There is a popular belief, especially amongst start-ups, that sales and marketing are more or less the same thing. And this is not, especially when you are at the beginning and making the first steps to get your products or services known and have some sales in the same time. And moreover, it seems that sales people are put into marketing duties, just because sales and marketing seem to be very similar. But there are some things you should be considering before asking a sale guy to make some marketing:
Sale guys think about customers as being a money source and not a business source
Now, sure, the ultimate goal of everything you do as a company is to make money. But the thing is that a sale guy doesn’t always understand that sometimes is more important to have a good market share even if it doesn’t bring you any money on the short time. Because they think about customers as the amount of money they should bring in directly.
Sale guys don’t think so much about positioning
They are not really interested about the company positioning. They don’t really want to position their company as a reliable business partner or anything else marketing wise, they want to position it in a way to make the most money available on the shortest period of time.
They don’t leave money on the table
Every sale guy that I know, wants to take all the money that the client might be willing to spend. That’s usually good, but from the marketing point you appear as the most expensive solution, and you might not want this if you want to keep your customer for longer periods of time.
They are paid by the sales they bring and not by the customer number
As I said before, sometimes it’s important to have more customers – that will buy something at some point. But no, the sale guy is paid by the sales volumes they bring, so any potential customer that doesn’t really want to buy something at this point will get dumped for the next cash cow.
So, let the marketing guy do its job. He has a lot of things to do. Sales it’s a different story.
