Difference between sales and marketing

Key Points

There are probably many possible answers, but one way of looking at the different roles is in relation to two axes: time and customer specificity.

1. A sales person is expected to focus on short term outcomes with specific customers. S/he may work broader and longer term than that, but that is the primary sales role
2. A key account manager still focuses on specific customers, but looks to the longer term – building propensity to buy within, typically, a more complex but still specific organization
3. A marketing person tends to focus in the relatively short term on generalized audiences. So, customer segmentation is the key tool. Which groups of people tend to think and behave in a similar way, and are therefore susceptible to common messaging that drives ever-stronger campaign results?
4. A brand marketer is responsible for the purity of generalized messaging for target customer/market segments, but needs to build propensity to buy over the medium and long term in order to optimize the equity and power of the brand

The core measures are therefore:

• Actual sales vs. propensity to buy (according to time)
• Among specific customers vs. customer/market segments (according to customer specificity)

You would therefore expect a sales person to feel uncomfortable generalizing experiences, and to be skeptical of the generalized soft emotional sell. Brand marketers, on the other hand, will probably tend to forget to close the deal, while marketers will suffer from short-termism and, if they are ex-sales people, they may question the value of customer segmentation to the extent that it suggests that the organization should not try to sell its products/services to some potential customers.

So much for the differences; the positives are that if you have all four types of people, you will have a balanced skill set over the long term that generates short term results.