Please punch me in the face.

(aka, sales and marketing are not the same thing)

One of my very favorite clients once asked me to punch him in the face.

But before you think we have some weird Emogen version of Fight Club going on, I should explain exactly how that came to be. It all starts with a joke I heard recently that went something like this…

My wife and I were walking to our vehicle, a classic Land Cruiser, one day when a man approached us and said, “Please punch me in the face.”

I smiled, happy to honor his request.

As I was readying to land one square in his nose, my wife grabbed my arm and quickly translated that what the man had actually said was, “I really like your Jeep Cherokee.”

… So while not the funniest of jokes if you’re not a Land Cruiser fan (if you are, then you totally get it), I love this because all of us can personalize it with that thing that, when said, makes you want to claw out the eyes of the person who said it.

Now back to my client (who, by the way, is a dear friend and has had the pleasure of reviewing this blog before I posted it): we have come to learn, he and I, that we have some differences when it comes to sales and marketing.

The meeting where I heard “please punch me in the face” actually went down like this: in a brainstorming meeting about the coming year’s marketing plan, I began throwing out some ideas for cross- and up-selling the company’s current clientele, to which my customer said “Oh, that’s sales, let’s get back to marketing.”

Essentially, he believes that sales and marketing are separate animals. Cousins maybe.

But I say they are waaay closer than cousins. Where there’s one there’s always the other.

Marketing is, as the good ol’ Merriam puts it, the “aggregate of functions involved in moving goods from producer to consumer,” and sales is where the rubber meets the road, the actual interchange of money and product (or service). It is based on these definitions alone that I say if you’re selling, you’re marketing and if you’re marketing, I sure as heck hope your selling.

I’ll give him that sales and marketing are not the exact same thing, that you can’t always use the terms interchangeably, but still if you’re going to talk on one, then the other has to be included.

To exclude one might be like inviting only one of a pair of conjoined twins to a party. Like only one coming to the party could even happen!

Another thought is that our differences may stem from practical vs. academic perspectives. Because of my customer’s employment background, he looks at sales and marketing from a corporate vantage wherein you have a sales department and a marketing department. And, I admittedly tend to think of business in terms of the broad functional areas: Management, Marketing, Finance, Accounting and IS. (Note that sales is not mentioned in this list… because it falls within marketing!)

Still, even if you think of sales and marketing as separate departments or functions, the two activities should be closely coordinated for myriad reasons: messaging, tactics, budgeting, and on and on.

So, I think I’m right. And although I can usually be persuaded to the contrary, I think I’ll choose to remain right on this one.

Ask me to budge and you just might get a bloody nose. But don’t blame me… you asked me to punch you in the face.

~Sarah, Emogen marketer