Small business owners and managers often confuse marketing with sales, using the terms almost as synonyms. In fact, marketing and sales are distinct arts. The marketing department in a small business lays the groundwork for sales. The sales department closes the deal. It’s essential that the two work together to find and acquire customers for your growing business—but that doesn’t always happen.

When marketing efforts misfire, sales efforts are bound to founder. Ask Kansas City, Missouri, contractor Jake Schloegel, who went years without implementing a focused marketing strategy for Schloegel Design Remodel. Every so often, he’d run a few ads in a local magazine or do a mass mailing with pictures of recent jobs, but those efforts were scattered and didn’t yield a single dollar of new business.

The problem: Schloegel’s marketing message was off base. “We thought we needed to talk about the fact that the wood we use is superior, the joints we make are super tight and the quality of our workmanship is great,” he says. “But people assume they’re going to get all that when they pick a contractor for a high-end job. What they really want to know is that we respect their home—we show up when we say we’re going to and we leave the site really clean at the end of each day.”

Schloegel’s realization came courtesy of an informal focus group conducted by John Jantsch, a Kansas City marketing consultant who is the author of the book Duct Tape Marketing (Nelson Business, 2007). “Most business owners don’t really know what their customers value,” says Jantsch. “A lot of times customers need to hear about little things like cleaning up a job site at the end of the day, rather than the buzzwords like ‘industry- leading’ or ‘solution-based’ that entrepreneurs like to repeat.” Schloegel shifted the focus of his marketing campaign to reflect customers’ real world needs, and his sales picked up. The company has seen a significant increase in business since implementing the new campaign.

Making marketing and sales work together. Schloegel might have solved his problem sooner if his original marketing strategy had taken into account the real-world requirements of closing a sale in his business. Unfortunately, many small business owners have a poor understanding of how marketing and sales can reinforce and strengthen each other. Such confusion leads to anemic growth rates for firms that would otherwise be burning up the track.

How can you make sure that your marketing and sales efforts support and complement each other? For starters, you can invest in efforts to make sure that each department understands its job and does it well. Beyond that, you can look for ways to ensure that their efforts are collaborative and mutually reinforcing. Some ideas:

Spend the money you need to spend on both marketing and sales. Your sales force can’t do its job effectively without support from marketing, whether your efforts take the form of advertising campaigns or publicity blitzes. Don’t make the common mistake of claiming that you don’t have the budget for a marketing campaign. “That’s sort of like saying, ‘We don’t have any money for lights or desks,’ ” says Kim T. Gordon, president of the Florida-based National Marketing Federation, Inc. “Without marketing, nothing happens.”

Likewise, hire smart and experienced sales people and invest in professional development to keep their skills up to date. Sales reps are the deal closers, and the best ads in the world won’t make up for a clumsy sales pitch.

Bring sales and marketing staff together to define your customer. This information will help you target your marketing and sales campaigns— and without it, both of those campaigns are sunk before you launch them. Confusion about a firm’s customer base often leads to conflict between marketing and sales people, and that leads to further confusion. “Marketing people typically say, ‘We generate all these leads and you can’t close them,’” says author John Jantsch. “And then the sales people say, ‘That’s because they weren’t right for us.’”

Chances are, the sales people are right. Jantsch suggests asking your sales and marketing staffers to sit down together and come up with a description of the ideal client. Though your marketing people may not like to admit it, the most accurate description will often come from the sales reps. “Sales people are the ones who are talking to customers every day,” says Jantsch. “They know who’s interested and who’s not.”

The end result of this brainstorming session should be a very specific picture of your ideal customer. If you’re selling consumer goods or services, that means you ought to know your prospects’ distribution across age, gender, location, and income bracket. If you’ve got a business-to-business product or service, you need to know, at minimum, your best prospects’ industries, company sizes, and locations.

As part of the effort to invigorate his sales and marketing campaigns, Jake Schloegel invited a couple of his best customers to a meeting with his marketing and sales staff. “Ask your customers why they hired you in the first place,” says Jantsch. “You may be surprised at what you’ll discover.”

Remind your sales and marketing staff why this information matters so much. Identifying your firms’ best prospects will ultimately save them considerable time and energy. “You’ll be better able to spot prospects who have a willingness or ability to purchase your product or service,” says Kimberly McCall of Marketing Angel, a media and marketing firm in Durham, Maine. “In my own business, that means I don’t spend time selling what I do to somebody who only has a $1,000 marketing budget.”

Develop a marketing message. After you have identified good prospects, figure out how your marketing and sales teams can attract their attention. That means learning, as contractor Jake Schloegel did, the difference between what you’re telling potential clients about your business and what they need to hear. “You may be selling accounting services, and they may want to buy someone who’s going to save them money on taxes,” says Kim Gordon. “Devise your marketing communications to answer a potential client’s most important question: ‘What’s in it for me?’ The answer should resonate with your target audience.”

Define roles for marketing and sales people. Once you’ve settled on a message, develop tactics to court your prospects over time. According to Gordon, your marketing team should handle all the mass communication— advertising, public relations, direct mail and so on. “Marketing allows you to communicate with a large group of prospects and move them closer to the buying decision, without all the oneon- one time it would take to do that individually,” she says.

Jantsch likes to call this phase “lead nurturing.” In the long run, he says, it makes the process of closing a sale much easier. “One of the best things the marketing team can do is give prospects the information products that will help them to gently and logically move to conversion,” he says. “The better the information, the more personalized the information, the more quickly they come to the conclusion that they need to sign this contract.”

Meanwhile, your sales team takes responsibility for one-on-one contact with prospects: individual e-mails, phone calls, individual sales letters, face-to-face meetings, and the like. They should be well versed in the details of the marketing campaign, so they can pursue a strategy that makes the most of those efforts.

Make sure your message stays consistent. The two departments should communicate with each other so that they continue to send the same messages to everyone, from vendors to colleagues to competitors to customers. “Consistency is king,” says McCall of Marketing Angel. “All of your collateral materials—your brochures, website, print and broadcast ads, sell sheets, and any other materials you use to support sales— need to tell the same story so that there is no gap in the customer experience.”

Consistent design elements also are crucial. “It takes multiple exposures to make an impression on a new client, so every piece of communication has to relate to the piece before it,” says Sara Kogon, president of West 44, LLC, an Atlantabased marketing and sales consulting firm.

Coordinate marketing and sales efforts to avoid duplication. Bear in mind that more than one staffer in the marketing and sales departments may be contacting the same prospect through different channels. Give your sales and marketing teams access to the same database to track what you’re sending out and when in order to avoid stepping on one another’s toes. Customer relationship management software has become much more affordable and easier to use in recent years. For example, when a prospect takes some action—downloads a white paper from your website or e-mails you to request information— the software automatically prompts you to take what you’ve previously identified as the next step, whether that’s sending a standard information kit or making a personal call.

Once all this hard work has paid off and you’ve got paying customers ready to sign on the dotted line, ask them how they heard about your company. Their responses will help you determine which marketing campaigns and sales tactics are working.

Don’t rely on intuition to drive your marketing or sales. “Do not use yourself as a focus group of one,” says Kogon. “When I worked for a major soft drink company, a restaurant owner would say, ‘I love orange soda, and so I’m putting it in my soda fountain.’ That’s all well and good—unless your audience hates the drink, and it’s causing you to miss opportunities to make other sales.”

Deliver. Make sure that neither your marketing nor your sales force makes promises you can’t keep. “You’ve got to deliver on whatever promise you’re making,” says Kimberly McCall. “It could be as simple as having a $9.99 pizza ready in 10 minutes. It doesn’t have to be some big deal, as long as you follow through.”

ULTIMATELY, MARKETING AND SALES should work together as a team. Marketing creates the conditions for a strong sales effort, while sales provides the follow-through to close the deal. In short, like a couple with complementary strengths, they need each other. As a business owner or manager, one of your most important jobs is to make sure they understand that fact—and insist that they find ways to get along.

 

RESOURCES

MarketingProfs.com offers strategic and tactical marketing advice for businesses of all sizes, written in lively, accessible terms. Though some content is available for free, premium membership ($9.95 a month or $49.95 a year) allows access to the site’s extensive archives.

Sell it, Baby! Marketing Angel’s 37 Down-to- Earth & Practical How-To’s on Marketing, Branding & Sales is a quick, breezy guide to marketing and sales written by Kimberly McCall of Marketing Angel. Buy it online (e-book $9.95; paperback $14.95 plus shipping) at www.marketingangel.com.

Maximum Marketing, Minimum Dollars: The Top 50 Ways to Grow Your Small Business is Entrepreneur columnist Kim T. Gordon’s step-by-step guide to creating an effective marketing plan regardless of budget ($18.95; available from Amazon.com).

If you’re looking for customer relationship management software, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing (www.ducttapemarketing.com) recommends buying one of several affordable, easy to use online applications. (If you have more than five sales people, Jantsch recommends getting server-based software customized to your business.)