Introduction
This article is only the consolidation of my learning all throughout my 10+ years of career as head of sales, marketing and business development in various industries along with the experiences as a serial Entrepreneur floating and selling more than 5 companies in these years. What I write here are my own theories and framed from my experiences. I welcome anyone who can add in or make a completely different perspective to these concepts.
According to me, Marketing and Sales are the most or equally important department in any company. Be it a startup or an MNC, the one department common in all companies of any vertical is marketing and sales. This department needs to be more agile and adaptive to any market conditions. It is this department that helps companies find new vertical of businesses during recession and market challenges.
Sadly, in recent years I can see a lot of people picking marketing and sales as a temporary or as I call it, a survivor option. I see a lot of youngsters choosing this field as with lot of hesitation as an option till the time they get into what they call as a stable job. This mentality is due to the commonly called “target fear”. This is also more likely a fear of achieving or a fear of commitments. Marketing is just like any other career options having its own positives and negatives.
Difference between Business Development, Marketing & Sales
There is always a confusion between Business Development, Marketing and Sales Departments in companies and people often mistake one for the other. Even the HR departments in many companies don’t have a proper work role specification for each of these 3 segments individually. I have come across a lot many sales executives who introduce themselves as business development executives. Now this is really confusing. If their intention is market research, then yes, they can be termed BDEs. But if their intension is to sell a product or service, then they are Sales Executives. It also shows me the inferiority complex in them to be identifies as sales executives. But we should understand that sales executive is not a mediocre or lower designation at all. One need not beautify that designation according to me. May be the cultural impact has made it sound so little a job, but sales executives are people who help to know the market pulse. They are people who work on field on the ground level. Though business development, marketing and sales, all focus on increasing the revenue of a company, each of these departments has its own fine line differences. Understanding these differences and planning the right organisational structure and manpower shall result in a strong sales force and revenue generation for the company.
On simpler terms, business development commonly focuses on bigger deals, long term objectives and futuristic planning. This department is commonly headed by the Chief Executive Officer of the company along with the Chief Strategy Officer. The various Key performance indicators (KPIs’) of this departments might be territorial expansion, product launch, partnerships, deals and establishment of long-term objectives that we call as “big Ticket Decisions”. It is in fact the business development team that forecasts the company’s annual turnover, profit growth, investments and revenue sources, launch of new verticals to fulfill the management’s vision on where the company has to be positioned the year after year. This department understands and works on long time goals which make them negotiate and compromise various day to day affairs and take “on the go” decisions strictly focusing on the bigger picture.
The marketing team on the other hand primarily focuses on modes and methodologies to brand and market a product or service to the right customers. This department defines the target audience, the language with which the brand should communicate to public, the visual factors of the brand and every minute details on taking the brand to the customers. From a Human Resource perspective, a person good at business analytics can be part of the Business Development team but to be in the marketing team, one has to possess a creative and aggressive personality with good communication and interpersonal skills. This unfortunately is becoming a rare combination lately as even psychology contradicts the fact that a creative person can be aggressive. But in the marketing department when we prioritise creativity and aggressiveness, the former always has a bigger advantage. In order to effectively brand and market a product, one should be creative enough to design innovative campaigns that varies with each segment of audience. Most people confuse a marketing person to a salesperson. The basic difference is the characterisation of aggressiveness and creativity in the person that decides him /her to excel in a marketing or a sales team. Now in both these segments, study shows that women excel more than men as they naturally have the ability to think from second person’s point of view. It is always better to subject your team to a DISC analysis by means of which you can identify the skills needed to differentiate and segment the right manpower to the right job role. The more aggressive people can be deployed to a sales role while the more creative/intuitive people can be assigned into the marketing role. The marketing team is responsible for all advertising and branding campaigns, be it BTL ( Below the Line ) that involves targeted events and promotions focusing only on a particular target group with help of sales team or ATL ( Above the Line ) focusing on mass audience like the newspaper advertisements, TV Commercials etc. that primarily increases the brand value. This team works extensively on the budgeting of advertisements taking input from the Business Development team on the overall budgets allocated and matching it with the target revenue to be achieved.
This Marketing team is equally responsible on the brand placement itself. This team is normally involved in discussions along with the board and the business development heads during the ideation stage of a product itself. This team contributes to the logo, brand placements, target audience etc. as mentioned earlier. The huge amount of knowledge, perspective and creativity needed for designing a logo, selection of colour palettes, creating brand manuals etc. are directly contributed from this marketing team along with expert agencies or professionals. This team should stick to these brand manuals and colour codes as each colour depicts a different target groups according to colour psychology.
The sales team does have a direct agenda to focus on ground sales. They are the ones who take the product or service to the end user or distributors. The major focus of this team is to achieve the sales targets. The sales head of any company takes responsibility to dissect and allot timelines and targets based on the company targets. The team takes care to avoid false commitments, mis representation of information and primarily focuses on customer relationships. The sales team also brings back major facts and figures about ground reality and customer reviews to the company which helps in improvising the product or service big time. Most products fail when there is a mismatch between the commitments done by pre-sales team and the reality check by the post-sales support team. The sales head normally works on strategies to increase sales and close targets like offers, freebies etc. under the budgets allocated. The sales head also ensures that false commitments are not given to any customers at any point of time just for closing targets. Super aggressiveness is the main quality to be seen in any sales managers or sales executives. But a good sales manager should also be organised and realistic.
All these 3 segments are commonly assigned to plan and execute tasks and handle tremendous pressures. So, stress management as a quality comes very handy for people working under these segments. I normally call these 3 departments as the frontline team of a company. When the frontline team thinks straight and handles situations in a matured way, the company becomes stable. For any structured business, all these 3 departments or individuals focusing on these segments separately are super essential. As I can conclude, when business development ensures the place of your business and its future, marketing brings customers to your place and sales makes sure those customers buy your product.
As an entrepreneur or a CXO of any company, the more you invest time on segregating the right people for the right segment of your frontline team, the more progressive and stable your business will grow.
Thank You.
