[Is My Startup Leveraging Sales or Marketing to Attract Customers?]
When founders find out that I developed and managed Microsoft's global social media marketing for startups, many of them ask me if they can run a few ideas by me and see where they are doing the right thing in their marketing.
I have noticed after talking to founders for the past two months that sometimes there is a little confusion about sales language / sales pitches and marketing. So, I want to be helpful to founders at any stage of their growth by briefly offering my point of view on which is which.
Marketing is the language that you craft, and the story that you permeate through all of your branding and media engagement that clarifies and directs the tone and message of your mission.
Sales is the language and the toolkit of techniques that one or a group of people leverage to close deals with customers.
They both use many techniques and deploy many types of messaging, but they are very different things.
Marketing builds trust.
Sales makes use of that trust to ensure purchase activity.
Sometimes I have seen people use web properties like a site, or a blog, to talk about offers and offers seem to be the only language that gives insight into the product and what it does.
Truthfully, this isn't typically enough to build trust. Yes, if your product is what they want, price may be a feature of the marketing, but using this alone isn't marketing. It's just sales language using up very lucrative and precious space that could be used for marketing.
With some exceptions, marketing is a long game. It's the intelligence that you use to prep for the sales battle. It's the method that from far away and from up close, gains you and the brand attention and trust.
It is your company's WHY.
Examples of marketing:
Nike's Just Do It campaign
Apple's Think Different campaign
Starbucks' Meet Me at Starbucks global media narrative
Sales is the hand-to-hand combat that you engage in when the target is close, lured in by your marketing.
Example of a sales technique:
Watch the scene from Wolf of Wall Street, when Jordan Belfort, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, cold calls a man and asks him to invest in penny stocks.
Founders need to think about how marketing is a very long game. It may take years to build that story. It may take countless trials and errors. But the focus on that mission is building trust. Trust is what enables sales to happen.
If you would like to sit down with other founders and experts in the fields of marketing, communications, legal issues, human resources and hiring, as well as mentors who have built up their own companies in Taiwan and in Greater Southeast Asia, you are welcome to apply to our 20th cohort, which will begin next year.
Deadline is December 16: http://bit.ly/2NF5RL8
Doug Crets
English Communications Master, AppWorks
Image courtesy: Paramount Pictures
