Marketing is all about finding out what the customer wants. Selling is all about showing the customer that you can please them by providing them with the products that they want.

There is a natural flow-on from marketing to sales, and this synergy must be understood in order to create effective marketing and sales strategies.

The first thing you want to do is define your marketing strategy. A marketing plan includes everything from understanding your target market and your competitive position in that market, to plan how you intend to reach that market (your tactics) and differentiate yourself from your competition in order to make a sale.

Marketing plans should be maintained on an annual basis, at a minimum. But if you launch a new product or service, take time to revisit your original plan or develop a separate campaign plan that you can add to your main plan as addendum.

An overall marketing strategy should essentially include these four strands.

• A marketing penetration strategy.

• A growth strategy which would include answer questions like increasing your human resource, buying another business, branching out and your product service strategy according to user data.

• Channels and choice for distribution strategies. It can include original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), an internal sales force, distributors, or retailers.

• Communication strategy to reach out to your customers through the means of promotions, advertisers, flyers, catalogs etc.

Next step would be to define a comprehensive sales strategy.

• Concerns like the number of representative, their recruitment strategy and training process.

• Determining your sales activities i.e. Identify the prospects, prioritize the contacts.