What do marketing, BD, and sales do respectively? What is the difference between the three?

Nowadays, some freshly graduated students are looking for jobs and want to join the marketing team, but they are confused when they see that they are in sales, marketing, and BD. How can a marketing team have so many roles? Positions, what do these positions do, and what are their differences and connections? Let me briefly distinguish them for everyone.

1. Let’s start with the duties of each department

Marketing: The marketing department is sometimes called the marketing department. The work of the marketing department includes market research, brand promotion, and sales promotion activities. planning and implementation. The goal of the marketing department is to establish the brand, expand brand awareness, enhance reputation, and provide consumers with reasons and incentives to purchase products.

Sales: The specific job of the sales department is to visit customers and sell products to customers. The sales department is responsible for the company's sales targets, and its goal is to sell as many products as possible and improve sales performance and company profits.

BD: The full English name of BD is Business Development, and its Chinese meaning is business development. BD's work content is to establish smooth cooperation channels with upstream and parallel partners, and communicate with relevant governments, associations and other institutions to seek support and secure resources. To put it simply, it is to find companies to discuss cooperation.

2. Marketing, BD, and sales. What are the differences and connections between the three?

In fact, BD is easier to distinguish, that is, discussing cooperation with enterprises and exchanging resources. What is more difficult to distinguish is marketing and sales. The following mainly talks about the relationship between marketing and sales.

1. The relationship between "strategy" and "tactics"

The work of the marketing department includes market research before, during and after sales; product positioning; formulation of marketing plans; channel development and promotion policy formulation, etc., which involve all aspects of sales and are overall coordination tasks.

Sales work is implemented based on the channels, prices, and promotional methods planned and designed by the marketing department.

One of the two is responsible for strategy formulation, and the other is responsible for tactical execution, just like the relationship between the head and the hands and feet.

2. The difference between long-term interests and short-term interests

The goal of the marketing department is to increase brand awareness and brand reputation. Its assessment standards are difficult to quantify, and its brand building The effect usually takes five or ten years to be verified, so the marketing department pays more attention to the long-term interests of the brand.

The goal of the sales department is sales. Monthly and quarterly sales performance is usually used as the assessment standard, and it pays more attention to the company's short-term interests.

Li Ka-shing worked as a salesperson in a hardware factory when he was young

3. Which job is the best, marketing, BD, or sales?

The cooperation BD talks about is all at the enterprise level, and the people we usually come into contact with are at the CEO, director, and manager levels. Through cooperation and negotiation, BD has the opportunity to build its own high-quality human resources. Whether it is to change jobs or start a business in the future, these resources will give BD a good advantage.

Let’s focus on marketing and sales. From the above description, you may have an understanding that the work of marketing is overall and relatively high-level, while the work of sales is narrow in scope and relatively low-end. But this is not the case. Since the marketing department does not work on the front line and has no contact with real customers, it only talks about tactics and strategies in the office, which is prone to theorizing and talking on paper. Sales, on the other hand, have to work on the front line, deal with customers, and have personal experience. You must have experience in solving specific problems, and you must be able to withstand the pressure of performance indicators. Your growth potential is very strong.

From the fact that many bosses in China currently have a sales background, and few have a pure marketing background, we can also see the importance of front-line work experience for future development and growth, as Ren Zhengfei once said "Let those who can hear the sound of cannons direct the battle."

Therefore, when young people are looking for a job, they must make a comprehensive decision based on their future development direction and their own personality characteristics.