Sales and Marketing: What’s the Difference and Which One Is Right for Me?

Sales and marketing are careers that focus on helping companies grow their users or clients. While they both have the same end goal, the way they achieve that goal requires different focuses and approaches. Sales is a more direct approach, focusing on building relationships, while marketing is more about building awareness through creative strategies. 

In this guide, we’ll explain the key differences between sales and marketing — from day-to-day responsibilities to education requirements — and then give you a free quiz to help you understand which career path best fits your skills, personality, and goals. 

What Is Sales?

Sales is a career path focusing on selling people products or services. Salespeople are more than just persuaders and negotiators, although their sales pitch is a large part of their role. The sales career path is also about finding prospective clients, building relationships with them, and understanding their needs. The primary goal for sales teams is to generate revenue for the company.

Sales Jobs

Sales titles often vary depending on how senior you are; however, sales professionals may also have titles that indicate what part of the sales process they specialize in. For example, some professionals work closely with maintaining client relationships and renewing deals, while others generate new sales leads.

Sales job titles include:

• Account executive
• Account manager
• Business development representative (BDR)
• Chief revenue officer (CRO)
• Client success manager
• Customer success representative
• Sales development representative (SDR)
• Sales director
• Sales enablement manager
• Sales manager
• Sales representative

What Is Marketing?

“Marketing is about positioning and generating awareness and interest in a product or service, be that through unique value propositions, naming, content creation, product development, and translation of the overall organization’s broader positioning,” says Nancy Lockhart, president and senior marketing strategist at Lockhart Marketing.

Marketers use a variety of channels, strategies, and tactics to attract and engage potential users (or customers, if it’s a paid product). Marketing careers differ not based on the type of product the person is marketing but rather on their marketing tactic. Popular types of marketing include:

• Digital marketing: marketing that reaches users online, including social media, content, and email marketing
• Product marketing: marketing that focuses on the strategy behind marketing a specific product, including market research and product launch execution
• Event marketing: hosting live or digital events to create buzz about a brand, product, or service
• Growth marketing: data-focused marketing that’s all about experimenting and optimizing user growth

For example, I’m a digital marketer who specializes in content marketing. I write content that helps promote my company and attract interest in our product. Other digital marketers on our team create email campaigns; some work on social media. 

Marketing Jobs

While there are some general marketing titles, there are also specific titles that indicate what type of marketing you work on:

• Brand experience manager
• Content marketing manager
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialist
• Digital communications manager
• Digital marketing specialist
• Email marketer
• Event coordinator
• Growth marketing manager
• Marketing manager
• Market research analyst
• Product marketing manager
• Social media manager
• User acquisition specialist
• Web marketing manager

Key Differences Between Sales and Marketing

While both sales and marketing focus on attracting users for a product, their focus and approach differ.

“Marketing is about creating broad awareness and interest in a product or service, often dealing with larger audiences and longer-term strategies,” says Sam Wright, head of sales at Huntr, a tech startup that helps people navigate their job search and career path. “Sales, on the other hand, is more direct and personal, focusing on converting that interest into actual purchases or partnerships. At Huntr, our marketing team works on building our brand and attracting potential users (SEO, landing page and blog content, etc.), while in sales, we engage directly with career coaches, universities, and businesses to form partnerships and drive adoption of our platform.”

Because professionals in each career path use a different approach to achieve their goals, the work environment and required skills for sales and marketing are pretty varied. Marketing is typically more strategic, behind-the-scenes work to execute on campaigns and tactics. Sales is all about building relationships and talking to people.

Education

To land an entry-level role in sales or marketing, you don’t typically need an advanced degree; you might not even need a postsecondary education, depending on the role. According to Zippia, 63% of sales professionals have a bachelor’s degree, while nearly a third (27%) have a high school diploma or associate’s degree. More marketing professionals have bachelor’s degrees — 74% — and 8% have a master’s degree.

If you’re in college and interested in either of these career paths, majoring in something related to the field can help you build the right skills and land a role. While some schools have a marketing major—which would be an easy fit if you’re interested in marketing—related majors include communications, business administration, English, psychology, sociology, and public relations. 

Not many schools offer a sales major, but there are plenty of related majors that can help you get into this career path. Majors like economics, finance, business, and communications can lead to relevant skills.

>>MORE: ‘What Should I Go to College For?’ Quiz: 17 Questions to Find the Right Major

Skills

The skillsets for sales and marketing roles are the most different parts of these career paths: sales is focused on building relationships, while marketing is focused on executing strategies.

Sales roles require many interpersonal and communication skills:

• Active listening
• Closing deals
• Empathy
• Negotiation
• Overcoming objections
• Persuasion
• Presentation
• Resilience
• Time management

Marketing skills focus more on building and executing campaigns:

• Creative thinking
• Innovation
• Analytical skills
• Data analysis
• Market research
• Content writing and creation
• Project management
• Prioritization

The main difference between these skillsets comes from the people sales and marketing professionals work with every day. Sales professionals need more interpersonal and negotiation skills because they often work with external clients to try to persuade them to buy a product. Marketing professionals need more tactical and execution skills to collaborate with internal team members on various marketing campaigns.

>>MORE: Boost Your Skills With the Top Sales or Marketing Job Simulations on Forage

Salary and Job Outlook

Both sales and marketing roles can be lucrative. For sales roles, salary varies most depending on what types of product you’re selling; professionals who sell more technical products, for example, tend to make higher salaries. Sales salaries may also differ from salaries in other career paths if a company offers commission pay. Commission is additional pay based on performance. If a salesperson hits a certain quota, they may receive a commission on top of their base salary.

Title	Mean annual wage	Job outlook
Advertising sales agents	$75,820	-7% (decline)
Insurance sales agents	$79,700	8% (faster than average)
Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents	$109,710	7% (faster than average)
Wholesale and manufacturing sales representatives (excluding technical and scientific products)	$80,490	1% (little or no change)
Sales representatives, wholesale and manufacturing, technical and scientific products	$113,520	1% (little or no change)

Marketing managers tend to make similar amounts in various industries; instead, salaries vary most by seniority.

Title	Mean annual wage	Job outlook
Advertising and promotions managers	$152,620	6% (faster than average)
Marketing managers	$166,410	6% (faster than average)
Market research analysts	$83,190	13% (faster than average)
Public relations managers	$159,420	6% (faster than average)

Work Environment

One of the main differences between sales and marketing careers is their work environments: sales careers tend to have a mix of office work, client meetings, and travel, while marketing careers tend to be more independent and focused on internal work. 

Sales careers are often fast-paced and high-pressure. Some of the busiest days of a sales professional’s life are at the end of a month, quarter, or year when they’re expected to have hit their quota. Because sales professionals often work with potential customers or current clients, their work may require more virtual and in-person meetings.

“One of the aspects I enjoy most about my sales career is the opportunity to directly impact the growth of our company,” Wright says. “There’s an immediate and tangible result to our efforts — when we close a deal, we can see the direct impact on our business metrics. Additionally, I love the personal interactions and relationship-building that come with sales. Every conversation is an opportunity to learn about different businesses, understand their challenges, and find ways our product can provide value.”

Marketing careers can also be fast-paced, requiring careful coordination to successfully executive and launch different campaigns. However, these roles are more strategic and require independent, focused work. Marketing professionals may collaborate with their internal team and sometimes even present to clients, but much of their work can be done alone. 

Sales and Marketing: The Breakdown

	Sales	Marketing
Education	No strict requirements; 63% of professionals have a bachelor’s degree	No strict requirements; 74% of professionals have a bachelor’s degree
Skills	Interpersonal and negotiation skills	Creative and analytical skills
Pay	Competitive, with higher salaries in specific industries, like tech. Some professionals may receive base pay and commission	Competitive, with higher salaries as you become more senior
Work environment	Fast-paced, dynamic, often working with external people	Focused, strategic, with the ability to work independently

Sales and Marketing: Which One Is Right For You? Quiz

Sales and Marketing: The Bottom Line

Sales and marketing are both career paths that connect users or customers with a product, but their focus and approach are different. Sales professionals aim to build relationships with potential and current customers and persuade them to buy (and continue to use) the product. Marketing professionals are focused more on top-of-funnel awareness to get users and customers to understand what the product is and what it does.

Choosing between sales and marketing depends on your skillset and preferred work environment. If you like fast-paced, dynamic work where you need to have stellar interpersonal skills, sales might be a better fit for you. Marketing might be the right career path if you’re more strategic and analytical and prefer working alone.

“To me, the biggest difference between sales and marketing careers is the amount of personal time spent with individuals in the marketplace — the general public,” says Rob Durant, a professional with over 20 years of experience in sales and professor of Intro to Marketing at Northeastern University. “Marketing is a one-to-many relationship, so while you have to listen to the market to create effective marketing, very little time is spent in one-on-one conversations with people outside your organization. Conversely, by the very nature of their role, salespeople are required to have numerous one-to-one relationships and interactions with many different individuals outside of their own organization. While both roles benefit by having strong communication and interpersonal skills, marketing generally applies those skills internally while sales applies them externally.”

Explore both sales and marketing careers with Forage job simulations:

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