Hints & Tips

*** A new version of this page can be found at my current website mentoringsales.co.uk ***

Is your issue Sales or Marketing (or both)?

Having worked for a number of American companies, I well appreciate how they have positively influenced our business sales approach over the last generation.  Such as how important communication is to maximise revenue from existing customers.  But one negative to my mind is their generic term for sales activities as “Marketing”.  It is critical to a business to understand that Marketing is different from Sales, since you have to analyse both disciplines separately to identify where you are weak and need to concentrate your efforts and improve skills.

In a nutshell, Marketing is about generating the sales opportunities, whilst Sales is about closing the right opportunities for your business.  So if you are not creating enough sales enquiries for your products or services, you need to look at your Marketing.  If you are getting plenty of sales leads but not getting enough orders (or not meeting business goals from such orders), you need to improve your Sales operation.

Of course, if you’re honest with yourself, you may decide that you actually need to work on both disciplines.  In which case, it would be sensible to start with improving your Marketing and then developing your Sales capabilities.  But recognise that you need both to achieve optimal results.

I saw this at first hand in my days at Oracle in the early 90s.  In those days, the relational database software product (RDBMS) was by far the most important element of Oracle’s success.  A significant competitor to Oracle’s RDBMS was Ingres.  In many respects, Ingres was a technically superior product, yet Oracle blew them away.  Why?  In my view, a key factor was that Ingres made the mistake of believing that Oracle was beating them on Marketing, and concentrated a lot of effort on being seen to win the independent RDBMS performance tests at that time (the “database wars”).  And Ingres did come out on top more often than not.  Yet Oracle sailed merrily on increasing their market share.  How? - Through having the better Sales operation.  Yes, Oracle was indeed very good at Marketing but more importantly it had an outstanding aggressive and motivated sales force that could close business.

So, look critically at your Marketing and Sales and decide where you need to make improvements.  You can find my analysis guidance on Marketing here and Sales here.