Is Your Business Sales- or Marketing-Driven?

Overview

Companies today take many approaches when it comes to growing their business and marketing their products, but there are two primary forms that most of the others can be combined into: whether the business is Sales-driven or Marketing-driven. Knowing which approach your business uses helps you understand what needs to be done to get your product in front of potential customers.

This blog will provide a brief overview to help you understand the differences.

Difference and Similarities

In a perfect world, your business would have the choice of choosing how to generate new leads and pursue customers, how to drive product awareness in the marketplace, how to generate revenue. But in reality, that’s not often the case.

Most businesses don’t have unlimited time, money, resources or headcount to allow them to try different growth strategies until they find the one that works best for them. Instead, most businesses typically choose the strategy that they are most familiar with, or that they think makes the most sense for their product, and go forward with that. Whether this is the best growth strategy may or may not be the case.

This is why it’s critical for the success of your business to choose the growth strategy best suited to your specific needs. To help clarify these two approaches, here are just a few of the similarities and differences between the two approaches.

Similarities

• Both are customer-facing
• Both are focused on getting the product in front of the customer
• Both want to sell the product

Differences

• Sales focus is on the immediate sale
• Marketing focus is on the long term relationship, with the potential for much more than one sale
• Sales focus is on selling an item
• Marketing focus is on selling both wider and deeper, leading to greater revenue potential
• Sales focus does not take into consideration the actual customer problem
• Marketing focus is on understanding the customer issues and problems before positioning a solution

As you can see, the sales-driven approach has a focus that is typically short-term and immediate, whereas the marketing-driven approach takes the longer view. The difference in these two approaches also requires the sales organization to have different skill sets.

Key Defining Characteristics

To determine what growth strategy your business has, or is potentially considering, here are some key defining characteristics to help you better understand the two approaches.

Sales-Driven Approach

• There is an “anything for a sale” attitude
• Focuses on the short-term (sales, number of accounts, etc.)
• Looks for immediate results
• Allocates resources to achieve maximum short-term results
• Looks at daily/weekly/monthly sales numbers as a measure of success vs. annual sales growth
• Focus is on pursuing individual accounts vs. the larger market opportunity
• Tends to pursue individual sales vs. developing long-term customer relationships that lead to deeper, wider engagements
• Sells on features not on value and benefits
• Focus is primarily on price
• Will drop price easily to make a sale; does not care about long-term impact to the business of this tactic as long as the sale is made
• Does not consider the “big picture”

Marketing-Driven Approach

• There is a “customer first” attitude
• Focuses on long-term results and building customer relationships
• Understands that building trusted relationships takes time to accomplish
• Allocates resources to sustain long-term results
• Understands and focuses on the market opportunity, not the immediate sale
• Develops a strategy and go-to-market plan to support the long-term goals
• Sales and Marketing are in alignment before beginning to sell
• Knows and understands the target audience’s problems, challenges, pain points, issues and needs
• Focus is on informing and educating about the value and benefits, rather than on product features, helping encourage customers to move further down the buying funnel
• Engages more than one customer at a time
• Focuses on accomplishing the “big picture” goals

Summary

Because of the short-term nature of the sales-driven approach, this strategy is better suited for businesses that are product-focused. Businesses that are more solution-focused, or have a broader portfolio of products to sell into a customer may benefit more from using a marketing-driven growth strategy.

Once you understand the similarities and differences between the two growth strategy approaches, you will be able to choose the best one that will work for your specific business.

© 2020 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing

All Rights Reserved

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