The Growth Dilemma: Choosing Between Marketing and Sales

Angela Frank: 00:00:00

Welcome to the Growth Pod. Today we're checking in one on one to learn which is better, marketing driven organizations or sales driven organizations.

I'm your host, Angela Frank. I'm a fractional CMO and founder who's generated millions of dollars in marketing revenue for clients.

In: 2022

So if you're like me and love learning about how to grow your business more efficiently, you've come to the right place. Let's start with some definitions. What does it mean to be marketing driven? And what does it mean to be sales driven?

When we talk about these two strategies, we're really discussing the difference in the way that companies acquire customers and achieve growth. So a marketing driven organization primarily relies on marketing, while a sales driven organization relies on an inside sales team.

And usually if you identify as one or the other marketing driven or sales driven, you don't really utilize the other acquisition strategies to drive your growth. So if you're marketing, you don't rely on sales and if you're sales, you don't rely on marketing to drive your growth.

This matters because it can impact not only your growth strategy, but also your customer experience, the way that you retain customers and can impact your long term success as well.

So today we're going to dive deep into each of these two types of organizations and I'm going to share with you how I actually combine them both to drive growth for my clients brands. Let's start by looking at each type of organization and the benefits of using each one.

Starting with sales driven organizations I think is a good place for us to start because these types of organizations are pretty classic and I think they're straightforward to understand.

You can tell if you're a sales driven organization because those types of orgs usually have an emphasis on hitting sales targets and quarterly revenue goals, a strong focus on direct sales strategies, personal outreach and closing deals, and they often use incentive structures like commissions and have quotas that drive individual performance. A great example of a sales driven organization is Salesforce, which is an enterprise CRM software.

The benefits of sales driven organizations are a pretty immediate result in revenue flexibility to respond to short term demands, and an emphasis on performance and accountability. So if somebody's not hitting their targets, you know exactly who you can hold responsible.

But the cons of a sales driven organization are that you become reliant on incentive structures.

Meaning you pay commission on every sale and usually the more a rep sells, the more you end up paying them because of course they're performing well and you want to reward that. But it can become quite costly.

Another con is that you can have pretty severe fluctuations in sales if a top performer unexpectedly becomes sick or goes on vacation for a few weeks, and the fact that you literally have to tell everyone about your brand and you end up missing a lot of at bats because you're not in the right place at the right time. But there's also pros and cons to marketing driven organizations.

So let's look at the characteristics of marketing driven organizations and look at some of the pros and cons of using that type of growth structure.

You know you're a marketing driven organization if you have a customer centric focus that leverages the understanding of a customer to make more sales, if you are using strategies that are driven by data, strategic insights and customer feedback, and if you have the ability to engage customers long term through content, community building and brand loyalty.

When you imagine a marketing driven brand, Apple is always a classic example, but more recently I love using the brand Liquid Death as an example of a marketing driven organization. The pros of running a marketing driven organization are a consistent brand identity that fosters customer loyalty and increases demand generation.

You have a lower cost to acquire customers and win repeat business and you also create sustainable long term growth with outsized returns. And the cons of a marketing driven organization is it can take some time to ramp up.

As you're establishing a strategy, you have less control over your ability to turn sales off or sales on.

And if you don't have your dashboard set up correctly, you can have a muddy understanding of what's actually working and not really know what is driving your growth.

Now that you know the pros and cons of each type of organization, one may already seem like a clear winner to you, but if not, how do you choose which is right for you? Well, the only time that you really need to choose between these two approaches is at the start of a business when resources are spread thin.

Marketing driven orgs require investment in content, branding and market research, while sales driven orgs need a skilled sales team time to ramp up and they also need effective performance incentives. Which is best for you really depends on your industry, your offer and your ideal team structure.

But remember, you need to have proven market fit before you choose between these two. So if you don't have that yet, start trying to give away your offer for free and get that early Stage feedback.

But what if you're more established and you're looking for what will get you to that next stage of growth? Well, this is where my favorite strategy comes into play.

Where I combine a sales driven organization and a marketing driven organization into what I've coined a growth driven organization. Let's pretend you've booked a discovery call with me and you've posed the question.

Angela, I'm looking to grow my brand and I don't know which approach is better. Should we lean more into sales or should we lean more into marketing which is best for us as we look to hit this next stage of growth? Growth?

My answer is usually both. The only exception to that is for low ticket e commerce. Then the answer is marketing.

But a lot of the brands I work with have high ticket high consideration offers who can unlock growth easily by balancing online sales and inside sales. And I'm going to walk you through the exact strategy I use to create growth strategies that expertly balance sales and marketing.

The first thing you're going to do is map out your customer journey from the very moment someone hears about your offer to making a purchase and what happens after to encourage repeat business business and referrals. There will likely be two parallel journeys on this map. Marketing and sales.

And when you map these out, you'll find that while there may be parallel spots, you might see that there's already quite a bit of overlap between marketing and sales. And once you see that, the next step is to identify where you can actually start to improve that customer journey. Are there steps you can remove?

Can you provide a marketing journey for somebody who doesn't want to talk to a sales rep at all before becoming a customer? Is there a way for someone to be instantly in touch with a sales rep if they want that high touch experience?

When you complete that exercise, you should have an improved customer journey map. And you can start rolling that out right away. But keep both marketing and sales informed on the goals of this improved customer journey.

Which brings me to my next point. Normally marketing and sales are two separate functions with different goals, working styles and normally those two departments do not communicate.

But if you want to become a growth driven organization, getting those two departments in lockstep is key. So as you begin rolling out this new customer journey, you've got to get everyone on board and and working together during this transition period.

And usually that means getting someone to be the go between for both teams.

Someone marketing can complain to when their leads aren't getting followed up with quickly enough and someone sales can complain to when the leads aren't high quality enough.

And it should be this person's sole objective to get both teams working together, getting them what they need to slowly bring them towards relative harmony. And this is a strategy that I've actually implemented in a few different brands and the results have been amazing.

One company, for example, I created an eight figure pipeline in less than a year, essentially tripling pipeline in less than 12 months. In another, I increased total sales by 30% in less than seven months.

And both of those case studies are just scratching the surface of what can happen when you bring sales and marketing together in a growth driven organization. So there's no need to wait to start achieving your growth goals.

Assess if transitioning to a growth driven organization is right for you and start mapping out your customer journey. If it is, it's a simple process to follow, but there is so much that you'll learn along the way. And if you need help, I'm here for you.

You can reach me anytime for support in achieving your growth goals. Learn more and book your free discovery call at growth directive. Com. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Growth Pod.

I look forward to seeing you in the next one.