What is marketing? What is sales? When do marketing and sales intersect? Learn the true difference between marketing and sales and why you can’t blame marketing for lack of sales.

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Welcome back to another episode of She’s Busy AF – I love today’s topic. I’m gonna get a little spicy with today’s topic. And that is because I, as a marketer, let people, let clients make me feel bad that marketing wasn’t working for them – when the issue wasn’t marketing. The issue was with sales, and I am not a sales person.

So I’ll kind of get into that, right? Like I believe in my marketing ideas and skills and strategies, but today’s episode is all about how I want you to stop blaming marketing for your lack of sales. And we’re gonna get into all the nitty gritty we’re gonna get into what is marketing? What is sales at what point do they interact? And how can you just make this all better? So without further ado, let’s dive in.

All right guys. So first things first marketing is building awareness of your brand to potential clients. Marketing is responsible for finding potential clients. That’s essentially what marketing is here to do. So some examples of this are going to be driving traffic to your website from social media. Your marketing on your social media has done a very good job if people are taking action from there, theoretically speaking. In service based businesses, people are not going to purchase on social media. They’re going to go to a website. They’re going to go to an intake form. And so it’s really important to get people there. And that’s what marketing does. So that’s one example.

Another is using a blog post call-to-action to warrant a form fill. Do you see here how these kind of go into form fills? Having a call to action on all of your blog posts is absolutely recommended, especially if you are placing emphasis on SEO optimizing them, making sure you’re updating those calls-to-action and making sure that they are going somewhere, whether it’s a lead or directing them to another blog or something, that’s going to go through this loop of getting them to the point of making some sort of like lead conversion.

Another example is SEO, optimizing a blog post to show up in search results for a certain keyword – that is marketing. So what that essentially does is result in site traffic, which then will get people to your blog post, which then should hopefully have a call to action, which then would transition into the sales process. My final example for marketing here is a QR code scan from a direct mailer. Now I work with a couple clients who still do direct mail – no direct mail is not dead. QR codes are very, very, very powerful. I remember being in high school, I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this on a previous podcast, but I remember being in high school, my yearbook teacher being like we should do a whole drive, like a Google drive or whatever, and have a host of extra pictures that didn’t make these spreads on there through a QR code.

I remember looking at him and being like Mr. Moffitt – no QR codes are stupid. They’re not here to stay. Well, then 2020 happened. And yeah, now everyone uses QR codes. So silly Lauren for being so shortsighted. QR codes are incredible tactics for direct mail – that’s besides the point, but that is a form of marketing. So sales is what happens when you turn that viewership into a profit. So marketing, you increase your visibility. You increase viewership. Sales is taking that viewership and converting potential clients into actual clients.

The biggest example I have for this is taking a form, fill starting a buyer conversation and closing the client. Sales is responsible for closing the client. And this really brings me back to like when I had my agency and I hired someone in my business to do sales for me because sales is not my strong suit and it’s not something I do with the clients I have today. I refer out to that. I have fantastic people for that, but that is not me. What I can do is help you get your brand visible. They are both extremely necessary components in the buyer journey process of getting people. Marketing is what gets people to be a raging fan of you. And that’s what you want, raging fans buy.

However, you can’t say that a sale is because of marketing. Sales happens in sales processes, and they’re extremely powerful when they work together. So some examples of how marketing and sales work together, number one is using and sending blog content case studies and testimonials in that bottom of funnel, decision making process, use your top of funnel content.

If you’re having a conversation with a buyer and they’re like, “you know, I’m just really struggling with X, Y, Z,” and you have a blog post on that, or you have marketing collateral on that, or you have something that you don’t mind throwing at them as a freebie – that is only going to build trust with them and make them say, wow, they really cared about me. I’m gonna move forward in this process. Again, I am not the sales expert here, but this is what’s worked for me. And this is how I’ve been able to intersect marketing and sales. When I had a salesperson in my business and now as a marketer who has to make sales too, like, to an extent I am knowledgeable in that field because I have to do it for my own business.

The second piece there is leveraging marketing’s discovery of demographics in conversations to close prospects. So something else that marketing is responsible for is finding the demographics, studying the demographics of the buyers and creating content that speaks to them. So that can be extremely valuable in the sales process because you can speak right to their struggles, fears, and desires. So marketing and sales really talks to each other there.

The last thing is sending proposals with examples of work, there is a hundred percent marketing involved in not because the way you format the proposal, the work you decide to show. All of those things are very important when convincing someone to work with you, sales is responsible for the delivery of that and the conversations around that. So as you can probably tell by now marketing plays a crucial role in the journey to sales, and a strategy is 10 out of 10 recommended, which is why, if you’re listening to this as a marketer or as an entrepreneur or business owner, you don’t have a marketing strategy for your business. Hang on. I have solutions for you, and they’re not super expensive solutions.

I wanna make this like, you know, achievable and affordable for you. What I have just released is my marketing strategy template. This is the framework I use for my six and seven figure clients. And it’s just something I’ve worked with over the years. I get asked a lot, Lauren can you teach this to me? I get asked this by marketers. And I’m like, that’s a really good idea. Like, yes, absolutely. I can teach it. But my capacity to teach is not in a one-on-one space, nor could I like reasonably price that.

So what I’ve decided to do is package up the marketing framework that I’ve developed over the years and put it in a really awesome Google doc with step by step processes and instructions. So it’s not just something that you like stare at, and you’re like, I don’t know how to do this. I have a video recording at the beginning that you watch to walk you through it. I have a glossary of terms and some templates in there for you to check out, but really it’s meant for the entrepreneur or the marketer who does not need a lot of handholding in the creative process.

Meaning like, you can come up with those creative ideas, but you need direction. You need help with like the top middle and bottom of funnel strategies, and placing them and also placing them in a way that’s going to honor your capacity and your client’s capacity as a business. That is what this strategy was built with – with this in mind. Basically, if you’re in need of a law out of hand-holding in that creative process, or you struggle to come up with those creative solutions that align with marketing strategies and tactics, this probably isn’t the best option. You’d probably be a better fit for custom marketing strategy.

So I’m gonna link in the show notes, both options, the template and the custom strategy. I’m also giving $50 off because you to listen to this episode today. So congratulations. That code will also be in the show notes. The link to the landing page will also be in the show notes, and there’s multiple ways to add support if you feel like you might need that.

But again, if you feel like a custom strategy is more for you, I offer that as well. So both of those will be linked there. I really hope that this episode was powerful and impactful to you to help you understand the difference between marketing and sales and really how they need to work in your business. All right y’all, this is Lauren Loreto. You just listened to another episode of She’s Busy AF. We drop new eppies every Wednesday, and it would mean the world to me if you would screenshot this episode, share it on Instagram, be sure to tag me and Brand Good Time, or She’s Busy AF. Thank you so much for being part of my community. I would love to thank you by resharing those tags and with that being said, I’ll see you on the next.