Sales and marketing are intended to enhance business development. Sales are focused on building profits for organizations by selling their products and services. Marketing is a broad term to be discussed. Its role is vital to building sales, including understanding existing marketing trends, customer expectations, relevant activities, attain customer satisfaction, and build long-lasting customer relationships.

Essential Features About Sales And Marketing 

• Marketing builds sales automatically. The customer voluntarily comes forward to buy the business products and services.
• Marketing focuses on the market needs for customer relationship, while sales mainly focus on the organization’s need to sell its products to the customers 
• Sales is short term oriented, while marketing focuses on the long term goals.
• Sales include an individual or group of people, whereas marketing includes the general public.
• The scope of the sales is limited to sell the products. Marketing includes gaining user attention through advertisements and various other marketing ideas.
• Discounts and offers are the tactics implemented for sales, while marketing analyzes the customer essentials. Thereby, necessary promotional means have been adopted that act as a magnet to pull the user’s attention to build sales automatically.
• Sales mainly include the skill of communicating convincingly, while marketing includes reasoning skills and analysis.
• Sales mainly intend to generate profits through selling the products, while marketing intends to create profits through customer satisfaction and market share.

Having gained a deeper insight into sales and marketing differences, let us gain the basic ideas about the sales funnel, various stages of the sales funnel, and why is it important to have sales funnel?

Sales Funnel 

The statistics have revealed that the sales funnel for any business is fetching. The percentage of lead conversion into sales has proved high for the businesses implementing the sales funnel.

Sales funnel is a graphical image representing the buyers’ journey from the beginning till the sale’s closure. It is mainly categorized into the top layer, middle layer and bottom layer. 

The customer’s life cycle is represented as a funnel as the prospective customers’ strength keeps reducing from top to bottom.

Various Stages Of Sales Funnel

Business Awareness: Any business has to create awareness about the products and services for user’s reach. Various means are at hand to create such awareness, and they include email marketing, social media platform, digital ads, webinars, influential talk and promotional videos. 

User’s Interest: As we go into the following stages of the funnel, the user come across the various awareness means and eventually chooses some of the best available options according to one’s interest. 

Product Evaluation: Further progressing into the funnel, the user evaluates one’s interests considering the product pricing, the quality and the competitors’ edge as the factors for purchasing. Business offers and the commitment to connect with the customers’ post-purchase also count for the purchase.

Purchase: The count decreases as we go down the funnel. Though significant people reach this level of the sales funnel, all might not end up the inclosure. Those who have successful bought your products turn to be the customers. 

Retainment: The relationship with the customer does not end. Businesses need to adopt customer retention strategies to withhold the relationship. Customer service, user guides and feedback implementation contribute to the strategy. 

Conclusion

Sales and marketing, when worked together, can improve the overall success rate of any organization. 

Nurturing the users from lead to sales is the key to marketing. ONPASSIVE is set to satisfy this requirement with O-Desk ( erstwhile O-Lead ), an AI-powered tool that helps understand the user’s intent through sentiment analysis.

The customer relationship is made healthy and strong with O-Desk. Explore more of its options.