Know-How Exchange : Career/Training

Depends on the industry. In some cases, Sales is the primary engine and Marketing is a Sales support function. In other industries, Marketing sets the course across a number of fronts (i.e., the entire marketing mix), and Sales executes the strategy at the customer interface.

And there are all shades of gray between these extremes. (For an e-tail business, arguably, there is no distinction between Sales and Marketing.)

From a 30,000-foot perspective, Marketing includes product strategy, pricing, positioning, packaging, advertising, promotion, publicity, public relations, distribution, merchandising ... and sales. Oh, yeah, and profitability too ... at least for the marketing portion. (Can't always control raw material or manufacturing costs.)

Hope this helps. There are so many variations based on individual companies and industry segments that there really is no single answer that would apply to every situation.

Well,not sure you meant marketing mix specifically, but if so, that is product, price, place, and promotion. Truthfully, in my mind sales is not a primary driver of any of these. There should be some minor discounting by sales to close a specific sale, but this is often done too much. Other areas, sales should provide feedback on.

In general, I look at sales as a one to one activity, where marketing is one to many. In sales, they know specific customers by name and their needs. In Marketing, they are looking at overall markets at their needs.

I agree totally with Mr. Goodman....

In my world (b2b of high tech products used in automation, process and building controls), marketing is a supporting role to sales. Like the Character Q in James Bond movies, marketing is expected to create a number of new and exciting tools which will be used by the sales force at their discretion.

In the b2c world, marketing sets the plan and sales is expected to execute the plan.