I often get asked this question and have heard a number of different answers. Salesmen will tell you that you can do sales without marketing – and that the latter is probably just a waste of time and money. Marketing people will tell you that if you get the marketing right then you won’t need to do any sales – they might even tell you that sales people are too pushy! So what’s the right answer?

In my opinion, sales and marketing go hand in hand. If you want to get more clients and grow your business, you need to be able to do both activities. A simple way of looking at them is that marketing is what you do to bring in leads; sales are what you do to convert those leads into clients.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Earlier this year we did some marketing work for a therapist. He wasn’t very comfortable going to networking meetings and found it difficult to explain to people what he did. He had a website that brought in a lot of work, but from overseas, and he wanted more local clients. We started by getting hold of the list of all the people he had treated in the last 12 months in the local area; he didn’t keep in touch with any of them (and didn’t even have up to date contact details for some of them!) We cleaned up the list and started sending email newsletters to them. After a couple of months of doing this, I bumped into someone who told me she had received the newsletter and spoken to my client, as she was interested in getting some help from him, but wasn’t sure if it was right for her. I spent some time telling her how he could help and promised to ask him to get in touch. When I emailed him about this hot prospect, he told me that he’d already met her and didn’t think she wanted to work with him, so he wasn’t going to bother following it up!

So we had done the marketing for him – all what was needed was for him to close the sale. With a bit of gentle encouragement from me, he did contact her again and she is now working with him as a client.

Another client asked us to help him promote his new ebook. He wrote it because he thought he saw a gap in the market. He set up a single page website, full of carefully crafted, engaging sales copy, where people could download a free section of his ebook. They could also easily buy a copy, for a price he had set, that would allow him to make money from the ebook. And then he sat back and waited … and waited … and didn’t sell any copies. Why not? Because he hadn’t done any proper marketing. He hadn’t researched the market, which is actually quite busy with people writing similar books; his website doesn’t tell people what section they can download for free; the price he’s asking is very high; and no one knows about his ebook or his website, because he hasn’t told anyone!

We’re now doing some proper marketing for this client, to generate lots and lots of leads for him. When they come flooding into his website, the sales will happen easily because people will find exactly what they’re looking for and an easy way to buy it. Job done!

So, what’s the difference between your sales and your marketing? Do you use them to work together to grow your business, or do you rely on one more than the other? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment.