The Real Difference Between Sales and Marketing

What's the difference between marketing and sales, beyond the obvious that at the end of sales somebody signs a contract?

The easiest way to explain it is to look at the tools each team uses. They're often mirror images, or opposites. A marketing team's toolset is organized around a small number of people talking to a large number of people. Sales is the exact opposite: a large number of leads or prospects, however you define them, whittled down to a very small number of high-quality, likely buyers.

Marketing is advertising and big events and 10,000 emails sent this week. Sales tools are about qualifying that larger group into a smaller one.

That's why you get a disconnect. No sales team in the world will call a lead list of 8,000 people who downloaded a PDF when all you have is a first name and a Gmail address. To them that's not a good list. There could be good leads in the 8,000, but as it stands it's useless. They'll also never have the head count to interact with and qualify 8,000 people. They'd much rather focus on certain kinds of companies and certain job titles.

So in marketing you're thinking about mass and a large audience. In sales you're thinking about quality and a small audience. There's an air gap between the two organizations, and someone has to say: I get this fundamental difference, so we're going to figure out how to bridge it. Some companies give it a fancy name like marketing and sales alignment. But at the top level, their purposes are different. One wants a tiny number of people to create a large audience. The other wants a large audience shrunk to a small number of people they can interact with.