As a small business owner, you might be asking yourself the question: which one is more critical - marketing or sales? Which one is more likely to promote major growth? Where should you be putting your money?

First off, you need to be clear on what marketing is and what it isn't. While marketing and sales are clearly linked to each other, these are separate things and shouldn't be confused.

💸 Sales entails understanding a specific prospect's needs, offering them a particular set of services which address these needs, and convincing them to purchase these services.

💌 Marketing requires you to understand a market's needs, tailor your offerings to those needs, and generate awareness of your firm's services which encourages qualified prospects to reach out for more information.

Sales entails understanding a specific prospect's needs

Basically, marketing is about creating qualified opportunities, while sales is about converting these opportunities into actual clients.

So, marketing is step one on the road to new clients and sales is step two. Anything you do in marketing should aid your sales further down the line. Marketing gives prospects their first sense of what your business, product, or service is all about, and sales converts interested parties into customers.

Sales is vital to the growth of your small business, no doubt about it. But while sales entails your team approaching prospects - be it via email, cold calling, or going door to door - marketing can be immensely helpful to the sales process by drawing people towards you. As LYFE Marketing says, "The GOAL of marketing is to bring in as many QUALITY people into your pipeline at the lowest cost possible." And quality people are the people you want to target with your sales team.

The US Small Business Administration recommends spending 7 to 8% of your gross revenue on marketing and advertising if you are earning less than $5 million a year in sales and your net profit margin, after expenses, is around 10-12%. However, in reality, start-ups and small businesses are more likely to spend 2-3% of revenue on marketing and advertising.

As an entrepreneur, selling is crucial to everything you do. High-growth tech businesses spend 25-45% of their revenue on sales, according to Steve Smith, Head of Sales for Encoding.com and former top salesperson for Yelp. For Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, the amount of money spent on sales and marketing is often more than half of their annual recurring revenue (ARR). However, determining the split between sales and marketing costs is tricky.

A good marketing strategy will aid your sales process by sifting out leads who were never likely to become customers. While LYFE Marketing found that investing in marketing made a massive impact on their sales, different approaches work better for different businesses. How do you know which one is right for you?

Here are five key issues to consider when deciding where to focus your attention.

Where should you focus your attention?

The biggest difference between marketing and sales is the time that it takes for you to see results. For sales, 3 months is usually long enough for you to see results. By contrast, with marketing, it can take a whole year for you to start seeing any noteworthy results. Even then, this is just the START of seeing results.

If you're looking for short-term results, sales is the way to go. But, if you're prepared to wait a little longer for results, it may be worth dedicating some time and money to marketing.

How do your ideal customers feel about salespeople? A lot of people are not a fan of sales calls. As one article written for Customer Think stated:

"Most of us hate salespeople. They're the bottom-feeders of commerce schooled in the art of deceit and manipulation. Think of The Wolf of Wall Street, Margin Call, and Glengarry Glen Ross. Was there a character in any of these movies who was anything other than craven and rapacious?"

But it doesn't have to be that way. One way to circumvent these feelings is to deliver value and build trust via marketing. If you can find a way to illustrate why people need your product or service without pushing it on them, they may come to you themselves. And this sense of added value can be something you integrate into your sales approach as well.

It's all about your approach and what your customers are most receptive to.

How do your ideal customers feel about salespeople?

Sales is about pursuing opportunities - or prospects - while marketing is about generating opportunities by attracting people to your product or service. Marketing uses tools such as:

These tools are meant to inspire interest and some kind of reaction. On the other hand, salespeople must pursue and push people who show any interest into making a purchase, using a discount code, signing up, buying a ticket, and so on. And salespeople deal with much more obvious rejection than marketers do.

Marketers weave a story for their audience, attempting to captivate them with customer testimonials, blog articles, or the attractive aspects of the product. On the other hand, salespeople ask questions, looking for the thing that will trigger someone to purchase what they're offering.

Is there a problem you're having with your washing machine? Your nice new shirt turned from yellow to an ugly pink in the wash? Well, you're in luck because this Deluxe Delight Washing Machine is so much better when it comes to handling color than any other machine, and it's even good for sensitive fabrics like that silk dress you're wearing!

Salespeople ask questions and pose answers in the hopes of pushing prospects in the direction of making a purchase.

Marketers weave a story for their audience.

People often refer to marketing as art and sales as math because "sales is about numbers" and marketing tells stories. But, in the time of digital analytic tools like Google Analytics, is this really the case? Today's marketers need to know how to analyze their work, check how their ad campaigns are doing on Facebook or Google, and across Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Businesses also often outsource some of the more creative aspects of marketing to professional designers, editors, and writers, rather than using an in-house marketer.

By contrast, sales is performance art. You need to have the confidence and wit to have an impromptu performance for each and every sales call. This doesn't mean that you need to be good at acting or deception though. What it really means is that you need to be able to detect what your audience is feeling, how they respond, and then adjust your approach accordingly.

Marketers get to see a lot of happy customers when they work on case studies or social media posts, while salespeople see all kinds of people - including those who swear at you as they slam down the phone. To work in sales means dealing with every manner of complaint, objection, and just plan insanity.

You spend a lot of time trying to fix problems for unhappy people, while marketing is working with the happy ones, finding out what they love about the product, service, or brand.

Ultimately, irrespective of the size of your business, you need to have some form of marketing and sales in place. Despite the number of times marketers and salespeople may pit themselves against each other, both are vital to the success and future growth of your business. And they both help each other.

Really, the question you should be asking yourself isn't which one is more important because your business will not thrive and grow without both sales and marketing strategies in place.

You need to have some form of marketing and sales in place.

The question you should be asking is how you can get your sales and marketing efforts to mesh better together? How can you get the brand presented on your website and in Google Ads to be reflected in sales pitches and sales emails? How can you unify your message to both attract prospects and convert them into customers?

And the answer is to end the false sense of competition between sales and marketing.

It's one business with one goal. There are no either/ors here. This is, unfortunately, not the simple answer you may have hoped for: just focus on sales for now or just focus on marketing. You want to survive and thrive, not survive/thrive. So, focus on the long-term and the short-term and work on a coherent sales funnel from start to finish. Your business is the sum of many parts. The key is to get these different components to come together.