Sales and marketing should work hand-in-hand. But if you’re just starting out in business, the most important thing in the world is to make sales. You need the cash till ringing (or the bank account filling up nicely with payments) because this is what allows you to keep operating and growing.
So it’s natural to put efforts into making more sales – and then more and more. You work out the way that sales happen, and you concentrate your efforts into refining your sales processes so that you can get even more customers over the line.
What’s wrong with concentrating on sales?
On the face of it, it makes absolute sense to put all your time, effort and budget into making more sales. And after all, you might say to yourself, isn’t that what marketing is?
Well, not quite.
We often meet people when they’re a year or two into their business. They’ve got to a stage where the founders – and the senior decision-makers within it – are frustrated because they’re still spending a lot of time selling their products.
“Once I’ve got a prospect on the phone,” a business owner often says, “I know I can convert them.”
Which often means the client acquisition model is still all about recommendation. The brand isn’t widely known. And time that could be spent on strategy, on having a voice in the industry – or simply on being home at a decent time – is still being spent talking to prospective clients or training and supervising new sales colleagues.
When sales growth is the only objective, it’s easy to lose focus
Then there are the strategic implications of a sales-only approach. If the only metric or guideline that matters is sales growth, it’s easy to end up doing things that maybe aren’t strategically important.
When we start working with a new client, we ask them to talk us through their portfolio.
“How does product X sit with your overall offer?” we ask.
“Well, what happened was Client ABC wanted something like product X and our technology can be used in that way and it seemed a good opportunity, so we did it – that’s why we have Product X. We’ve kind of moved on from that now and we only really do it for Client ABC, but we may as well have it on the website because someone may need it.”
Now there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with developing new products and having them succeed or fail. That’s what innovation is about, after all.
However, if you don’t have an integrated brand and marketing approach, it can be too easy to jump down a lot of unproductive rabbit holes and spend a lot of time and energy developing approaches and products that don’t align. Then what you end up with is a straggly-looking portfolio that confuses potential new clients.
Sales-only approaches can be scattergun
When we start talking to organisations at this stage of growth, they sometimes think of marketing as getting PPC ads out there.
“We’ve identified all the terms that someone looking for products like ours might use and we’ve got a PPC agency to work them hard for us,” is not an unusual position for businesses to take in these early days.
And of course, there’s nothing wrong with PPC. But to give a good return, it’s got to be targeted. And to be targeted, there needs to be a marketing strategy underpinning it.
And they can gloss over a lack of clarity about what a company does and who they do it for
If it’s all about sales – and the only strategy is identifying which sectors you want to go after – then you can completely skip over the part where you pin down what you do and who you do it for. There’s simply no need to articulate it.
Sales are very individual, you think. So you tailor your pitch to the person you’re speaking to and what you think they’re most likely to respond to. Which means you’re describing your organisation in different ways to each prospect.
And when you do enough of this, you can easily end up thinking that it’s impossible for your company to have a single, focussed narrative… because you’ve been successful so far by doing precisely the opposite.
“There are too many use cases for us to have a unified approach,” you might think, closely followed by, “We’re just working in too complex an area to be able to identify that common thread.”
However, the truth is that there are plenty of highly complex organisations out there that have succeeded because they target an audience, are clear about what they offer – and dedicate resource to becoming better known and sought after.
So how is an integrated brand and marketing approach different?
If sales is about getting prospects across the line, marketing is more about getting them aware of and interested in you in the first place. Having clients become aware of you via recommendation is great – and it’s actually something to be really proud of.
But recommendations are difficult to scale. And if people aren’t coming to you via any other route, it probably means that you’re not marketing your offer, not marketing it enough – or not doing it terribly well.
Brand-aligned marketing casts the net wider and helps to build a relationship with potential clients before they’ve even picked up the phone to you. Which means the sale itself should become easier and less protracted.
What does marketing do differently?
Marketing sets out your stall in all the places your potential clients might be. And it explains the benefits of working with you in easy, consistent terms that resonate with your audiences.
Great marketing doesn’t try to be all things to all people. It looks at what your brand is in the world to achieve – and it takes your offer out to the kinds of people you’d like to work with and who are likely to share your passion and excitement.
It can do this because it views at your business in a different way to sales. While sales looks at all the different people you want to sell to, and what all their individual needs might be, brand-aligned marketing looks through the other end of the telescope.
So rather than focussing on lots of different use cases – and developing products and services for the myriad possibilities out there – it looks at your organisation. It sets out the position it occupies in its marketplace, what it stands for and why large numbers of people should choose it.
While one-to-one sales looks at individual challenges and needs, brand-aligned marketing identifies common challenges and shows how your organisation is uniquely placed to address them. And in doing so, it gives businesses a platform to go out and become a go-to, best-known entity.
Can’t marketing and sales work together?
Yes, of course marketing and sales can work together – and they should. But the most successful businesses know that the role of marketing isn’t simply to push more prospects towards the sales team. It’s also to create the strategies the whole business works within to grow.