up sales skills with Asheville’s SCORE Salesmanship Seminar!