Marketing vs. sales

Somebody asked me on a podcast recently what the difference was between marketing and sales.

I have always had a hard time explaining it quickly, but this time I had an answer I didn’t want to forget.

Sales generates immediate revenue, whether that’s Kickstarter, or book sales, or launching a course through a sales page. Sales initiatives drive direct sales and are all about immediate ROI.

Marketing is brand awareness than drives down the cost of acquiring future sales. This might be guest blogging, or hopping on a podcast, or doing a strategic partnership, or even certain ad buys that don’t lead to a sales page. Sales from marketing come indirectly.

The more people know, like, and trust your brand, the less you will have to convince them to buy your next product, and you can convert them to sales much more quickly and cheaply.

Russell Brunson once talked about how producing a single marketing video reduced his cost per registration from $150 to $50.

Even though that video wasn’t selling anything specific, it was so ubiquitous and did such a good job explaining the company that it cut the cost of ads by 66%.

That’s good marketing.

Interestingly, sales campaigns like Kickstarter have marketing and brand awareness built into them. You get marketing while you’re doing sales, but you do not necessarily get sales by doing marketing.

The question for sales campaigns is “will this give me an immediate ROI?”

However, for marketing campaigns, the question might be best summarized as “Will enough of my ideal customers engage with this effort and lower the acquisition costs for my next launch enough to make it worth it for me to participate?”

Both are important, but they serve different functions.