Marketing is the money you spend to acquire potential customers. Potential is the key word. How is this done? Think of the word “attraction.”
Sales is the money you spend to close a sale. How is this done? Think “persuasion.” Sales is about doing whatever is necessary to make a transaction happen.
Examples:
Sign on building: marketing
Brochures: marketing
Advertisements: marketing
—————-
Pitch or proposal: sales
Working with a customer: sales
Site Visit: sales
I usually account for marketing expenses as “operations or overhead costs” and sales as “COGS or direct cost.” It just makes more sense to me that way, and it ties the sales cost to gross margin so it is very “visible.”
I agree with your first piece on attraction - I equate this to creating demand. Your examples from the physical world are really good. There are analogs to the digital world that go above and beyond - but content, distribution, and community are key.
The part I disagree with is that everything below the line is sales. The line between marketing and sales is much more blurry these days due to digital. Lots of "self serve". The pitch, the narrative, the capturing of the demand (i.e. maybe this would be the design of the physical store in the physical world) happens in marketing land and there's strong partnership.
Really interesting that you put sales into COGS. If it works for you, that's great! :) I'd encourage thinking about it in CAC (cost of acquiring a customer) and then using Payback (how quickly you pay the CAC back) as a measure of health.
Not sure this post is doing much better than the problem it describes
