It’s not something we ask that directly often enough. Is it sales or marketing that are most important for your business?

Now, you might instantly fall on one side or the other. And it’s definitely a loaded question. But I think it’s one we should be asking more than we are – especially in small and medium business where we have limited time and resources.

Recently, my dear friend, and sales queen Frances Pratt and I asked the question and went head to head on a LinkedIn Live chat where it was Sales versus Marketing.

Here's what we decided.

Sales & Marketing are sisters

When it comes to being on Team Sales or Team Marketing, we agreed that the most important word in sales and marketing is actually the word AND.

Sales and marketing are sisters. You need them BOTH to have success in business.

So, it’s time that we started finding more balance. And that happens by understanding where the marketing process ends and the sales process begins.

Whether you’re doing Sales or Marketing you must know your customer

Knowing your customer is the most important thing you can do for your sales or your marketing.

The reason Fran and I get along so well (even though one of us is a sales specialist and one of us is a brand and marketing specialist) is because both of us advocate incredibly strongly for knowing and understanding your customer.

And both Fran’s sales training and my Brand Story Strategy process have a strong focus on this element of sales and marketing.

I can’t state it strongly enough; if you take the time to ask the right questions and really get to understand who it is you serve and what they need from you, then your sales and your marketing will improve as a result.

Sometimes we use marketing to hide from having to sell

Selling has a bad rap.

But it shouldn’t. Because selling is really just helping someone solve a problem. And you don’t have to put on a persona to sell. In fact, the more you are yourself, the easier you’ll find it, and the more you’ll sell (just ask Fran)!

Over time though, this icky feeling we have about selling has made us a bit frightened of it.

In fact, we are so scared to come across as salesy, that we choose not to sell – we choose to market instead.

Because to an extent, we can hide behind marketing. Clients can’t object to our face about our landing page, or Facebook ad, or website content. They might object with the action they take next, but we don’t have to be there to see it.

Are you using your marketing to avoid doing sales?

Probably all of us have done it at some point, even unconsciously. And it’s time to change our mindset about what it means to sell.

We all want More Sales with Less Marketing

We all want to make more sales with less marketing effort, right? And that means we need to level up our sales game as well as our marketing game.

It’s important to work out where your marketing pipeline ends, and your sales pipeline starts, remembering that there can absolutely be some crossover (especially now that some sales happen without us even being face-to-face with our customer).

Taking the time to understand your customer journey, so you can create marketing that properly supports your sales process is key.

And you won’t be surprised to hear me tell you that the way to work that out is to know your customer (because I told you that just up there ).

Brand Story is something that can supercharge both your sales AND your marketing

If you’ve been reading my insights for a while, you’ll already have an understanding of how strongly I feel about Brand Story being the key that unlocks marketing success.

So, Fran and I finished our conversation with some thoughts on how it's BRAND that is the thing that can supercharge both your sales AND your marketing.

When you’re clear on the pillars of Brand Story Strategy for your brand, and understand how to apply them to your business, the fact of the matter is that both sales and marketing will become supercharged for you.

You’ll be clear on the customer journey and know when to say what and how you should say it. You’ll have a clear picture of the difference you make for your customer, and why one person is a good fit for your offering and another person isn’t.

Brand Story Strategy is where it’s at. And it will answer all the questions you’ve been asking about both the sales and marketing strategies in your business (and why they aren’t, perhaps, working as well as they could be).

My final thoughts? More than ever, Marketing is at the top of our priority list.

But that doesn’t mean it should be.

Over the past 10 years or so marketing has become both easier AND harder, thanks to the internet, social media and the raft of technology tools that have appeared to “streamline” our processes.

It’s gotten easier because marketing has become less expensive and more accessible.

But it’s gotten harder because all this accessibility has meant that we have to do more marketing than we ever have before. And a lot of the time, we’re doing marketing when there’s no strategy and we’re simply doing it because everyone else is doing it.

These advances in technology have also meant that some of our sales are not made in the traditional way – where we’re face to face with our customer.

There’s been this massive crossover between sales and marketing. The lines have blurred. Where it used to be very clear where marketing ended and sales began, it’s much harder to see that differentiation.

That doesn’t mean that marketing can replace sales. Or that sales can replace marketing.

We need to find the balance. And when we do, it can only be to the advantage of our businesses.

Want to listen to our full LinkedIn Live chat?

If you’d like to listen to everything we talked about, you can check-out the recording of our LinkedIn Live here.

It's an awesome way to spend 30-minutes of your time learning this week.