Sales vs. marketing: define and understand the differences.

Before any discussion of marketing concepts, it is important to clarify and understand the differences between the functions of sales and those of marketing.

Most often, when a person comes to the table with the designation of Sales and Marketing in his or her title, many tend to think that the two are one in the same. However, sales and marketing are separate functions, each entailing unique activities that set it apart from the other.

Defining the Roles

To gain a better understanding of the role of sales and the role of marketing, the attached table provides a brief review of their activities.

Theodore Levitt, onetime lecturer on business administration at the Harvard Business School, aptly described the difference between sales and marketing: "Selling focuses on the needs of the seller and the need to convert product to cash. Marketing focuses on the needs of the buyer and the need to satisfy the customer through the products produced."

To put it another way, it's sales' job to influence the customer to buy what the company has produced. It's marketing's job to influence the company to produce what the customer wants. Both are concerned with the customer but, while sales talks, marketing listens.

In a company with a true understanding of marketing, it is marketing that guides and controls the entire operation, with manufacturing playing the role of a service activity and supplying the products needed by the customer as relayed to it by marketing.

A State of Mind

Marketing is a subject in which there can be many experts; therefore there can be many elements to a firm's marketing philosophy. It is not so much the individual philosophy or the number of elements that it contains that is important, rather it is that there is a marketing philosophy, that the philosophy holds customer satisfaction as its main thrust, that it contains a plan, and that the plan contains a means for implementation.

Keep in mind what it is we're in business to do. Create jobs? Earn profits? You bet. But it doesn't start there. It starts with the customer and our ability to understand his needs and satisfy his wants. The entire company must be viewed as a customer creating and customer satisfying endeavor. We are really in the business of creating customers, and it is marketing that must accurately define what the customer needs.