And shouldn’t it be sales and marketing instead of sales vs. marketing?
Marketing is everything that you do to reach and persuade prospects. The sales process is everything that you do to close the sale and get a signed agreement or contract. Both are necessities to the success of a business… and in a well-oiled organization, the two forces work together.
But, in some organizations, the marketing department regards the sales staff as lowbrow monkeys or pushy parrots whose sole calling is to repeat the same sales pitch to new prospects. And in return, the sales staff think the marketing department is full of lazy liberal arts graduates who use the word “branding” to describe activities that are in actuality “a colossal waste of money.”
Or even worse, in many small organizations, “sales and marketing” is one bullet item on a long job description of the owner or an overburdened employee.
Do any of the following statements describe your business?
- Our web site has out of date information.
- We have new products or services, but no sales materials to promote them.
- Our sales people spend several hours each week re-creating, or re-inventing presentation materials for sales meetings.
- Sometimes we go to sales meetings and “wing it”.
- No one knows where the “official” company logo is.
- We’d like to order new business cards, but can’t find the file.
- We had a marketing plan… but that was two years ago and now we can’t find it.
- We were supposed to attend an industry tradeshow this year, but the registration date slipped by before we knew it.
- We’ve had several “newsworthy” events happen recently, but didn’t send out a press release because we were busy working on other stuff.
If your marketing needs attention, call FatCat Strategies, we can help.
