Sales
Sales is about face to face personal contact with new and existing customers to present the buying proposition.
Sales implements strategies for overcoming resistance to your product or service and provides feedback to marketing and operations. Critical functions are networking and building long term relationships. Sales is primarily about closing the deal and completing the paperwork. The personal attributes of a sales professional are quite different to that of a marketing professional. Successful sales people must be great with human relationships, have strong personalities, high levels of emotion and drive and be highly motivated and able to handle getting a "no". Sales people need to be mentally tough.
Marketing
Marketing is responsible for defining the target market preparing and analysing statistics to define potential and is responsible qualifying prospects.
While marketing concentrates on who to call on sales concentrates on executing the call. Marketing also looks at customer touch points and develops strategies to improve the customer experience. Marketing is about arming sales reps with the collateral, web presence and promotional programs needed to make a compelling case for doing business with you.
Marketing is about by researching and reviewing customer wants and needs, along with analysing sales successes and failures in order to reshape product/service offering to meet customer demands. Marketing assists in developing meaningful loyalty programs, reviewing customer experiences and crafting entirely new product and service offerings.
A typical marketer will be able to sit and do analysis for long periods of time and be able to test sales activity and suggestions against statistical evidence to assess risks and/or opportunities. Personally traits of marketing professionals differ dramatically from that of sales professionals.
references: http://blog.straightnorth.com/difference-sales-marketing/
Nice article. Very deep subjects in sales and marketing and how they can compliment each other. Most companies I have been involved with, miss the real value of marketing because they fail to separate their objectives into short and long term. Marketing should ensure that revenue flows are non-exhaustive and optimized, however companies tend to only focus on "Revenue" for right now (this month, this quarter, this year).
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