SaaS Sales vs Marketing: What’s The Difference?

Both sales and marketing are pillars of a successful SaaS business. In a B2B SaaS business, marketing teams are responsible for generating interest in the products/ services, while the sales teams are responsible for directly contacting leads and moving them further down the sales funnel. 

But to ensure your sales and marketing sections work effectively, it's important to understand the difference between the two. 

In this article, we cover SaaS sales vs marketing and how they can work together

What is SaaS sales?

SaaS sales is essentially the process of successfully selling your SaaS business’s products and services. Your sales team is responsible for qualifying leads, connecting with them, and converting them into paying customers. Your leads may be generated through marketing campaigns, referral programs, or any other business initiatives. 

The responsibilities of a SaaS sales team can be multifold and they can depend a lot on your target audience, sales budget, sales goals, and more. 

What is SaaS marketing?

SaaS marketing majorly focuses on raising brand awareness and encouraging prospective customers to buy your products or services through content marketing and digital marketing platforms. The goal of SaaS marketing efforts in any organization is to stand out in the SaaS market and effectively attract new customers that will hopefully stay for the long haul.

SaaS marketing involves compiling the main USPs of the product/services and creating marketing messages that can communicate those USPs to prospective customers. 

As a result, the marketing team is responsible for implementing different strategies to attract the audience, including public relations, content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, pay-per-click ads, and more.

The most significant difference between SaaS marketing and sales is that marketing is generally aimed toward the entire target audience. It is broad and mostly anonymous. Marketing strategies are used to attract customers and generate new leads, but their aim isn’t to close deals or connect with customers directly. On the other hand, your SaaS sales team works on building one on one relationships with leads and prospects.

SaaS sales vs marketing: Finding the key differences

While the goals and objectives of both the sales and marketing departments may be different, they still have to work together in order to achieve the same combined goals – To improve the number of conversions and the bottom line revenue. 

If you have a considerably smaller company, your sales and marketing team may work together daily and even share responsibilities. Now that may sound good in principle, but it is only practical if you have a limited number of people working. 

As your company grows in size, so will your sales and marketing teams. It will become more and more important to distinguish between the two clearly. Therefore it is necessary to understand the key difference between SaaS sales and marketing in order to ensure there aren’t any overlapping responsibilities. More importantly, it makes it easier for sales and marketing teams to work together seamlessly.

Here are the key differences between SaaS sales and marketing: 

Target 

The target for SaaS sales is to actively promote the business's products or services to other organizations or individuals. They want to generate more leads and nurture those leads in order to increase overall conversions.

For SaaS marketing, the target is to improve brand awareness, establish brand authority in the industry, and attract more prospective customers to sign up. They also try to generate more leads which are then passed to the sales team. 

Main focus

SaaS sales majorly focuses on the needs of the current prospect. They often take a unique approach towards each prospect through custom demos, proposals, and quotes. 

The focus of a SaaS marketing team is the entire target audience. They create strategies keeping the ideal customer in mind and not just one particular prospect. 

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of a SaaS sales team include:

• Create a streamlined sales funnel from start to end; 
• Define the main sales goals and metrics. 
• Conducting cold calls and email campaigns
• Qualifying leads based on their requirements and budget
• Contacting qualified leads to further nurture them 
• Develop custom proposals, demos, and quotes for the clients
• Successfully closing leads and converting them into customers 
• Analyzing the previous performance and setting up an action plan that gives you a competitive advantage

The responsibilities of a SaaS marketing team include: 

• Identifying the target audience
• Determining brand positioning 
• Defining the marketing goals and metrics
• Setting up marketing campaigns across the company website, email, social media platforms, and paid channels
• Working closely with the sales team to create marketing campaigns that can generate more leads

Can SaaS sales and marketing be aligned together?

SaaS sales and marketing have to work hand in hand in order to achieve the combined goals of increasing lead conversions, customer retention, and revenue. Without a SaaS sales team, you would have great marketing but no way to successfully close a large number of deals. Even the prospects you convert may feel like you don’t care about your customers enough to provide one-on-one meetings or custom product demos before they make a purchase. As a result, it would become almost impossible for you to close deals with large enterprises and clients that need custom quotes and special attention. 

Similarly, without a SaaS marketing team, you will struggle to create brand awareness and trust among your target audience. Even if your sales team reaches out to prospective customers, they would have never heard of your brand, making it difficult for them to trust you. 

Here’s how SaaS sales and marketing can work together successfully:

• SaaS marketing teams can pique the interest of your target audience and establish trust
• SaaS sales teams can provide the marketing team with insights and the best way to continually improve the marketing messaging by taking feedback from customers directly

Custom product demos that allow SaaS sales and marketing to work together

Storylane is a no-code product demo builder which allows you to create interactive product demos and share them with prospects directly. Your SaaS sales team can use it to create custom sales demos for every prospect in just a few minutes, and your SaaS marketing team can use it as lead-gen by embedding product demos on websites or landing pages.

Book a free demo of Storylane to better understand how it can help your SaaS sales and marketing teams