Today the companies must identify their market and their offerings on the basis of KYC tools (Know your Customer), there actual needs and wants. It is important to remember that every customer has different taste, attitude and the understanding about every aspect. Sales & Marketing have vital role to play in this process as it not only specifies the need of the customer but also analyze the product requirement and the changes required in the product as well as in the process, which helps to convert a prospective buyer to a customer and generate the revenue as per the business plan.

A clear understanding of customer needs, buying processes, buying preferences, perceptions, and potential is essential to sales and marketing success.

When the opportunity is unsure and is a possibility, it's not a lead but a Prospect, and the challenge starts at this stage when the Prospect is considered as lead and the sales process is initiated. This scenario is observed when there is lack of coordination and efforts to adhere to the process. The sales or a marketing role should be clearly defined and assigned to the individuals at their respective levels. In reality though, the most effective approach is assigning the responsibility to both and integrating the activities of each.

Essentially, successful prospecting comes down to the powerful integration of the magic of marketing with the science of sales. And though it is not easy and does take discipline, it is well worth it.

Strategic Planning

Strategic Planning is a very crucial topic. We believe sales and marketing success depends on it. A well-built strategy that integrates the sales and marketing process and consistently communicates the company's position in competitive market should be based on knowledge. If the plan designed is not viable and is not something you have the resources to implement and stick with, edit it to something which you can achieve and commitment. Build a detailed project plan for implementation, detailing departmental dependencies, resource allocation, project tasks, and key deadlines on a weekly basis and, hold each other accountable to delivering on the strategy, whether strategic or tactical.

Working together is important, but independence is equally necessary. If you have sales and marketing reporting to the same boss you have to be careful that one isn't ignored. Because if that happens you will soon find that you have been compromising the long-term prosperity of your company.



Sales

As correctly preached sales is the act of meeting prospective buyers and providing them with a product or service in turn of money or other required compensation. Selling has features and benefits which are still the main topic at every sales  department, as management is pushing the same old ideas about cold calling and open-ended questions, but customers are changing rapidly in their behavior, buying habits, knowledge about the situation on the market, and most important to their expectations from sellers.

Selling technique is vigorously changing, Whole business environment is more dynamic, we have many new products in the market, and competition is bigger, harder, and stronger day-by-day.  Buyers are more educated and they are searching for information by themselves, and are looking from providers who understand buyer's situation, needs and business. Sales cannot continue to resolve situations in the business world by using same old tips and tricks. Sales challenges cannot be met using past understandings and strategies. The skills and information are not wrong, but they are simply incomplete for today's market.

Technology is developing at a pace that rarely anyone can catch up, and especially in the last two decades many trained sales people are not in the position to utilize the advantages of the technology. Customers are not waiting around for a sales person to get back to them with information; they are waiting for answers from people outside company through their networks and generally searching for people they should be in contact with. The trick is to make yourself as visible as possible so that this new breed of customer has no option but to come across your name or profile during this search.

Marketing

As aware marketing is the process used to determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business. Recent approaches in marketing include relationship marketing with focus on the customer, business marketing or industrial marketing with focus on an organization or institution and social marketing with focus on benefits to society. It attempts to perfect the segmentation strategy used in traditional marketing. It targets its audience more precisely, and is sometimes called personalized marketing or one-to-one marketing. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to be broad in scope, because it not only refers to marketing on the Internet, but also includes marketing done via e-mail and wireless media.

Marketing is used to identify the customer, satisfy the customer, and retain the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, marketing management is one of the major components of business and is evolved to develop new markets caused by mature markets and overcapacities in the last couple of centuries. The adoption of marketing strategies requires businesses to shift their focus from production to the needs and wants of their customers as the means of staying profitable.

It generates the strategy that underlies sales techniques, business communication, and business developments. It is an integrated process through which companies build strong customer relationships and create value for their customers and for themselves. In the consumer-driven approach, consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer research.

Mutual Relationship

Selling starts the very minute the company goes out into the world and talks about its offering. It would be very naive for anyone to assume otherwise. Companies spend on marketing activities because they want to attract people who can buy their offerings. So what really differentiates marketing from sales is the point of their entry in the relationship building process. Sales unit always believe that marketing hasn't created enough leads to meet their goals, while Marketing unit claims they have generated ample numbers which are not processed by sales.

There is in fact a place for both Sale & Marketing, but it is defined by customers and the industry respectively and by the complexity of products. When domestic market is your target audience, and you have short span to demonstrate your product, then certainly the need for marketing is the lead process for growth. When target audience is corporate or small businesses with a high technology product that requires education, then there is a lower requirement on marketing and a higher degree of emphasis on sales personnel.

For sales & marketing, people, often go to market, unprepared, unfocused and not following the basic steps of the sales process. They are trying to close unqualified leads and doing presentations to people on subjects they are not interested in. They also have not explored the market sufficiently and followed the tried and true practices of consultative selling. Both the sales and the marketing departments have grown from very similar beginnings and certainly have caused organization senior executives equal amounts of anxiety over the years. Marketing have been renowned for the 'advertising pitch': an ability to create passion for the product with a significant price ticket attached for the service. Sales and marketing will always be natural partners and their common relationship is your brand. But their mandates are quite different; therefore, it's important we clearly define each department's responsibilities.

Use of technology like marketing automation solutions can help in easing and automating the process of scoring and qualifying leads if your primary source of Lead generation is Internet and Just this one process can go a long way in bridging the sales-marketing divide, at least in settling the blame game. This is because; setting up such a process not only helps in bringing clarity to the end objectives of both, but also equates the success metric.

Marketing is a very measurable process, but the results are head to measure; it's easy to measure Sales outcomes but Sales activity is hard to measure. As a result, compensation and rewards tend to be very different, which creates further problems. Marketing is measured not on the basis of Leads generated but on the basis of qualified Leads generated in accordance with the common definition whereas Sales gets measured on how many of these qualified Leads it managed to close.

Irrespective of how companies want to position their marketing and sales objectives the truth is marketing and sales are two sides of the same coin.