What is the difference between marketing and sales? Do some people get hired to do both?
I am looking at internships in sales but most of them also have some marketing in them. Looking for advice on whether marketing can help me get into outside sales after college.
Hello,
A lot of times you might see sales and marketing together in a job function. Sales is a function of developing relationships to drive revenue growth. A sales person is transactional and all other forms of marketing are not.
Make sure you ask what are the job responsibilities for both sales and marketing. Most confuse marketing and lump in together with Advertising. However having a good understanding will help you with your sales efforts.
Prior to your interview research the difference between Branding, Advertising and Marketing. You will have a job winning discussion.
The fundamental difference between marketing and sales is that marketing generates leads and thus enlarges the funnel whereas sales converts the leads into customers.
Marketing is about communicating with larger groups of people - first by getting the message to a large crowd and then working to separate it into smaller subgroups and provide more targeted messaging. Sales go on a deeper one-to-one level to complete the transaction.
Marketing can take up a lot of forms that include writing content and optimising SEO, through analyzing AdWords campaigns or working on more creative projects.
Marketing skills are useful for your general business understanding, but will they will be highly applicable for an outside sales career? To be honest, I think they will be more useful for an inside sales rep, but it really depends on the job and on the company.