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O P I N I O N
Marketing vs. sales Marketing is the backbone of sales and business development, so be proactive and stop thinking of it as just an overhead function.
I am passionate about marketing. Everyone who works with me knows it. I am on a mission to bring clarity between marketing and sales to the AEC industry. It’s a greatly misunderstood subject in many firms and that confusion holds back firms of all sizes. Marketing is an essential business function that fuels growth. Most firms have what they call a marketing department. These departments spend the majority of their time and resources responding to opportunities by assembling proposals, statements of qualification, presentations, and so forth. Unfortunately, that is not marketing. That is sales support, also know as business development.
Chad Clinehens BRAND BUILDING
In order to get your organization to start thinking differently about marketing, you must first start with providing a clear definition of what it is. Here are a few things that can help you advance this cause: “I am on a mission to bring clarity between marketing and sales to the AEC industry.”
Marketing is the process of finding out the needs of your client, then persuading them your products and services meet their needs. It creates awareness of your firm and the services you provide. Typical real marketing functions include advertising, branding, web and social media, and direct mail. Sales is the process of persuading the client to actually buy your services. So whereas marketing is proactive in creating opportunity, sales is reactive in that it attempts to close the deal on a specific opportunity. Sales is developing the proposal and the presentation in the pursuit of actually winning a project.
See CHAD CLINEHENS, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER April 10, 2017, ISSUE 1195
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