[danielrhodes]

I recall reading an article here on HN a few weeks ago that said marketing is not selling, it is lead gen. Selling is an entirely different stage in the process. Makes me a bit wary to take tips from this guy if he doesn't actually know the difference.

[dkokelley]

"Marketing" in the pure academic sense is the entire collection of activities that create value, give that value to customers, and extract some of that value in return. By this definition, sales is a subset of marketing.

[adamtmca]

Upvoted.

This definition always caused me to roll my eyes when I heard it from profs, "Everything from R&D to operations falls under marketing" but it actually proves valuable; limiting your thinking about marketing to promotion and sales means you leave a lot of opportunities unexamined.

[dkokelley]

It is a particularly broad definition. One could argue that 'anything in business can fall under marketing in some way'.

A personal definition I like to use is 'marketing is any activity designed to increase the top-line sales revenue number'. If you research and launch a new product, that's marketing. If you cold call, that's marketing. If you write inventory control software, that's not marketing. If the software reduces delivery time, that's marketing (since you could argue that improved delivery time translates to increased customer satisfaction, and ultimately increased sales).

[fab1an]

On the web, esp. with SaaS and other self service business models, marketing and sales are much more intertwined than they originally used to be. If your price point does not allow for a salesforce, your website essentially becomes your #1 sales rep. And while not 100% comparable, a lot of the best practices of classical selling apply very well on creating a high-converting sales funnel online.