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Who’s in Charge Here?
Sales vs. marketing: The best companies know the difference
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Business New Haven
2/23/1998
By: Deborah Ketai
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Marketing. Sales.
In a small business, the same people or person may be responsible for both functions. In a large company, they may be relegated to separate departments that don't talk to each other at all - except to fight over whether the organization is “sales-driven” or “market-driven.”
A recent meeting of the Connecticut chapter of the American Marketing Association explored the division - and synergies - between the two disciplines. Billed as “The Marketing & Sales Connection,” the meeting featured J. Michael Zabkar Jr., an Andover entrepreneur whose Tailgate Products is best known in Connecticut for developing UConn Huskies tortilla chips and salsa.
Zabkar's background encompasses both marketing and sales, but the latter is his true calling. He started his career with what he calls his “Ph.D. - panhandlers degree” (selling pots and pans) and went on to sell corporate aircraft, first for Mitsubishi Aircraft International and ultimately under his own flag.
Zabkar defines “sales” as asking for and getting the order; and “marketing” as everything that enables sales to proceed efficiently and effectively. Specific responsibilities that he places on the shoulders of marketing include:
n identifying “suspects” - the universe of people who might have reason to buy;
n researching and analyzing their demographics and habits;
n communicating features and benefits of the product or service to create awareness and demand.
Some companies give their marketing arms a say in everything from product design to packaging and pricing. In general, however, even these extended responsibilities stem from marketing's primary role: collecting, analyzing and interpreting information.
Beth Santa, promotion manager for Santa Fuel in Bridgeport, agrees that marketing is mainly research. “Sales is selling things to people. Marketing is finding out what people need or want to buy.”
In some companies, salespeople grouseabout the unqualified leads marketing passes on to them. But where does marketing end and sales begin? When names are picked out of a phone book? When prospects express interest? When they have the money and are ready to buy?
No single answer will fit all companies. The underlying problem is that qualification is an ongoing distillation process: It starts with the world's population and ends with a single customer handing over money or signing a check.
Santa Fuel's marketing department generates leads through focused direct-mail campaigns. Santa says the leads are qualified in the sense that “We already know they use oil.” From there, she says, “Sales makes the call and qualifies with a few simple questions.”
Zabkar believes that sales takes over once a prospect has been identified and continues through signing the order. Despite that conviction, he admits, “In medium and small companies, you do have to wear two hats” - that is, identify customers and sell to them.
Still, it's important to know which hat you are wearing at any given moment. Many business people who are not sales professionals think of selling as communicating, rather than as “getting the money.” As a result, they find it difficult to stop pitching and ask for the order. In essence, they never stop “selling” long enough to make the sale.
This can cause problems even when marketing and sales responsibilities are vested in separate departments. Zabkar spent eight years selling aircraft for Mitsubishi. He remembers his frustration when marketing people came along on sales calls.
“When you're selling a hard product to a hard market, you have to be specific,” he says. But instead of selling only to the prospect's needs, the marketers would talk endlessly about every possible feature and benefit of the airplanes. “They just wouldn't shut up and ask for the order,” Zabkar says.
If any one thing truly separates sales from marketing, it is this focus on getting the money. Where many companies fall down, according to Zabkar, is in failing to account for and market to both the end consumer and the “true customer” - the person or company that writes the check.
In creating the Huskies snacks, his true customers were snack food distributors. But in order to convince them to buy, he had to generate demand among both local sports fans and the distributors' true customers: the supermarket chains.
The need to market to many “customers” extends into the not-for-profit arena. As a sales representative for Easter Seal Goodwill Industries Rehabilitation Center Inc., John Allen “sells” work crews to local employers who need help on their production lines.
In Zabkar's scheme of things, the agency's “true customers” are probably its funding sources, particularly the Department of Mental Retardation. Yet when Allen talks about “customers,” “clients” or “consumers,” he is referring not to the organization's sources of income but to the disabled workers.
Neither is this merely rhetorical nomenclature: Since the workers “can choose any number of agencies to work with,” Allen says, Easter Seals Goodwill must earn their “business.”
Still, in Allen's voice one can hear echoes of Zabkar's belief that sales boils down to the process of persuading individual prospects to exchange cash for goods or services. Marketing? “They're blue-sky,” says Allen. “They're out there on the horizon, while the salespeople are trying to secure the immediate business.”
Despite their differences, sales and marketing need each other. Selling would be a crapshoot without information from marketing research, or without the communications programs developed by marketing departments.
For its part, marketing needs sales to pay the bill. And in the final analysis, marketing is useless unless it generates sales.
Moreover, the economics of customer acquisition vs. customer retention dictate that customer service responsibilities overlap sales and marketing.
Zabkar tends to see customer service as a marketing issue. He admits, however, that in some industries salespeople also play a strong role, especially by feeding customer and prospect information back to marketing.
He recommends structuring commissions to reward repeat business - and adding a little incentive to the reporting process, e.g.: “Commissions will be out next week - and by the way, I need your report before I can cut that check.” BNH
Deborah Ketai is principal of a consulting firm that specializes in marketing and business communication.
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