Which comes first, Marketing or Sales?

Video transcript

Which comes first – Sales or marketing, marketing or sales?

I get asked this all the time. Should we do our marketing first to generate leads, or should we do a sales process first to learn how to convert the leads? So the answer I give is always the same, and sales and marketing should be the best of friends and work hand in hand. You just can’t simply have one without the other.

It’s no good at all having a great marketing system and a great marketing strategy, if you don’t know how to handle any leads that you have brought in. And similarly, it’s not good enough to have a great sales conversion process, if you have nothing bringing your leads in. So the answer I give to everybody, and when they ask me, look, do we invest money running a or learning a sales process or sales strategy? Or do we take that and redo our website and redo all our marketing? My answer is always, you can’t do one without the other.

So my tip is always don’t do either, unless you have enough financial spend to do both.

Because if you have a great marketing strategy and you’re doing excellent marketing activity and it’s bringing you in leads, what’s your plan to convert them? What if you don’t convert them? And if you have that strategy in place where you’ve got all the marketing coming in, I guess in terms of leads and you’re not converting, then you might as well take all your money that you spent on marketing and light it up in a pile of smoke.

So my tip is always to businesses when I get asked this, don’t do either unless you can actually afford to do both, which is marketing and a sales strategy at the same time.