Sales or marketing? You need both - Military Careers, Second Careers - Navy Times

Sales or marketing? You need both

In my company, we’re having an internal dispute. We want to substantially increase our sales in the coming year, but to do so, we need extra help. No dispute about that.

Like all small companies, however, we have a limited budget. So the disagreement comes about what type of person to hire.

Our staff is already overwhelmed trying to get our monthly newsletter out, manage our trade shows, create catalogs. Many of those activities need to be expanded. On the other hand, we really need a crackerjack person to go out there and contact potential customers, one-on-one, and increase our top line sales figures.

In other words, do we devote our resources to hiring someone who’s good at marketing or one who’s good at sales?

Many entrepreneurs don’t grasp the difference between marketing and sales. That’s because these two critical business functions are extremely interrelated.

Briefly, here’s the distinction:

“Marketing” encompasses all those activities designed to make customers aware of you and to explain your competitive advantage. Marketing activities include public relations, advertising, developing and maintaining a Web site, exhibiting at trade shows, creating brochures and other marketing materials.

Marketing also includes “networking” — meeting potential customers and referral sources through informal activities such as joining organizations, attending industry events, or taking people to lunch. In smaller companies, networking is often the major marketing activity.

“Sales” activities are those direct actions taken to secure customer orders. Sales activities include submitting proposals and estimates, in-person or on-phone sales calls, e-commerce on your Web site, exhibiting at consumer shows and direct mail. In smaller companies, one-on-one prospect meetings, including lunches, dinners and other time-consuming activities dominate the sales process.

As you can see, it’s hard to be successful in one area without the other. How do you go out and make a sales call if you don’t have a brochure to give a prospect, a Web site to explain your company, or if you don’t exhibit at trade shows to generate leads? On the other hand, what good are all those great marketing activities if you don’t have someone to go out there and actually close the deal?

Since both marketing and sales are designed to attract and secure customers, why can’t we just get one person to handle both jobs in my company? That’s what many small companies do. We’ve tried this in the past.

Ah, but here’s the hitch: people who are great at marketing usually hate sales, and the best salespeople are usually terrible at core marketing activities. That’s because these key activities appeal to very different personality types.

Think about the salespeople you know. They’re very action — and dollar — oriented. What motivates them is securing that order, landing that client. They don’t want to waste a bunch of their precious sales time working on a news release or designing a Web site. They typically hate paperwork and detail work of any kind. Even following up with prospects by e-mail, letter or phone is a pain.

And great marketers? They’re terrific at figuring out how to communicate to customers, designing a marketing program to keep your name in front of your target market, figuring out the right trade show to demonstrate your products. But don’t ask them to sit down with an important prospect and ask them to purchase the product, or even worse, pick up the phone and make that appointment.

If yours is a one-person business, you internally struggle with this tension between marketing and sales. If you’re not a natural salesperson, it’s likely you’ll end up spending a lot of your sales time strictly on marketing because it’s a lot less intimidating than trying to close a deal.

So, what’s my solution? I’m going to try to get both, perhaps by hiring two part-time people, using independent contractors for some marketing activities, or hiring salespeople who work partially on commission. Whatever I do, I know the tension — and dispute — won’t go away entirely. Unless, of course, our new crackerjack salesperson makes us enough money so we can hire both!

(Rhonda Abrams is the president of The Planning Shop, publisher of books for entrepreneurs. Register for her free business tips newsletter at www.planningshop.com.)

AP-NY-07-26-07 1720EDT