Sales vs marketing - why can’t we just all get along?

Among the many examples of disappointing, clickbaity, self-aggrandising, humblebragging hubris on LinkedIn, you will almost certainly have read some variation of “marketing is better than sales because… sales is better than marketing because…”

Both of these statements are wrong, wrong, stupid and wrong.

It’s like looking at a car and going “well, yeah, tyres are nice to have and all, but I don’t need them because I’ve got some petrol.”

Marketing helps to creates opportunities for sales. Sales converts good marketing. Neither can be properly successful without the other.

Rather than combative, divisive statements which do nothing to help an organisation’s commercial objectives, how about we do the sensible thing and look at business – hey, and life itself – as a beautiful symbiotic whole?

Otherwise where does it end?

“HR creates the value from human productivity but finance just writes it down.”

“Design makes products work, manufacturing just makes products.”

“Finance captures what matters, HR just adds warm and fuzzy feelings.”

If this thinking is correct, the only logical conclusion is that one or more of the various existing departments in business are having a laugh at everyone else’s expense and should be dispatched forthwith.

This is obviously nonsense.

Like so many things, this type of nonsense is rooted in defensiveness born of ignorance, and a general disinclination to look beyond the end of one’s nose.

This post has been precipitated by a few separate but related factors.

First, the low-level but persistent crap-o-rama that usually begins with someone shrieking: “This business did no marketing and still grew revenues by a bazillion percent!”

Second, the UK Government’s (alleged) cretinous declaration that, if only businesses would spend less on marketing, they’d have the cash to do more important things like cut prices. One might reasonably take the view that this administration might not have the credentials to advise others on how to run their affairs, but I’ll leave that one alone.

Third, and the straw that finally busted this camel’s hump, was a recent LinkedIn post which featured a series of egregious comparisons of marketing vs branding. Thankfully plenty of other people recognised it as agricultural-grade manure, but I fear it will have served only to reinforce ill-founded perceptions of what marketing is and isn’t.

So let’s take each of these in turn.

1.      “This company did no marketing and made loads of money!”

No, I’m sorry, but it didn’t.

The last time I read a version of this argument, a week or so past, someone with a brain helpfully responded that caution is required to avoid confusing marketing and advertising. This, I think, is at the heart of the issue.

Let’s say you’re setting up a business from scratch. Day one. The very twinkle in the eye of your entrepreneurial fantasy. Imagine it’s a piece of software which helps small businesses do their taxes.

You think to yourself: “I’m going to sell this to small businesses which need help with tax but can’t afford an accountant yet.”

Congratulations! You’ve just Done Some Marketing. In the very thought process of identifying your target audience and working out what they might buy from you, marketing has commenced. By isolating this group, you’ve also excluded others – large corporates, for example, or even mid-sized SMEs who might have an in-house finance team as well as external advisers. Well done again – there’s no point wasting time and resource in chasing something which won’t make you any money. That’s marketing, that is.

Now you need to find a route to your chosen audience. They need to be aware of your existence otherwise there’s self-evidently no opportunity for them to buy from you.

So you contact everyone you know to tell them about what you’re up to. You manage to scrape together the cash to build the software and you speak to some small business owners to make sure it meets their requirements. You work out how many of these people are out there and how much they might pay for the benefits your software gives them. You get someone to build you a basic but decent-enough website to create a source of revenue to get going.

Then you start posting on LinkedIn, talking about the issues you know your audience faces, and demonstrating how your new software sorts all this out for them.

All of a sudden, you’ve got some customers, and you haven’t paid anyone to make you an advert, or run a PR campaign, or sponsor Wimbledon. And guess what? You haven’t built a sales team either. But you’ve been marketing and selling your ass off this whole time. Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t have separated the two.

2.      “Cut your marketing budget and spend it on… y’know, worthwhile stuff”, says Government, helpfully.

Ignore for a second the intergalactic stupidity of this concept. The BBC reported this story based on the appointment of cost-of-living tsar (sarcasm implied, that word should be an automatic alarm bell) David Buttress, the former CEO of JustEat. This was then picked up by various marketing journals, despite no firm evidence of this plan even being in existence. In fact, most stories reported the plans were still in the works.

Then The Drum this week quoted a Government spokesperson as having said: “There are currently no plans to increase budgets for a marketing campaign on David Buttress’s work in government. His role will involve speaking to businesses where securing discounts and offers is feasible.” So top marks to The Drum for actually checking facts and being proper journalists rather than just grabbing its own pitchfork and joining the mob.

However, let me just get a bit crazy for a second. Let’s imagine, if we can, that the story was in fact true, and the Government just decided to tell a weeny little lie – I know, I know – to downplay the situation and avoid furthering its candidacy for the Darwin awards. Far-fetched, admittedly.   

The basic premise of the idea is – kind of – sound; or at least you can see how they got there. The Government wants to help people with the cost-of-living crisis, so the logic goes that cutting business costs will limit the need for price rises to be passed on to consumers.

One of the many important things this genius idea, were it real, ignores is that private businesses account for more than 80% of total employment in the UK (according to ONS data for March 2022). Those employees are, unless I’m very much mistaken, also consumers.

These businesses are only competitive because sales and marketing, either via design or despite a lack of it, are at the pointy end of efforts to attract and convert customers and clients across every industry sector. The Advertising Association reckons that for every £1 spent on advertising – just one aspect of marketing, remember – some £6 of GDP is returned to the economy. But yeah, let’s stop doing that.

Search Google for the brands which tend to do well during tougher economic times, and you’ll find a few common themes. First, they adapt, they don’t retreat. Second, they market effectively – evidence shows that businesses which market well during downturns emerge faster and stronger than competitors who slash budgets and hunker down. If you need to cut budgets in one area to protect cashflow, make sure your strategy is able to adapt to the changing circumstances and protect budget on the right things. That probably isn’t discounting.

Rushing straight to discounting can have a disproportionately negative impact on profitability which, of course, will eventually have a negative impact on employment and consumer spending; two things the Government is trying to shore up.

Let’s say you’re selling a premium wine rack for £1000, at a 10% profit (I don’t know who’d buy a wine rack for a grand, but it’s that time of night as I write this). A juicy, jammy, tannic ton for your troubles.

But, thanks to the Government’s helpful intervention, you’re pressured into selling the same wine rack for £920 instead. Let’s say, then, your annual pre-Government revenues were £10 million. So you’ve sold 10,000 units, and made £1m profit on sales. At your reduced price of £920 per unit, that profit is now £80k lower.

And your staff are looking for a pay rise too. Before inflation, pay was up by 4.2% in April. After inflation, it fell by 2.2%. So you’ve already got higher wage costs and staff who aren’t feeling the benefit. Your energy bills are going through the roof too. That profit is being gobbled up at a frightening rate.

Now your existing customers are complaining because they’ve just paid top dollar for your wine rack, and these Johnny-Come-Latelys are getting it for a song. Your customers are the type of people who’ll ride out a downturn without much trouble, but that discount makes you look a bit less premium now. Fewer show-off points when Jonno and Becks next come for a dinner party, yah?

So your top line sales are starting to wobble a bit too AND your Net Promoter Score is tanking because your marketing and customer service teams are struggling to cope.

Time to start trimming some of your other fixed costs then to stem your deepening losses.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Thanks, Government.

3.      Branding is… / Marketing is…

I actually can’t with this one. If you saw this post on LinkedIn, as I’m sure you probably did, please just ignore it. In a nutshell, here’s the deal: marketing is the whole process of identifying who is going to buy your product or service and finding a way to help them to do just that. There’s a lot involved in that.

Brand / branding is part of marketing. Content is part of marketing. Digital marketing? Part of marketing and not, in and of itself, marketing. Events = marketing. Social media = marketing. PR = marketing. Website = marketing. Actually, these are all communications tactics, which should be informed by a marketing strategy.

Each of these things, and no doubt others I’ve forgotten to mention, play a role in brand building and sales conversion, in varying degrees. Even your sales team plays a part in brand building, by representing your business the right way and leaving potential customers with an impression of what you’re about.

Anything which tries to separate the two in the real world is wrong. It’s that simple. Black and white doesn’t exist in marketing (despite my entirely black and white proclamation just now), because it’s essentially an attempt to homogenise groups of individuals and assume they’ll behave in a certain way. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. With some knowledge and experience, plus a decent mix of research, logic, head-scratching, estimation, testing, adapting, and dumb luck, you can take a pretty decent crack at it. But suggesting you’ve got it all figured out as a ready-wrapped infographic is either wilfully misleading or ignorantly mistaken. Neither of which I fancy as a client testimonial.

The bar for entry to a career in marketing is so low that it unfortunately allows confident pillocks to carve out quite nice roles for themselves, and there are countless platforms from which they can bazooka their audiences with plausible-sounding tropes.

In our modern world where facts and even common sense are often eschewed in favour of vociferous opinions and hypnotic jazz-hands, I’m starting to think strategy and proper thinking are being seen as the chess club B-team which somehow wandered into the frat party. Intellectual and diligent, but not really who anyone else wants to drink with.  

This cannot be.

Do your research. Create a strategy based on what it tells you. Execute it ruthlessly.

And for God’s sake, invite the sales team to your next marketing social. It’s time for more understanding in the world.