It’s an important distinction to make—sales isn’t marketing.

When drilling down to the basics:

• Marketing focuses on the long-term brand and sales focuses on the short-term sales.
• Marketing plans facilitate the brand, experience, and relationship; sales finds opportunities to create, follow up, and build on relationships.
• Marketing’s ultimate goal is to develop and define the product, while sales’ ultimate goal is to close a transaction or deal.

Both sales and marketing are valuable to an organization, with relationships acting as the common thread between them. Sales and marketing need to work closely together so that their efforts complement each other.

Too often, however, the functions get jumbled. The sales goals drive the marketing, and in turn, the marketing efforts become more about simply selling the product and less about selling the brand.

I used to work for a gym where the sales goals drove the marketing efforts. Each month we came up with a sales promotion or incentive.

• If membership sales were down, we increased the frequency of our ads.
• If sales were really down, we gave existing members an incentive to refer a friend.

We were training the market to evaluate us based on our incentive, or price, and not on the experience we offered.

At monthly meetings, we didn’t focus on the number of cancellations, how we could prevent people from cancelling, or, more importantly, how we could make the gym an experience the member valued beyond burning calories. We thought about the product—the membership contract—and never about the experience and relationship the member had with the gym. Once members signed our contract, they were left to fend for themselves in a sea of weights and pulley contraptions.

Our marketing efforts should have been focused on creating tools and programs that would influence the experience and relationship—in other words, the brand. And, on the sales side, we should have been selling the brand, not the contract terms.

We failed to use the powerful connection between sales and marketing. Marketing should support sales. Marketing should help develop the brand and the tools that make the sales job easier. In a recent branding discussion, Kurian Tharakan of Acton Consulting explained this connection with the following analogy:

“Marketing sets the volleyball so that sales can spike.”

Both sales and marketing are important, and when the two work together, the client experience becomes infinitely better and the sales become stronger too.