1 March 2024 by Angela Knox
Are you confused about the difference between marketing, sales, and business development? Don't worry, you're not alone! These three functions are often used interchangeably, but they actually have very distinct roles to play in a company's success.
They should also be baked into your overall business planning process, which is the thing that comes first.
Let’s break it down.
Pre-planning your marketing
Marketing is what happens in the planning stages, before you run off and start randomly trying to sell or find buyers for your product or service with a blindfold on.
Planning a marketing strategy and setting out your marketing objectives stems from your overall business strategy, i.e. what do you want your business to achieve, what are your targets, your mission, your short / medium / long-term objectives?
Other aspects of your plan include operational considerations or limitations, building your team, and financial constraints.
Whether your business is a start-up or an established concern, having a business plan is crucial - it is a roadmap of your starting point and a plan of where you want to get to in 6, 12 months, 2,3,5 and 10 years.
Whilst your plans will change over time, you need a business plan that will evolve with your business.
If you can get into the discipline of creating one and always be in fine-tuning mode as your business changes, you will be able to deliberately set out what you want to achieve and be able to benchmark your success against the plan.
You can also avoid nasty shocks as you will already have thought about preventable problems and factored them into your plan.
So have a business route map, just as you would if you were planning a long journey.
It’s amazing how many businesses I come across that do things on the hoof, and avoid the hard yards of proper planning. Then they try to reverse engineer their live activities into a half-baked plan that never really reflects what they are trying to achieve.
A business plan is a deliberate piece of work that helps you to structure your activities in a way that forces you into the discipline of proper planning throughout the life of the business.
Operational marketing
Marketing is all about making people fall in love with your brand. It's like trying to woo a potential partner - you want to make a great first impression, show them your best qualities, and convince them that you're the one for them.
This involves creating a strong visual brand identity, crafting compelling messages, and using creative tactics to get your brand in front of the right people.
Before doing any of that though, there are some analytical steps you need to take so you can work on your positioning. Remember STP - segmentation, targeting and positioning. You need to work out who you are targeting, the different market segments, and how you want to position yourself to those markets.
Then you need to work out your TAM (total addressable market). To properly plan any marketing activity, you need to know how big the market is, and what proportion of the market you think you can sell to. Sounds simple, but this is an often overlooked process, and without it you’re fishing in the dark.
Think in terms of pitch deck content: identify and explain what the problem is and how you are solving it - i.e. PROBLEM - SOLUTION.
What’s your USP (unique selling proposition) or UVP (unique value proposition) - how do you encapsulate the uniqueness and appeal of your product or service in a way that summarises your offering in the fewest amount of words? This is not an easy process and is worth spending a lot of time getting it right.
Another step that businesses often overlook is identifying competitors and comparing how they stack up against them. They can fall into the trap of thinking that their product is so great that they don’t need to consider who else is in the market (or if there is a market to start with), who their customers are, and why they should buy from you.
Marketing is about markets, so you need to be sure of which markets you are trying to target, and how you measure up to other providers of similar products.
Sales
Sales, on the other hand, is all about sealing the deal.
Once you've got someone interested in your brand, it's the sales team's job to turn that interest into cold, hard cash.
Sales people are like the closers in a baseball game - they're the ones who come in at the end and make the big play. They're experts at persuasion, negotiation, and objection-handling.
Especially important if you’re in B2B or SaaS, where your front-line sales person is going to be responsible for getting the deal over the line.
If you’re a consumer business you’re going to be selling online and/or via retailers - so that’s a different mechanic. That’s about brand building and promoting your products cost-effectively to the pre-identified target audiences - so your sales plan and process is more about effective ad strategy.
None of these processes will work effectively if you haven’t done your proper marketing planning as outlined above - there will be a lot of guesswork, false starts and expensive mistakes.
Business development
This is where the big picture thinking happens.
Business development is like the visionary CEO who's always thinking about the next big thing. It's about finding new markets, developing new products, and forging partnerships that can take your company to the next level.
Business development people are the ones who dream big and make it happen.
A business always needs to be moving forward and spotting new opportunities, rather than stagnating.
Being agile in business is vital, otherwise competitors can come along and steal a march on the market you are operating in - so always be thinking of new ideas and better ways of doing things.
Conclusion
So, in summary, marketing is like trying to win someone's heart, sales is like closing the deal, and business development is like plotting your company's world domination. That last one is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
Now, it's important to note that these three functions are all interconnected.
You can't have a successful sales team without strong marketing, and you can't develop new business opportunities without a solid understanding of your market.
It's like a three-legged stool - each leg is important, and if one is weak, the whole thing falls apart.
So there you have it - the difference between marketing, sales, and business development.
If you're still confused, just think of it this way: marketing is like trying to get a date, sales is like trying to get a kiss, and business development is like trying to get married. Good luck out there folks!