The face-off: Sales vs marketing

Once upon a pair of flip-flops, I was a fresh Marketing Manager for a local retail brand who reported directly to the brand-champion, in layman’s terms, the business-owner. I was told that the marketing department is always the ‘cost-centre’, or at least, that was how he saw it. I like to believe that was something Philip Kotler would never have agreed.

Being inexperienced then, I was convinced that our pay-increments should be slowed down due to expansion plans and not forgetting the ‘fact’ that we were the ones spending company’s money, in the name of marketing. Oh well, we must have spent lesser than a hundred thousand, and if I have not remember wrongly, our annual turnover that year was seven million dollars. Good-gawd. We were once, inexperienced, but ‘gawd-dam-good’.

And so fast-forward a few years, I found myself at an event strategized and branded by the consultancy that I was working with. I saw customers walking in, contributing to the promised R.O.I. (Return-of-Investment). Saying that I was pleased would be an understatement. But as I stood outside to actually, contribute to my chances of getting lung-cancer, my gut-feeling (intoxicated with much tar and nicotine) told me to chat up the sales-girl from my client’s side. Knowing her pay-package almost gave me an instant lung-cancer. I remembered not breathing for a bit.

The customers who came to the event, a large portion of them which I believed, had already the intention to make purchase. That is as far as our marketing strategy was concerned. Yet to my surprise, how businesses are still spending big bucks on hiring sales-people instead of good marketing people. Your average-looking marketing genius these days may not be paid as well as your gorgeous sales-lady who is still studying part-time.

So here comes the golden question. Which is more important? Sales or marketing?

In my humble opinion, this has to be a chicken-and-egg question. Simply because, as much as it’s easier to believe that the tangible and very-visible monetary rewards are generated by sales, it is marketing, the art, science and brains behind, that made the transactions possible. So why should marketers be short-changed? In the same breath, without the sales people, we may end up with far lesser eye-candies on the front-end.

And I would like all to rethink, if you too, the thought that marketing is a ‘cost-centre’.

Caesar Zhong, Managing Director, HQ IDEAS