Lead Generation Dilemma: Is Sales And Marketing The Same?

For a lot of business people, the concept of marketing and selling is so similar that they tend to put them together, interchange them, or even alternate them in a lot of things. Sad to say, but this is a mistaken concept. Although both sales and marketing have similar in the idea of reaching business prospects, their scopes are different. It is important to differentiate the two, since it can create redundancies in yourbusiness sales lead generation campaign. Knowing where marketing ends and selling begins can help your sales team generate more qualified B2B leads for your business.

To do that, you need to get down to the basics.

When we talk about marketing, we are talking about the overall activity in which a company does to get in touch with their customers and the market in general. We are talking about activities like identifying what the customer needs; creating the product or service that will address these needs; pricing your offer in an attractive manner; promoting your product or services or spreading the word into the market; and actually selling the product or service to the end users or customers.

Based on the above explanation, you will realize that selling, although very important, is actually the last step in the marketing process. In the simplest terms, selling is simply persuading or compelling the customer to make a purchase. If we put it in the business lead generation perspective, the sole responsibility of the sales representative is to sell, not to generate sales leads. That is the job of the marketing team. But too often, we see a lot of sales representatives on the phone, spending a good part of their time talking to prospects who may or may not buy from them at all. This practically wastes their time.

This situation is true, no matter what marketing medium is employed. You could see a similar situation with social media marketers, email marketers, telemarketers, and direct promoters. They are just supposed to generate qualified sales leads, but because of the overlapping of marketing and selling duties, they can hardly maximize their capabilities. This calls for a separation of duties. Your sales team should focus on selling, while your marketing team should pay attention to generating sales leads for your company. In this way, you optimize the capacity of your marketing operations.

Now, in case all you have is someone manning the phone, and you have very little experience with regards to the finer details of marketing, you might find it attractive to outsource the work to a capable lead generation company. There are a lot of firms that specialize in analyzing your market, not to mention providing an insight on prospect buying behavior that can help your sales team clinch that deal. It is not even a problem even if you do not have your own sales team. Thanks to outsourcing, you can obtain the services of an outbound call center that specializes in sales.

It will work, as long as you have a clear-cut idea on what sales and marketing should be doing in the first place.