What's the difference between marketing and sales?

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Answer

Marketing creates awareness and interest. Sales converts that interest into a paying customer.

Marketing is one-to-many and works before someone raises their hand: content, advertising, referrals, your website, reputation. Sales is one-to-one and starts once they do: the reply, the call, the proposal, the follow-up.

They fail in different ways. If no one is contacting you, that is a marketing problem. If plenty of people contact you and few become customers, that is a sales problem — or a targeting problem, where marketing is attracting the wrong people.

Diagnosing which one you have saves a lot of wasted effort. Count your leads and your conversion rate for a month, and the answer becomes obvious.

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