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Introduction  

In any business, the sales process is pivotal in deciding the success of the company. It acts as a bridge between potential customer's needs and the products/services that the organization offers. In many organizations, one corner marketing team seen working on its strategies on brand communications and generate leads, the sales team is seen making desperate phone calls and following up with emails, to turn leads into sales in another corner.
Selling is a holistic process where multiple things are happening at once, with each step is interrelated and intervening any or each phase can vary the outcome to a great extent. Viewing marketing and sales as different units instead of approaching them as interrelated contributing parts to organizational goal, will lead to severe inefficiencies in terms of achieving the same.
Hence an integrated approach is required where marketing and sales works hand in hand. Though it is much complicated in the real world, for understanding purpose, it can be simplified into five steps, as shown in the picture. Each of these steps is explained little more for a better understanding.  

Step 1 Developing a marketing strategy

Developing marketing strategy again involves various steps like establishing a goal of the marketing campaign, defining your target audience, execution plan and finalizing the budgets to executing the plan. However, any marketing strategy should be closely aligned towards its organizational objective of creating awareness about the organization or its product and services, generate sales etc. A marketing strategy should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bounded, most importantly, accountable. 

Step -2 Execution of marketing strategy

The prime objective of this step is to lead collection by executing the marketing strategy devised in the previous step. The ultimate success of any marketing strategy depends on the ability to stick to the plan and perform it successfully. Many businesses put together a great marketing plan, then don't follow through, wasting so much time and energy end up missing real opportunities to build a sustainable marketing funnel. Marketing handovers the lead generated at this stage to the sales team.

Step 3 Sales conversion

Sales enter into the picture after the lead generation. The actual process of converting a lead to a customer involves approaching the prospect, presenting your products, handling objections and closing the sale. It is crucial at this stage to update the marketing team on the outcome of the whole process of sales effort. 

Step 4 Evaluation of the strategy

This step is a vital stage of the lot of any marketing strategy is reviewing the whole process, and it requires inputs of the sales team. No marketing strategy can succeed in the first, and it has to be fine-tuned repeatedly by reviewing the change in sales, compare it with competition's strategy and finally rerun on investment of the whole exercise. This refinement process makes any marketing strategy to succeed.

Step 5 Achievement of organizational Goal

Attainment of corporate purpose is the objective of the four processes above and if you have religiously followed all the above steps and you should have surely been reached your ultimate destination by now. 

Conclusion

As seen above, creating prospects for any product or service and converting them into actual customer is an interrelated process. It requires both marketing and sales works together as a contributing unit to one another. Though achieving sales targets is of prime importance to any organization, it is equally important to approach sale holistically along with marketing.