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For a small business, is there really a difference?
Even for a smaller company, there’s an important difference between marketing and sales. However, the two still work together seamlessly in a well-run business. They have similar goals, and in an ideal environment, they help each other succeed.
Here’s what you need to know about sales and marketing!
The job of marketing is to identify your ideal customers and create a message that appeals to them to draw them in to your company. Marketing focuses on creating awareness of your business among those who may not have heard of you but would benefit from your products and services.
For example, if you run a plumbing business, your marketing team would identify that homeowners were a target market and renters are not. They would then dig deeper into the demographics and determine that homeowners within specific age ranges or income levels are the most likely to work with your plumbing company on a regular basis. These are your ideal customers.
From there, the marketing team looks into the needs of that group when it comes to plumbing. They would craft a strategy to attract the attention of that audience by addressing their needs and offering your services as a solution. Marketing includes educational materials, ads, and more that bring interested consumers to your door.
The entire purpose of marketing is to take the general public and create leads of individual consumers who are interested in your services and need what you offer.
Once you have interested leads call your business, the sales team takes over. The sales team works with interested consumers and explains to them why they should commit to paying your business for services.
For example, answering a call from someone who wants a quote for plumbing work and getting the customer to choose your company instead of a competitor is the job of sales. Getting a consumer who’s shopping around to commit to a specific purchase is another sales task.
Some sales decisions are immediate, like when a consumer has a frozen pipe and needs plumbing help right away. Others take time and require the sales team to build a relationship, such as when someone is shopping around for new water heaters. Some really big deals, like a contract for commercial plumbing, can take weeks or months to close.
Sales can’t do their job unless there are interested leads to talk to. That’s why it’s so important for marketing and sales to work together to create a system where the public becomes interested in your business, and then those leads are turned into sales.
In larger corporations, marketing and sales may be entirely different departments. There can be rivalries between the two, or lack of communication can make effective business growth difficult.
However, in a small business like yours, it’s much more likely that marketing and sales are so similar that their unique goals can get lost. You may have the same handful of people doing both marketing and closing sales, or perhaps marketing isn’t a consistent focus and all employees simply try to sell products and services.
With the right focus, though, how marketing and sales work together can be very impactful.
Consider breaking your business growth goals down into two parts: attraction and conversion. When you create a strategy to attract customers, you’re doing marketing. This includes building a strong website, search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and encouraging existing customers to refer their friends and family.
Then, once your phone starts ringing with interested buyers, or you get focused traffic to your website, it’s time to switch to sales. You can educate your leads, engage them, and build relationships. Ultimately, you want to convert those interested buyers into customers and then retain them over time.
An integrated marketing and sales funnel can bring in targeted leads that become ideal customers on a regular basis. This powerful process is essential if you want to grow and become more successful over time!
As a small business, you might not think in terms of a “marketing team” and a “sales team”. However, your company still needs to have both marketing and sales processes in place. If you aren’t attracting new interested leads, you can’t get customers. At the same time, if you can’t convince consumers to buy from you once they get to know you, you aren’t going to grow.
If you need help with marketing and sales, we’re here to make it easier. When you work with Local SEO Search, we create a clear SEO marketing plan that helps you get new leads regularly. Your website will also be optimized to increase the number of visitors who become customers.
Contact us to learn more about our services today!
