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Marketing and Sales terms

Marketing and sales are two related aspects of a business. But most people aren't sure as to what should be classified as Marketing and what constitutes Sales. The same is true for many common terms we use but can't define.

We have below a list of common marketing and sales terms you need to know:

Lead – "A lead is a potential sales contact – an individual or organization that expresses an interest in your goods or services."

Sales – Taken as a department within an enterprise, sales basically functions "to 'sell what's in stock". The company has specific products or services and the job of Sales is to sell those things. Sales develops relationships with customers and/or channel partners."

Lead Conversion – "Lead Conversion is the process of converting a lead into an account, contact, and/or opportunity."

Closed Deals – Successful sales engagements. Basically, the term denotes an agreement wherein buyers, after making inquiries, purchase certain products or employ the services of entities selling them.

Lead Generation – A series of activities that are designed to stir buyer interest and generate engagements anchored on securing a successful purchase.

Lead Scoring – "Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads a receiving function (e.g. sales, partners, teleprospecting) will engage, in order of priority."

Lead Qualification – The process of determining whether a lead matches an enterprise's ideal client profile, in which case such a lead has a higher chance of committing to a sale.

Appointment Setting – This refers to a phase in the buying cycle in which an enterprise contacts prospects and "warms" them up for a sales meeting.

Prospecting – According to Entrepreneur, prospecting is essentially the process of "(reaching) out to qualified prospects and (moving) them through the sales cycle from cold to warm to hot."

Customer profiling – This refers to the task of scouting and identifying contacts that correspond to an enterprise's ideal client requirements.

Business list – This refers to any list containing names, email addresses, and contact numbers of businesses that can be guided through the sales cycle.

Account management – This is a set of activities that involve managing the accounts of high-profile clients. But Investopedia also explains that account managers provide "customer support, upselling, technical assistance and general relationship management."

Dialer – A tool allowing organizations to contact prospects automatically and determine whether such prospects are ready to accept a call or not by effectively filtering out answering machines and busy signals.

Marketing Automation – A set of technologies that allow business organizations to manage a high volume of customer data. To put it bluntly, such software systems allow organizations to undertake a variety of marketing tasks across a variety of audience engagement channels efficiently.

Pipeline – This is a representation of an organization's sales model dissected into steps. Depending on the organization's own definition of its sales pipeline, clients typically start from an initial contact and are guided through each succeeding step until they reach a point where they consider purchasing a product.du tam

Multi-channel Marketing – This is described as an approach that allows an organization to interact with its constituents through a variety of platforms or channels (for instance, email, social media, telemarketing, PPC).

Event Marketing – This is mainly a set of marketing tasks designed specifically to promote an event (for example, a trade show) with the intent of hitting a set number of attendances which the event needs to become successful.

This post originally appeared at Sales and Marketing Solutions.

by vivitsa