I’m a marketing manager. I don’t work in sales.

"Oh, I hate when those marketing people call my house."

So, I'd like to clear something up because I'm a little bit tired of defending my profession and I'm a little bit embarrassed to be pigeon-holed with the profession of sales. Sales and marketing? There is no such thing. There is no such profession. There is no such department in any business unless that business has no idea or can't afford to differentiate the two and pay the price for an actual marketing resource. And on behalf of every person that works in my proud industry of marketing, let's clear some shit up.

In essence, marketing is about connecting dots. You are a dot. What our business or client wants is for you to consume another dot. We work hard to draw a line between those dots and make you walk that path to both want and find that dot. Once those dots are connected, we then watch. We watch how well those dots are connected, if anything is interfering with that connection, if anyone else is making a better or different connection to the same or other dots. If the connection fails or begins to fail, we figure out why and we fix it. This, in lay terms, is what marketing is.

Marketing is not sales. Sales is not marketing. People who work in sales couldn't perform a day of marketing if you held a gun to their head. The only relationship the two industries have is possibly when marketers put together a strategic plan they may then pass on the sales component of the task on to the sales team. That sales team then goes and does what they do best - sell.

A marketer will never call your home or business to sell you something.

Marketing is a clever, dynamic, intelligent industry of forward thinking, strategic planning, research, a high understanding of all advertising, branding, analysis, massive understandings in consumer behaviour and trends, and to be any good at it you need a certain element of gut instinct built right into your DNA. You also need a university degree and/or a lot of years in the field.

A marketer will never ever try to sell you anything, ever.

Sales on the other hand is about sales. They sell shit. They call your house. They call your business. They knock on your door. They offer you a service or a product in exchange for something else of value in what is known as a transaction. This is sales. Now based solely on the fact that so many sales people do it, I would assume they are not very happy with the title of sales alone on their business card, so they all seem to add the word 'marketing' to it. Why? I suppose it sounds nice.

A marketer will never knock on your door.

What you will also notice is that people in marketing don't feel the urge to have the word 'sales' in their business title. Why? Because we can't/don't sell. Because we don't want that shit word attached to our title. Because we don't perform task of selling, ever, not even once. Because you can learn sales in a two day crash-course and we marketers actually went to university for a fucking long time. A marketer has 'marketing' on their business card. People in sales have 'sales and marketing' on their business card. Let common sense prevail here in which one is the parasite and which is the host.

If you call a marketer to buy something they will probably hang up on you.

So why have you got things mixed up? Well, think about it. For every professional marketer there are probably 10,000 sales people, and these sales people march in hordes and are in your face everywhere you go. Marketers on the other hand just tend to sit at their desk on the 13th floor of their office building quietly studying the world and they only really leave that office for a meeting with a client, to do research, to get lunch, or to buy cocaine. You don't see us. You never hear from us.

You're probably a little confused because a market is a place where things are usually sold.

For you to buy a blender, a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica, or an internet plan is of no consequence to us, and if you sell your house we don't give a shit how much money you make when you sell it. Sales people care about these things, that's why they are the forefront to all these things, knocking on your door or phoning your house. These people are sales people interested in the sale of something, and any time they produce marketing data to assist their sale, chances are that the analysts within the marketing department of their business provided them that info pack to help with the sale.

What marketers care about is when Wikipedia starts taking market share from Encyclopaedia Britannica or if a real estate site starts chewing into traditional house market transactions. That's what we care about and it is our job to understand that market shift, why it's happening, and connect or reconnect the dots to protect the bottom line of our business or client.

So the next time someone in sales introduces themselves as 'sales and marketing' please, slap them for me and my industry, because chances are this person is going to piss you off and leave you hating the word 'marketing'. Don't hate on us marketers. We’re not sales. We fucking hate salespeople too.