Sales and Marketing: Similarities, Differences, and Shared Goals

Marketing and sales work in tandem with the ultimate goal of finding, attracting, and retaining customers for a company. Although these two departments have similar goals, their methods for reaching them differ.

While marketing teams focus on top-of-the-funnel activities, such as reaching a target audience or generating leads, the sales department focuses on bottom-of-the-funnel transactions to ensure customers complete their purchases.

Understanding—and supporting—sales and marketing, and the value they bring, can build company performance over time. 

Sales vs. marketing: what’s the difference?

• Focus
• Structure
• Roles
• Strategies
• Metrics

Marketing builds awareness and attracts leads to your business. Sales converts those leads into paying customers. Companies need to use a holistic, collaborative approach that involves both departments working together to reach common goals. Here are a few differences between sales and marketing teams: 

Focus

While marketing teams focus on top-of-the-funnel activities, such as reaching a target audience or generating leads, the sales department focuses on bottom-of-the-funnel transactions to ensure customers complete their purchases.

Marketing focuses on strategically promoting a brand’s products to its target audience. Marketing teams must understand customer needs, define the brand’s value proposition, and communicate that message through various channels to increase awareness, engagement, and sales. Marketing focuses on the four Ps: product, price, place (where and how goods get marketed), and promotion (the marketing strategy). 

Sales focuses on finding potential customers, learning more about them and their needs, and building relationships with them to close deals. For software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies, enterprise brands, and companies that sell high-ticket products, sales might involve cultivating relationships with individual customers over weeks—or longer. For typical retail sales, the sales team might handle in-store customer interactions.

Structure

Sales and marketing teams have traditionally been separate or adjacent departments with their own responsibilities, but all businesses are unique. A Fortune 500 company might have distinct sales and marketing departments, each with an expansive team of professionals. Meanwhile, a scrappy three-person startup where workers wear many hats might integrate sales and marketing. 

At Crown Affair—a luxury hair care brand that sells wholesale, direct to consumer, and retail at Sephora and Goop—sales goals dictate marketing efforts. 

“Our overall sales targets and goals stem from a high-level vision from our founder, Dianna Cohen, and our CEO, Elaine Choi,” says Jordyn Casaus, Crown Affair’s director of marketing. “It’s all top-down.” 

After Dianna and Elaine set the sales goals, the various teams discuss how they will reach them. “On the marketing side, we decide how we’re going to hit these sales goals based on the marketing moments we have going on. I oversee our D2C [direct to consumer] business. We have a head of retail that oversees all things Sephora,” Jordyn says. “The sales department sits within our finance team. And it’s overall one band where we’re all working really closely.” 

Roles

Marketing and sales teams have related but different roles and responsibilities.

Sales teams deal with every stage of the sales process, from prospecting to education to conversion. A sales organization can scale from a single person to a department subdivided into teams: 

• Sales representatives. Sales reps deal with customers one-on-one. Responsibilities include cold calling, creating and sending educational materials, and attending in-person meetings to meet sales goals. 
• Sales manager. Multiperson sales teams usually need managers to oversee the sales process. Sales management ensures their reps have all the necessary tools and follow the sales strategy. 
• Sales specialist. A sales specialist or sales consultant is the person with the most in-depth knowledge about a product or service. They are often responsible for product-specific market research, conducting product demos, and troubleshooting. 
• Account executive. The higher-level sales reps typically focus on bringing in new business, writing sales proposals, negotiating with clients, and closing deals.
• Customer success specialist. Sales may also include the customer success function, which focuses on retention. Customer success specialists foster positive relationships with existing clients, drive renewal sales, and facilitate new purchases. 

Marketing initiatives can be handled by a team or, for small businesses, consolidated into a single marketing manager role. Your marketing team might include the following hires: 

• Chief marketing officer or marketing manager. The marketing manager directs team members, builds the marketing strategy, and often works closely with a company’s founder. 
• Website developer. Essential for ecommerce, a website developer builds and shapes your brand’s website to ensure it remains functional, user-friendly, and optimized for selling products or services. 
• Search engine optimization specialist. An SEO manager or specialist conducts keyword research to improve website ranking in search results and ensures customers can find products through digital marketing. 
• Content marketer. A content marketer works closely with your SEO specialist to create compelling digital marketing content that connects your brand’s products to your target audience. 
• Data analyst. A data analyst will help your team refine its marketing strategy, improve campaigns, and boost ecommerce performance by tracking customer behavior using metrics such as click and bounce rates. 
• Public relations manager. A PR representative manages your brand’s reputation, helping the marketing team build trust and credibility through strategic communications. 
• Social media manager. A social media manager develops and executes a social media marketing strategy tailored to your brand and target audience. 

Strategies

Marketing departments develop strategies and marketing campaigns to boost brand awareness for a company’s products or services to a specific audience. Marketing strategies can include channels like advertising, public relations, brand ambassadors, partnerships, celebrity endorsements, and influencers.

For Crown Affair, influencer marketing is a major component of its marketing strategy. “Influencers have become more of a traditional channel at this point,” Jordyn says. “With influencers, we’re constantly looking at affiliate links, testing new platforms, and doing paid partnerships.” Marketing might organize in-store activations, demos, collaborations, and founders’ speaking engagements.

A typical sales strategy requires sales professionals to make personal connections with customers. Therefore, they tend to be personable. Establishing and nurturing customer relationships often involves office visits, meeting with potential clients, wining and dining, cold-calling potential customers, and attending trade shows and industry events.

Marketing and sales teams can also shape how customers perceive a brand. Marketing does this through visual brand elements like website design and product packaging, as well as the brand tone it uses in its content marketing and search engine optimization efforts, such as blog posts, newsletters, and social media posts. 

Sales teams have more personal relationships with customers. They spend time showing customers how a brand’s services and products can solve their problems or benefit them, which can influence brand perception. 

Marketing and sales efforts can intersect, particularly with an inbound sales strategy or when a customer approaches a company. For example, a new customer lands on your website through a blog post and signs up for more information. Then a salesperson contacts them and provides more information and tailored solutions. 

Metrics

Sales and marketing teams use different metrics to measure success. 

Sales metrics might include:

• Customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV is the total revenue a customer contributes during the lifetime of their relationship with a retailer. 
• Sales conversion rate. This is the number of leads that become paying customers. 
• Churn rate. The churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company over a specific period. 
• Revenue by sales rep. This number is how much each sales rep contributed to the total revenue. 
• Inventory turnover. Inventory turnover shows how often inventory is sold and replaced within a time frame. 

Marketing metrics might include:

• Marketing return on investment (ROI). Marketing ROI shows how effectively a business’s marketing efforts increase revenue. 
• Return on advertising spend. This metric measures how much revenue a company earns for each dollar spent on advertising campaigns. 
• Social media engagement. This shows how many times people meaningfully engaged with your content by liking, commenting, or sharing a post.
• Email subscribers. When customers opt in to a brand’s emails, companies have the chance to continue fostering that relationship.

How to ensure your marketing and sales work together

1. Meet regularly
2. Over-communicate
3. Prioritize overall business growth

Combining your sales and marketing efforts can provide a holistic view of your shared goals. Here are a few ways to pair them for insights and efficiency:

1. Meet regularly 

Schedule structured meetings to review sales and marketing initiatives. Crown Affair is mostly remote and has weekly meetings across departments so each team can get on the same page. 

While each department has its own weekly meetings, the entire team also meets to learn more about marketing (through Jordyn) and sales (through the director of retail). 

“Every single week, we are looking at all data,” Jordyn says. “Both myself and our director of retail are pulling all things D2C reporting, looking at all of our main KPIs. For my team, it’s AOV and CAC and our top-line revenue, and what that means per channel. The director of retail is doing that as well, looking at brick-and-mortar versus .com and how products sell. We pull that into one report, so everything is super cohesive.”

2. Over-communicate 

Communication helps different departments collaborate and stay organized. Jordyn encourages teams to over-communicate to avoid surprises. For example, marketing might share its forecasts with the sales team to help accurately predict progress toward sales goals. 

“If we feel like we’re going to miss or hit something, or fall under, I’m over-communicating,” Jordyn says. “Since everything from a virality standpoint is attributed to sales targets, I might say, ‘Hey, I think we’re going to miss, for example, our dry shampoo sales goals, but I think we’re making it up in air dry mousse because that product went viral on TikTok.’”

Jordyn reports to finance, account executives, and executive teams to make them aware of which initiatives are generating interest, how she’ll optimize to better meet sales volume goals, which projects aren’t attracting qualified leads, and where she’s decided to pull back or test further. 

On the flip side, Crown Affair’s field sales team reports to the director of sales, who shares information with the entire team weekly. “They share what customers in stores are saying, what they’re looking for, what other brands are doing,” Jordyn says. “While there’s honestly never anything massively shocking, it’s helpful to know what customers are asking for, even if it is an issue or problem.”

Insights like this can help a marketing team address concerns through blog and social media posts—or decide what to prioritize when designing new campaigns. 

3. Prioritize overall business growth

Marketing and sales work toward the same goal, so the teams shouldn’t consider their work separate. Jordyn advises against this sort of thinking. 

“Throughout my career, I’ve just learned how important it is, especially when it comes to sales, finance, and marketing, to work together,” Jordyn says. “There can be a world where you’re butting heads, and you’re like, ‘I need more budget for this, and I want to hit this target.’ There is some tension when it comes to those two worlds, but I’ve learned the hard way how that doesn’t get you anywhere.”