What's the difference and Link between Marketing and Sales?

Question

I personally understand that Marketing has to do about the understanding of the product and Sales is about how to approach and convince the customer to buy the products.

Your opinions would be welcome to help me understand it better.

Answer 1

Sales and Marketing fall hand in hand, you would market a product so you can sell it.

Marketing can cover a broad spectrum of activities, such as;

1)Researching your competitors, so you can make your product better than theirs

2)Advertising your product

3)Running promotions with your product

4)Cross selling your product with other products

There are many other activities that would fall under marketing. All these things make the customer aware that the product exists and also may make them want to buy the product

If you have a great product, you still need a method of completing the transaction - that would be the sale.

For example, I work for a company that launched a product last year. We had a great product, we had the people to sell it, but the product was never marketed (Ie we never advertised it or cross sold it)to the customer in any shape or form, so it never sold!

Hope this helps below are the dictionary definitions of the two:

Marketing: to make goods available to buyers in a planned way which encourages people to buy more of them, for example by advertising

Sale: an act of exchanging something for money

Answer 2

sales:is when product is sold

Marketing:is the thinks u do to advertise to get things sold.

Answer 3

Marketing is a continuous, iterative process : market research > market analysis > product development > the marketing plan > marketing communication (advertising etc).

It is about understanding what the customer might want in the way of a product or service, how big that market is, what shape the product should take, how it should be priced, distributed and promoted, and the planning and execution of all this.

Sales is a function of marketing execution -  contact with the customer to achieve the vital last step - actual sales.

Answer 4

Marketing is essentially making the customers aware of a product or service by advertising them.  Sales is closely linked with marketing as the sales will show whether the marketing (advertising, etc.) is working.

For example, if make-up was suddenly advertised in Nuts magazine the sales would probably be very low due to the fact they were advertising it in a mens magazine. If they began advertising in a womans magazine their sales would increase.

Sales is essentially how much a company sells.