As a follow on to my last entry. I have been thinking a lot lately about small business owners and how most are so deficient in Sales and Marketing. First of all most small business owners treat sales and marketing as one and the same thing. What?

Marketing at it most basic level is simply Marketing Strategy, Advertising and Lead Generation. Sales at it most basic level is simply Lead Conversion and Client Re-conversion. The two disciplines do not overlap, they are distinctly different. Yet most small business owners treat them as the same process.

Sales and Marketing must be considered and dealt with as entirely separate activities that intermingle but are not one and the same. I doubt that one out of ten owners can define the seven steps in the sales process or the seven components of marketing. If they could they would certainly see the difference between sales and marketing.

To make things even worse most business owners concentrate way too much of their time and effort on selling or marketing tactics while virtually ignoring strategies. So what is the difference between the two?

Strategies are defined as:
A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning".

Tactics are defined as:
A tactic is an action, method or technique used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective, or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

I hope you understand the marked difference in the two.

In my next entry I will delve deeper into sales, marketing, strategies and tactics, in the meantime give some thought as to how you spend your time (are you tactically or strategically oriented) and do you look at sales and marketing as separate disciplines?