A Digital Dialogue on Sales and Marketing

People usually get confused between digital marketing and digital sales. They consider both of them as synonyms and use them interchangeably. However, the two are very different.

Both marketing and sales need to work together to grow your business. But you need to understand the key difference between them to adopt an approach that will foster the growth of your business. With that said, let's start by defining the fundamental difference between marketing and sales.

Simply put, digital marketing helps you connect with people, influence your potential audience, and increase online traffic around a product or service. In other words, it is an online communication strategy that connects with consumers via a range of assets such as websites, infographics, pictures, reels, videos, long form content (blogs, articles or ebooks) and social media platforms. Pay-per-click ads, paid digital campaigns, and search engine optimization, etc., are all examples of engagement-boosting tactics. The aim of digital marketing is to enable businesses to get in front of the right people and boost the possibility of their products and services being chosen by those people.

In contrast to digital marketing, which aims to engage a target audience, digital sales aims to convert that prospect into a customer and are responsible for driving revenue. Digital tools like content management platforms, CRM platforms, lead-generation resources, social media platforms and other digital communication methods can leverage a well-designed digital selling effort to win more business for your business.

Digital selling aims at supporting inbound activity from potential buyers. It endeavors to offer ideal prospects to those who visit your website, respond to offers, and show interest in your product and services. The primary goal of digital marketing is - to help you connect with your target audience on a global scale. Once the audience shows interest in your product, it becomes the responsibility of the sales team to persuade them for the purchase.

All the inbound activity from your business's digital selling efforts then becomes the fuel for your outbound business team, who reach out to the potential customers to convert leads into business. In an outbound selling approach, the sales team connects with potential leads and schedules interactions using a variety of resources.

For this reason, marketing and sales need to work jointly in developing both content and selling strategies to make sure the collaborative effort is creating an impeccable experience.

Digital marketing provides 24/7 targeted marketing. It allows your business to boost its sales exponentially by making it more visible and accessible to more consumers who are interested in your product and services. But to convert those prospects into customers, companies need to create the human-digital blend that can help prospects get what they want.

B2B sales companies must adopt a digital mindset and use advanced technology to optimize both digital and human interactions. Companies that add the human touch to digital sales unfailingly work well. When prospects move into the evaluation and active-consideration stages, a highly skilled sales force should work along with the digital tools that provide information for sales conversion.

In final thoughts, both digital marketing and digital sales, though fundamentally different, are essentially two sides of the same coin. While one aims at driving audience engagement, the other aims at converting engagement into enterprising business. And in today's business world, where we have woken up to a sudden tidal shift to digital platforms, the understanding of both these aspects as well as their implementation in your business is undeniable.